How to Capture Contacts with Hubspot Forms
This guide will teach you how to optimize your website forms, by “capturing” information about your website visitors in a way that’s tailored to your business.
Why lead capture based on conversion type is important
When someone submits a form on a website, generally they have a specific goal and expectations mind. They want to request a demo, get support, download a piece of content, attend a webinar, etc. These prospect and customer goals can be referred to as “conversion types”. Lead capture works best when the information you ask for aligns with the goals of the person submitting the form.
The effects of a bad lead capture setup damage businesses in subtle ways, just like any situation where information is not organized and not exchanged across teams well, including:
Longer time spent selling. More questions need to be asked and additional meetings are required. Selling drags on when you don’t have relevant information upfront.
Internal strife between sales and marketing. If the two teams don’t agree on what information is important to capture per conversion type, it’s a recipe for long-drawn out sales conversations and watered down nurturing.
Frustrated buyers and existing customers. No one wants to explain the same thing multiple times to different people because information wasn’t passed along. It’s the same thing as going into a store ready to make a large purchase and the first person you talk to for 10 minutes goes to get another person, who ends up having no clue what you told the first person. I’ve been in this situation many times as a buyer, and it makes me want to do anything else except buy something from the people engaging in this practice.
An optimized lead capture setup is easy to set up and everyone involved will instantly see an improvement. As a buyer, it’s remarkable when businesses are able to reference the information you shared with them over time, precisely because most businesses aren’t great at keeping their CRM data organized or up to date.
Note: This guide does not touch on the second half of the equation, which is improperly set up contact routing. I’ve personally seen this drain businesses of millions in would-be revenue each year. All because they regularly ignore inquiries that never make it to a sales or customer support team. This is all resolved by having a simple routing plan and building it out.
1 - Clean up and remove irrelevant forms.
The fewer number of website forms in your forms tool, the better. Yes, you will end up with the same form existing on multiple pages.
Here’s how to pare down your forms:
1.1 - Look at your forms and figure out your main conversion types. The most common conversion types include Demo Requests, Customer Support, Content Downloads, Webinar Registrations, and Newsletter Sign Ups. You may have others, but plan to condense these as much as possible.
1.2 - For each conversion type, decide on one form that you can use as the primary way to capture contact information for that conversion type. You’ll end up with one demo form, one content download form, one webinar registration form, one newsletter sign-up form, etc.
1.3 - Replace old duplicate forms with your new primary forms. For all live pages that house a form that’s not one of the primary ones you identified in the last step, replace the now outdated form with your new form.
1.4 - Move the phased out forms to an archived folder or delete them. If you don’t want to delete the old forms, you may want to add “ARCHIVED - ” before the name.
1.4 - Unpublish irrelevant pages (optional) - If you don’t have a form on a page, you’re probably not using it. Unpublish and delete or archive these pages.
2 - Determine which fields are essential for each form.
Remove all fields that are a nice to have. You can always add them back in later if you determine they’re important.
Here’s a good way to decide on which fields are important per conversion type.
2.1 - Create a spreadsheet that lists out your conversion types and start to fill in the obvious form fields. This will at the very least include email. For demo requests, you’ll likely want to collect at least their first name, last name, phone number, and why they’re getting in touch. For customer support requests, you’ll also want to include ways to classify the issue.
List out your conversion types and properties to plan updates. Use this to work with other teams before you update your actual forms.
2.2 - Ask Sales and Support what information what information is helpful for them to have as they respond to demo requests and support requests by email or phone. Then, work with them to fill in the spreadsheet. Some tips:
I’ve found it beneficial to start with team leadership and then move onto asking front-line reps. Merge the two needs.
The more form fields you use, the more work it is to fill out a demo request form and the less demo requests you’ll get. You should probably remind everyone of this. On the other hand, if you ask too few questions, you’ll make it too easy to request a demo or support and there’s more of a risk for low quality demo requests and painful support troubleshooting tickets.
Get agreement across teams on what fields are required and which ones are optional. But know you can always update in future.
2.3 - Fill out the rest of the fields for the marketing specific conversion types. If the website visitors who fill out these forms (e.g. blog or newsletter subscription) are not sent to sales, marketing should decide on final fields.
2.4 - Confirm nurture tracks (optional). Now’s a great time to consider the nurture tracks in place for each of the conversions. If there are gaps, start to plan out ways to fill those in.
3 - Add the agreed-upon information to your forms
Once everyone’s agreed to the fields needed per conversion type, use the forms tool to update your forms.
3.1 - Go into each form and update the form fields and form names. Since the cross-team conversations have been completed, this should be the easiest step. Form names should be simple, obvious, and align with your conversion types (e.g. Demo Request).
3.2 - Share links to each of the forms with everyone involved along with examples of what it looks like on the website. Adjust based on relevant feedback.
Actually making the form updates should be your last (and easiest step), en route to a clean, effective form strategy
Takeaways on forms and lead capture strategy
Making sense of, paring down, and editing your forms is a straightforward process. It’s powerful because it forces everyone to get very good at regularly sharing the most important information with each other.
As a recap, here are the steps to updating your lead capture system:
Pare down your existing forms. You only need a few forms on your website. Plan for the same form to be used across multiple pages.
Create a spreadsheet and document your goal forms. Include who the form is most relevant to and columns for each form field.
Get leadership on a call or two and finalize the spreadsheet. Who you need agreement from depends on whether the form is most relevant to marketing (e.g. newsletter subscription), sales (e.g. demo request), or support (e.g. support request). The fields you use on each form should be determined by department needs.
Many form submissions will need to be assigned via a routing workflow to the correct rep. This is should be thought of as a separate, but essential to-do.