How to Create Effective Lead Generation Forms

While all of these contribute to your overall success, your site’s main function should be to generate new leads for your company. If it doesn’t accomplish this, your site isn’t providing nearly as much value to your business as it could and doesn’t directly impact your bottom line.

That’s where lead generation forms become extremely important. The forms on your site need to be functional and optimized to generate as many qualified leads as possible. Optimize your lead forms, and you can increase your contact form conversion rates.

Call 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about lead generation services from WebFX, or keep reading for a few guidelines you can use to create more effective lead forms for your site.

Learn how we increased traffic by over 40%, and conversions by over 100% for an ecommerce client.

Read the Case Study

What are lead generation forms?

If your company operates on a B2B model, one of your main goals for your site should be getting potential clients to submit forms with the information you need to contact them about working with you.

In most cases, these forms are either framed as contact forms or free quote forms. Depending on your business, it may be a good idea to have both throughout your site.

At the very least, you need each lead’s name and email address. And if you’re looking to collect as many leads as possible, these may be your only required fields in a form.

However, the more information you get on each lead, the easier it will be to determine if they’re a good fit for your business and if there’s any research you can do before contacting them.

What makes a lead generation form effective?

If a form brings in qualified leads for your business, it’s at least somewhat effective. But when it comes to generating the clients your company needs to succeed, “somewhat” isn’t enough.

An effective lead generation form:

1. Generates as many leads as possible
2. Collects enough information from each of your leads to help you make informed decisions about which ones to pursue.

Unfortunately, these goals often work against one another. If a contact form is too long, some of your leads complete it. And if a contact form is too short, it won’t provide you with the information you need.

This means that creating effective contact forms requires identifying the most important information you need from each of your leads, then making it as easy as possible for those leads to provide it.

As an example, a dental practice lead generation strategy may use forms to collect a patient’s name and phone number. If the practice offers specialized services, like teeth whitening or root canal treatments, it may also give potential patients the option to checkmark which services they need or want.

If you’re looking for inspiration, these 10 contact forms are all great examples you can use to get an idea of what your forms should look like.

How to create effective lead generation forms for your site

There are a few general best practices to follow, but just because a format works for one business doesn’t mean it’ll work for another. In order to create effective lead generation forms, you need to think about your potential clients and the information you want from them.

Here are a few steps you can take to get started:

1. Determine which information is the most important

At the very least, each of your forms should require a lead’s name and email address. This will allow you to contact them about the product or service they want.

But if this is the only information you require, you’ll have no way of knowing why any of your leads are contacting you.

In some cases, they’ll be potential clients. But they could also be jobseekers, site visitors with general questions about your industry, or simply spam.

Asking for additional information will help you separate the qualified leads from the rest, but that information depends on what type of product or service you provide. To help you get started, a few common requirements are:

• Company name (if you operate on a B2B model)
• Projected budget (monthly or total)
• Specific services wanted (if you offer a variety)
• Phone number

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t attempt to collect every possible piece of information you’ll need right off the bat. You’ll need to follow up with them anyway, so you can ask more specific and detailed information when you do.

That being said, it’s also a good idea to include a “comments” field for any additional information a lead wants to provide.

2. Make certain fields optional

Once you’ve determined the fields you want to include in your form, it’s a good idea to make some of them optional. This may sound counterintuitive, but if a lead doesn’t want to fill out all the fields you have, it’s better to collect some of their information rather than none at all.

You can do this for any of the fields that aren’t necessary, like contact information beyond their email address. Even if you prefer speaking with leads over the phone, you don’t need their phone number to further discuss your services with them.

You should also make your “additional information” field optional. If a lead is still near the top of the sales funnel, they likely won’t have too many details about what their project involves – and you don’t want that to prevent them from working with you.

3. Consider breaking your form into multiple pages

If you absolutely need to collect more than five or six pieces of information from your leads, you may want to consider breaking your form into multiple pages.

This prevents your form from looking complex and overwhelming, which can prevent your leads from filling it out. On the other hand, it also adds another step to generating a lead, so it’s important that you weigh your options.

4. Run A/B or multivariate tests

As you create your first forms, you’ll make a few choices based on guesswork. You have no way of knowing how many fields your leads are willing to fill out, which questions are most likely to drive them away, or even which calls to action are the most compelling.

That’s why it’s important to run A/B tests on each of your forms. When you test multiple versions of a form, it’s easy to see which has the highest conversion rate. Using that information, you can be sure that you’ve created the most effective lead generation form possible.

37% of marketers say that generating high-quality leads was one of their biggest challenges.

We want to decrease that percentage.

WebFX can help you generate high-quality leads with a customized marketing strategy.

Learn More About Lead Generation Services

Do your lead generation forms have room for improvement?

If you want to start generating more leads with your website, we’d love to help. At WebFX, we have years of experience designing, launching, and testing effective lead generation forms for our clients, and we’ll do the same for you.

Contact us today for more information or a free quote!