Your Guide to Optimizing Lead Generation Forms for Supercharged Conversions

Before you can start nurturing your agency’s leads, you need to capture their contact information. Lead generation forms are the key node in your lead gen strategy where you can do just that, so optimizing them for conversions can make a major impact on your bottom line.

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In this blog post, we’re digging into everything you need to know to create next-level lead gen forms. We’ll cover what they are and why they matter, the benefits of spending time acing this part of your lead generation plan, tools and best practices for crafting your forms, and insights into common missteps to avoid. By the end, you’ll feel confident in your ability to capture quality leads through optimized forms.

What is a lead generation form?

Lead generation forms are simple forms comprising data fields like “name”, “email address” and “phone number”.

These are designed to capture essential contact information from prospective agency clients so they can be nurtured through email lead generation efforts. They’re strategically placed on lead generation landing pages, in pop-up windows, or at key points within the content of a marketing or lead generation website, typically offering a lead magnet offer in exchange for contact information.

By filling out your lead generation form, visitors show their interest in learning more about your agency’s services and enable you to enter them into your lead generation system so your team can start working on converting them from leads to paying customers.

You can think of them as marking the end of the acquisition phase of your lead generation funnel, and the beginning of the nurturing phase. 

Why is a lead generation form important?

Forms are the point in your lead generation system where all your hard work establishing lead sources, creating content, setting up your lead gen SEO, and running ads is rewarded. Those parts of your system are all designed to drive traffic to your website or landing pages, and once visitors arrive, your lead generation forms seal the deal and help you capture contact information. Let’s take a look at why these forms are so critically important to growing your agency.

Prospect info capture

At the most basic level, to market directly to a prospect, you need to know who they are and have a way to get in front of them. Lead gen forms facilitate this by providing an efficient way to capture critical customer information. 

Depending on your strategy—for example, you might use account-based marketing for key high-value accounts—forms allow you to collect information that can help you create more highly personalized, targeted communications, helping you convert prospects faster.

Quality and compatibility filter

Your lead generation forms can help you filter out incompatible prospects by asking qualifying questions, such as having a drop-down menu where they can indicate their monthly marketing spend or budget.

Using a variety of landing pages and lead magnets can help agencies categorize prospects by lead source. Then, tracking lead generation metrics by lead source can provide insights into which lead generation tools and forms work together to deliver the most high-quality leads.

Additionally, the lead generation form itself serves as a sort of self-qualifying filter, since leads need to feel motivated enough to opt in.

CRM integration

Since forms integrate with lead generation databases and CRMs, they’re key to helping you build a customer base that you can nurture and market to over time. By automatically populating your CRM, they save you the work of doing it manually, so you can focus on your content marketing for lead generation and other important tasks.

Benefits of a lead generation form

Lead generation forms offer serious business-boosting benefits to agencies, tying together many other elements of a holistic marketing strategy.

Here’s what they can do for you:

• Enable data collection: Lead gen forms give you a hub where you can capture essential information about your prospects, like the names of key contacts, their email addresses, and needs. This data can be used to adjust marketing efforts and create more personalized—and conversion-optimized—customer experiences.
• Facilitate lead nurturing: Email lead generation and nurturing is a highly effective strategy from a return-on-investment (ROI) perspective, and it all starts with lead gen forms. Once you have a prospect’s email address, you can use techniques like audience segmentation and email personalization to deliver direct, impactful messaging without breaking the bank.
• Improve your overall marketing strategy: The insights derived from lead gen forms can reveal which offers or services interest prospective customers the most, enabling you to refine your messaging and marketing strategies beyond email. 
• Boost your sales opportunities: CRM lead generation and management means agencies can identify which leads are hot and most likely to convert based on behavior such as email interactions. By ranking leads according to this and other ranking factors, it’s much easier to focus attention where it matters—that is, where it’s most likely to result in new sales.

Forms can work in tandem with other powerful lead capturing tools to help you build your pipeline faster. Check out this video for more tips:

Tools you’ll need to build a lead generation form:

Lead generation forms exist as part of a system rather than as stand-alone marketing tools. That’s why it’s important to be aware of tools not just for building forms but also to effectively use the data you collect to grow your business. 

Here are some must-have tools to consider:

Form builders

Forms can be a surprisingly fickle component of web design since they need to integrate effectively with a database. Your website builder might have built-in form functionality, or you may want to use a separate form builder for the job. Email marketing platforms like Constant Contact come with form-builders, or you can use a more general-purpose builder like Google Forms or Typeform—although this will require a bit of extra work to connect with a CRM or email marketing software.

Customer relationship management (CRM) system

Once your leads are captured in your form, they need to be maintained in a database where you can use and track them. That’s where your CRM comes in.

Some popular CRMs include Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and HubSpot CRM. The best CRMs, like Vendasta’s CRM, provide game-changing insights into what’s going on with each prospect, by tracking all communications, ranking leads, providing automated sales intelligence tools, and more. These insights are essential to effectively converting leads once you capture them.

Marketing automation platforms

Tools Constant Contact and Mailchimp allow businesses to automate their email flows, segment leads according to categories like lead source or recent activity, and deliver more personalized content.

By linking your marketing automation platform to your lead gen forms (you may create your form directly in your automation platform), you can deliver immediate automated responses and initiate drip campaigns from the moment a prospect completes your form. 

Analytics tools

In digital marketing, data is power, and analytics tools give you critical insight into your performance. 

Tools like Google Analytics or built-in tools in your CRM can track key metrics and help you understand areas for improvement in your funnel. Look for data by lead source for things like conversion rates, average customer acquisition cost, cost per lead, and average customer value.

If this seems like a lot of tech to manage, lead generation outsourcing may be worth considering for your agency. Lead generation can be a full-time job, and having outside pros available to support you can help you focus on your areas of strength.

How to build an effective lead generation form

When you’re ready to create your form, follow these steps and best practices to build a conversion-optimized lead generation form for your agency:

1. Clearly define your goals. Clarity makes for more impactful form design, so take some time to establish your goals. Understanding the difference between lead generation vs. demand generation helps here: do you want to generate buzz and awareness for your brand (demand generation), or is your aim to market to motivated prospective buyers (lead generation)? Are you looking for local lead generation or building an international audience?
2. Design the form. As a general rule, keep it simple and user-friendly. It’s usually advisable to stick to only the most essential information, like name and email address, and to gather more detailed information later. This maximizes response rates for most forms, but you can always test more complex variations to see how they perform.
3. Write your calls to action (CTAs). Your CTA can be a headline above your form or the text of your “submit” button. Aim to be compelling and catch the attention of visitors. Instead of a simple “Submit now” button, consider something like “Get your free checklist”.
4. A/B test variations of your form. Every part of your form should be continuously A/B tested for ongoing optimization. Try out different headlines, form lengths, button placements, and fields. Then, track conversion rates to see which combination of elements gets the best results.
5. Integrate with your email marketing platforms and CRM. Connect your form with your marketing automation tool to trigger nurturing sequences.
6. Optimize based on analytics. Review bounce rates, field completion times, and drop-off points to make ongoing improvements to your lead generation forms.

Things to avoid in a lead generation form

Start strong by avoiding these common lead gen form pitfalls:

• Overly complex forms: Asking for too much information causes friction that can lead to abandonment.
• Vague CTAs: What action do you want users to take, and what’s in it for them? Express these briefly and clearly, and you’ve got a winning CTA.
• Complicated designs: Keep the layout simple and user-friendly. The same goes for the rest of the page on which your lead gen form appears.
• No testing: Every audience is different, and you won’t know what yours prefers until you test variations.