The main goal of any business should be to connect and engage with customers in a meaningful way.
That starts with understanding your customers’ behaviors and expectations. The next step? Translate that understanding into experiences customized for each member of your audience. Remember, every interaction is an opportunity to gain insights, build relationships and engage with your customers. So it’s important to capture information that you’ll use in the future to differentiate your business from your competitors.
But are you asking the right questions (and utilizing that data) to get ahead of the pack?
2 Key Digital Strategy Tips
Customers will interact with your business in several ways. It’s vital to create a consistent and cohesive brand experience at each touch point. This post will focus on two digital marketing strategy tips that can generate quality engagement and therefore, quality leads:
1. Use qualifying questions to get the information you need.
Shorter online forms are great for conversion. But adding an additional question that helps qualify responses can make a big difference. It all goes back to your
business goal—what are you trying to accomplish? In most instances, it will be selling more products or services.
When crafting messaging for your forms, ask yourself:
- How large is the investment for the customer?
- What does your buying process look like?
- Who are your identified buyer personas?
If you have a clear understanding of your personas, you’ll know what questions to ask and how strong your leads may be. These questions could reveal background information such as demographics, location, company name/website, role, buying timeframe, etc. You may also want to gauge their need for your product, likelihood to purchase your service, or fit with your company.
As a general rule of thumb, include 3-5 required fields. Want to capture more information? Make additional fields optional. At the same time, be aware that asking too many questions can overwhelm people, so prioritize and ask what’s most important to create a personalized interaction with your customers.
In addition to form length, other key factors include the value of the offer to be redeemed, the types of information requested, and your website’s credibility and perceived sense of security. As Mona Elesseily said “collecting information from prospects with your form is a negotiation, a process of easing into a relationship—not a sudden event.”
2. Use the data you gather to make better business decisions.
Utilize the information your customers are providing to generate personalized offerings for them. By listening and giving them what they want, when they want it, and how they want to receive it, you’ll deliver a rich customer experience.
This genuine engagement will set you apart from your competitors.
Another crucial step is capturing and maintaining this data with a lead management tool like Salesforce to score your leads and determine the next step of action with them. This data will stay with the individual’s record to determine which campaigns they should be included in and the types of communication they prefer.
Good Examples of Strong Web-to-Lead Forms
So how does all of this work in action? Here are two entirely different examples of web-to-lead forms with strong qualifying questions, based on the type of investment for the service or product:
Clothing Retailer: The investment from the customer is relatively small, and limited qualifying questions are asked. Only email address is required. The retailer will track your movement/buying patterns/interests and in return, create a tailored shopping experience for you.
Manufacturing Company: The investment for purchasing large equipment is substantial. Therefore, this form for a brochure request has more qualifying questions than the previous example. This information will likely be shared with a dealership, based on the buyer’s location and product interest. These questions are all outlined within the form.
Friendly reminder: be careful not to auto-populate the “I wish to receive emails” field on your forms (if you have in the past). This is not compliant with Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and could get your company in loads of legal and financial trouble.
There is power in listening to your customers and applying what you learn to future interactions. You’ll have the most success when you put your customers at the center of your business and get to know their real needs and concerns.
And building better forms? Well, that’s the perfect place to start.
