Web forms are a central part of web-based CRM software. After all, the ultimate goal when a user visits your website is to collect their contact information. Today, email is king. When you have an email address, you are the owner of that contact.
Day after day I see web marketers asking for too much information on their web forms. Of course, sometimes it is necessary to have long-form web forms. However, if you’re looking for more raw subscribers quickly, you’ll want your web-based CRM software’s web forms to be easy and simple to fill out.
The email address web forms revolution has arrived! That means the only information your contact needs to enter is their email address. If they want more information, they can fill out a longer web form later, but it’s so important to receive your email that it’s better to skip other information and receive it later.
A proper landing page is going to be all about getting that email address in the first place. You would have to give away the world to get that email address. Free reports, free videos, free e-books, etc. Anything digital. If you can give them three things, consumables in different formats (audio, visual, text), then you’re much more likely to do it.
Second, and this is where web-based CRM software can help you a lot is to get more information after initially receiving your email. The first thing you are going to do is go straight to your email and look for the free content you are providing. This is a perfect place to collect the rest of your contact information.
You have a link that goes to a web page with that free content. On that page, using your web-based CRM software, you can have an additional signup form to collect more information for people who are genuinely interested in your offer.
So you’ve done a number of things with your web-based CRM software.
1. You’ve taken them to a landing page with a signup form that ONLY requires their email.
2. You send them a “crawlable link” that sends them to your website for your free content. On this page you collect additional information for people who are really interested in what you have to offer.
3. Your web-based CRM software will “tag” these people who are very interested and your salesperson (or you) can call them and follow up.
So what you are definitely doing is finding out how interested your prospects are. The less interested will only enter your email to get the free content. The most interested will fill out the web form and then get the content and fill in the additional information on the content page. With good web-based CRM software, you can keep track of all of this or even see it live in an activity feed.