How to Use Website Forms to Build an Audience and Collect Leads

Do you use website forms for your site? Forms are great way to get people to offer information about themselves. But it is also an excellent way to increase your leads and marketing. In this post, we will explore ways that you can use your website forms to increase your leads and build your audience.

Forms for eBooks

If you want to increase your level of engagement as well as build your audience, try offering a free eBook through an online form. Offering something free such as an eBook that addresses an important topic will go a long way toward winning over some of your more difficult prospects. If you are an eBook author, you could simply offer one of your eBooks for free that you previously published if it fits customers need. But don’t just choose any eBook. Think about which topics interest your audience and offer free eBooks on these topics.

Forms for Subscriptions to Newsletters

Creating online forms is one of the best ways to get people to sign up for your newsletter and gain access to their email address and basic information. Remember not to make the form too long and just ask for the essential information that you need to market your products and services to them.

Make sure also when recruiting email addresses that you outline what people are signing up for at the onset. If you are going to send them regular newsletters and nothing else, let them know this. If you plan to send them links to sales or other sites, let this know this as well. Transparency is important when it comes to creating forms that you are going to use for your marketing campaigns.

The Opt-Out Option

Also give people a chance to “opt out” of your announcements once they have joined. Not only is this a good business practice, but it’s the law. You could find yourself getting a visit from the FTC or other governing bodies if you don’t follow the law.

Polls and Surveys

When was the last time you went to a site and saw a poll or survey that you just had to fill out? Some forms offer prizes or special coupons for filling out the form while others just ask you to do it for free.

Despite the fact that too many forms or extra long ones can be detrimental, people love to fill out polls and surveys if they are not too lengthy. Consider placing relevant surveys about your company or business on your website in return for their email address and name or create a poll asking their opinion on your businesses and services.

Polldaddy.com shows the difference between poll and a survey and shows you how you can use both to your advantage through an online form. It doesn’t take long to set up a poll or survey on your page. In fact, many online platforms and web servers such as WordPress.org offer this as a part of their online tools. Just download the plugin to add it to your WordPress site.

What to Put in Your Forms

The question of what kind of information to include in your form comes up when we talk about adding polls, surveys, and other types of forms to your web page. First, consider the type of question that you want to ask if you are doing a survey form. Some sample questions that you may want to consider are listed below:

  • How did you find us?
  • What do you like about our brand?
  • Is our site easy to navigate?
  • Would you recommend us to a friend?
  • What would like to see done differently?

All of the above questions ask the person for information that they must provide within the form. So you will need to make sure that you have programmed enough blanks to provide the answers. For example, you could have the firm form field be the question: “How did you find us?” Then you will need to create the answer fields through either a text box, radio button (multiple choice), or drop-down menu. All of these options for answering the question are different and must be programmed according to the coding that is required to create them.

Expert coders can do this for you, or you can use one of the self-created forms on WordPress or another web server or resource site such as Bravenet.com. Bravenet offers a multiple of web tools for the web builder, and you may want to browse their site to see if you can find a web tool that will be beneficial to you.

Resources for Creating Forms

Other resources for creating forms may include eBooks on the topic such as How to Create Highly Converting Sign up Forms on AWeber. This book was written by Joan Mullally and Thomas Michaels and is free currently on Kindle.

One topic this book talks about is how to create a sales magnet, and sales funnel that will result in conversions, and that gets a significant number of prospects to sign up for your form. Remember that the main goal of an online web form is to get the email address of the person so that they will become a part of your email marketing list.

You don’t want to just create a sale one time. The goal is to create a system that will enable you to obtain prospects that you can market to over and over again, regardless of what you have to offer. You do this by matching up what you have with the potential client pool.

Aweber.com is a good resource to build great web forms that will teach you to grow your list quickly using step-by-step directions to do the following things:

  • Add new fields to your forms
  • Add values to your fields
  • Create all the different types of sign up forms available
  • Set the parameters for the different types of forms

Just Do it!

To borrow from Nike, sometimes you just have to do it! Digging in and creating dazzling forms takes some time but you can experiment with all sorts of online forms and tools that we’ve mentioned above. Another tool you may want to try out is Surveymonkey.com.

Survey Monkey allows you to create forms that work well with your intended audience while also targeting a specific audience that you specify when you sign up.

You do not have to buy the targeted leads when you sign up for SurveyMonkey, but it is an added tool you can have in your arsenal to increase your potential leads.

The key to creating winning forms is to start with a great website which you can get at webdesignteam.com. We have years of experience in creating professional websites, and we can also insert stunning web forms with high conversion potential.

Just contact us to get started, and we will brainstorm ways to help you create a compelling website that will increase your engagement and conversion rates. Visit us online and contact us at webdesignteam.com for more information.

Whatever you need, we can do it if it involved custom web design.

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