When you’re eager to be making meaningful connections will potential leads, you would think it only makes sense to list every piece of contact information on your website. And it is true, you do want potential leads to be able to contact you in whatever medium suits them best whether it’s phone, email, chatbot or social media. However, by simply putting your direct email address on your website, you’re missing an opportunity to truly learn about your new leads. Let’s dive a little deeper to see how to avoid missed opportunities and what you have to gain.
Good-bye email, hello forms
Instead of listing your email address on your contact page, consider replacing it with a form. Using HubSpot’s form tool, you can customize the required and optional fields in your form to gather information that will be most helpful to your when nurturing this lead. With an email address listed on a website, the only guaranteed information gathering from leads will be their name and email address. However, by using the right tools, you can gather tons of helpful information to serve leads better such as best times to chat, location, the company they work for, if they were referred to your website and more.
Why forms will make the difference
In case you weren’t sold on the valuable data collecting power of forms. Here are a few other reasons we love forms:
Organization optimization
Picture this: a potential lead goes to your website, fills out a form to learn more and fires it off with expectations of a punctual, informative reply. With forms, this new data will seamlessly autopopulate into a new contact in your CRM. Once integrated into your CRM, you can see where your new contact is in their buyer’s journey, all your previous contact with them and set reminds to respond to them in a timely manner. With forms, you can also set up email automation to respond to the lead as soon as your hear from them or at a scheduled time you set. Keep all your new lead on track in their marketing funnel with CRM-linked forms.
Contact forms can direct right to email lists
If a lead sends you an email from the email address listed on your contact page, they likely didn’t come across an opportunity to join your email list. Well, can you add them to your email list now that you have their contact information? Of course not. Your lead must consent to opting in. So, with a few back-and-forth emails, you may be able to interest them enough to opt-in. Alternatively, instead of wasting precious time, automate this process with a form that give leads the option to check an opt-in box and automatically be added to your email list when they submit their form. Easy-peasy.
Automating the inbound email process the way you’ve (hopefully) already automated your outbound email campaigns will save you and your team serious time that you would have otherwise needed to spend gathering additional information, manually populating your contacts list and asking leads to join your email list. As marketers ourselves, we know that is simply not realistic in such a busy industry. If you’re ready to maximize your time and efficiency, contact our sales director to learn more about how forms can optimize the way you do business.