When you first start out in doing internet marketing, you probably spend most of your efforts on promoting your website and getting website traffic. However, at some point you probably start to realize that not all website traffic is created equal and you should start thinking about how to get qualified traffic. In order to follow your web leads through the sales funnel and determine which sorts of web visitors convert into viable leads, you need to do web to lead tracking. For starters, in order to do this you need a web to lead form for website goers to fill out. Watch the video on how to use web to lead forms. Also, check out our web-to-lead form for a visual understanding.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our video on web to lead forms. I'm Chad Hill, and I have Adam Setzer with me today.
Hey, good afternoon, Chad. When you first start out in internet marketing, your focus is probably on promotion of the website and getting traffic to the website. You can spend a long time working on that, but at some point you start to realize that not all traffic, not all search engine traffic is the same, and you start to shift your opinion to, or your focus on qualified traffic.
And you inevitably want to track what visitors to your web site turn into a lead. And if you don't have the right web to lead forms set up, or lead tracking, or CRM integration, this is very elusive data, and almost everyone in an agency, or search engine optimization firm is going to want it, because their clients are going to want it.
So let's talk to our viewers today about what a web to lead form is, what it's useful for, how you can quickly implement it, and then what you do with data.
Right. So a quick definition of a web to lead form is it's basically what you would see when you click on a contact page, and there are actually fields where you type information into the fields. And typically at the bottom of those fields is a Submit button. Now, what happens from there is that that web form turns into a lead. Typically they're delivered one of two ways.
They're either emailed from the website to someone's inbox, which we'll talk about is fairly inefficient and dangerous. And then the second way is that that web to lead form is actually hooked up to a database CRM tool, and that information immediately goes into a database for better tracking and reporting.
All right, so back up there. That was a lot of information. So a web-to-lead form as it presents on the internet, is basically just an HTML form, the traditional one that all web designers seeing this would understand, which you have typically on a contact us, or get a quote type page for any business website, or even a blog. So that's pretty straightforward. But let's hit that second part again.
What happens to it afterwards sounds like where it differentiates from just being HTML form, and makes it truly a web-to-lead form, or a CRM integration tool, right?
Right. So in the case of a situation where the actual form is connected to a database, it actually goes into a CRM, so that rather than someone seeing it in their inbox, they're going into their CRM, it's time and date stamped and saved in the database, and then there can be an associated workflow around someone calling back that lead and tracking the results.
And the real benefit there is that now you're able to take that lead, and as you said, Adam, of course everyone wants to get the leads, but what we also really want to know is how many of those leads turn into customers? That's where a CRM tool and a web to lead form is very important, because it gives you the ability to see that initial lead come in, and then watch it through the sales process until ultimately it becomes a customer or not.
So you're talking about tracking it all the way down through the sales funnel. But what about the web to lead's ability to capture some of the data on the inbound side, how it got to the website in the first place?
Is that the beyond the scope of what a web-to-lead form can do, or is that something that's in scope? And I also want to mind you, earlier you said it might be dangerous if you choose one of these simple web-to-lead forms that just sends an email. I'd like to understand why is that dangerous?
OK, let's hit the easy part there. It's dangerous because email is not a transaction that actually is always guaranteed to happen. The email may get caught in the spam filter, it may actually not even go out, because if there's an issue with an SMPT server, whatever mechanism is being used to deliver that email, email just isn't 100% reliable.
So these are your web leads, this is the most important part of your business, in many cases. You want those going into a reliable transactional database that is always going to save that information.
OK, cool. And then the second part of that was can a web to lead form be smart enough to understand actually where the visitor came from before it got to the website way, way upstream? That visitor landed on the website, maybe they came from an ad, maybe they came from a search engine.
Maybe they were a direct referral, or a type in. Is that data that we could somehow have passed all the way down into our CRM? Do you know of technology that can do that?
Yes, absolutely. Most people don't really think that that's possible, they just look at their Google Analytics and say, I had 10 leads, and over here they have 10 leads in their CRM, but they don't actually know that three of those leads came from organic search, seven came from paid search, or six came from paid search, and one came from email marketing.
They're not able to map the 10 to the 10, and be able to know which ones were the good ones and which ones weren't, and what source is driving those good leads. But there is technology that, at the point at which they're submitting the form, if you're using a more advanced web-to-lead form service, there's technology, we have some, that'll actually look at all of those parameters about where the person, how they initially got to the website.
And save that with the web to lead record, so that when it gets put into the database, we can then report on it and see things like maps of where your leads are coming from, or at least be able to see which of your leads from different sources are turning into real customers.
Awesome analytics. Great stuff. So for more information, visit the forums at Semify.com and learn more about it.