This post is the first in a series that will walk through powerful integrations that help your website make more of an impact for the streamlining of your online presence.
Many websites are simply a version of an online brochure. The page structures are usually very similar and expected (About, Services, Contact, an so forth…). While there is nothing at all wrong with a normal and expected structure, many sites are overlooking what their site can be doing for them. With this post we are going to look at web forms and what they can do for your website. A web form is simply and online form used to capture some form of data. Most commonly they are used on contact pages where you can enter your name, email and a message. Once you hit submit, a mailto link transmits an email to someone’s email inbox. At that point, that person sees a website inquiry and will then choose to respond (note: many sites will get a lot of spam through web forms). This is where most web forms stop. Today you can leverage the power of third parties to do some pretty amazing stuff with a web form. Before we get to that, here are some alternative uses for web forms.
Other uses for web forms:
- Adding mailing list subscribers
- Selling good’s online/eCommerce
- Taking users through questionnaires
- Capturing key documents often too large to be emailed.
- Lead capture
- Event registration
- Lead qualification
The action that is created when a prospect, interested party or customer completes a web form can be really powerful – if you build it to be. For example, our web forms can be configured to follow this path.
A form is populated based on the content or choices made, different rules will send the web form to different members of our team here at
Mackrill Media , the content we now have can then be automatically sent in a text message or email. In addition, I can go back into the our form manager app and add comments about each lead to further qualify the information we have captured. Finally, we can monitor conversion rates for each web form.
How Does This Work for My Organization?
Web Forms for Business
Businesses spend a lot of time creating a marketing tunnel through which they can build an expectation of new leads to generated, qualified and contacted. One of the major things you often need to do is create some sort of item that will add value to the reader for visiting your site. For example, lets say you have a white paper you have written on something where your businesses is an expert. Let’s say its hub cap design for the Mars Rover. You own this market and you are the expert in this field. You know that if someone reads information about your expertise in this field, you will likely be able to generate leads of your growing business of specialty hub cap design.
Here is the workflow:
1. Create your content
2. Content revision
3. Protect your content via PDF saved to a secure web based location (e.g.,
Amazon Web Services)
4. Create a lead capture form
5. Customize the notification for those that download the form and include a specific link to download this form
6. Test process multiple times internally
7. Sync your lead capture form to your CRM (e.g.,
Salesforce.com,
Highrise, etc.) to minimize multiple forms of data entry
8. Deploy your lead capture form as a link in blog posts, and embedded area of your website, or a link that you publish through your social media marketing
Web Forms for Ministries
Churches have events all the time and churches are often the organizations that struggle the most with scale. So, here is how technology can save you a ton of time.
Community Bible Church is one of our customers and recently they sought to get a better gauge on the people in their church family that were best suited for the ministry opportunities they had available. Traditionally, this would mean that the church administrator would build a survey/questionnaire, print it and then distribute it to the congregation. This time around we were able to work with them to help them do this online and in a much more streamlined manner.
Community Bible Church Lead Capture Form
Here is the workflow:
1. Gather required questions
2. Separate questions based on ministry groups to streamline – post completion results distribution
3. Build survey online using our form builder
4. Create notification rules to send certain results to certain ministry chairs
5. Test questionnaire internally
6. Upon approval of #5, web forms our embedded online
7. Web forms are promoted through traditional church marketing (email newsletters, Sunday morning announcements, and bulletin).
8. Ministry leaders receive email notifications of completion and can follow-up directly with those that completed the survey
Five years ago, we bought a new house and painted the main floor a color that Sherwin Williams named Sanderling. All the trim work changed from wood to white with more than a few strokes of a brush. It was time consuming, but it was worth it. While doing some spring cleaning this week, I took a hard look at the walls. I still really like the color, but the walls themselves don’t exactly look their best anymore.
