By Add only this field on your forms and collect information for 7 more fields
As B2B Marketers we are often tempted to add many fields in forms in order to collect as much information as we can about a lead. However, as one of my fellow marketers, Yanay Sela,
VP Marketing of Appsee pointed out at his recent presentation at Content Israel 2018, “With today’s lead generation technology by asking just one question, we can extract a wealth of information that no longer requires us to include a multitude of fields in our forms.”
So what’s the one and only field you need in your top of the funnel (ToFu) forms?
Company email address
I know many marketers are against this but this is the trade-off of having less fields on your forms. Making it mandatory for a lead to leave their company email address in exchange for your valuable resource allows you to collect more information than ever before. Thanks to the ability to re-engineer a lead’s site visit we can now operate like a well trained Secret Service agent without frustrating the lead.
The added benefit as well is that it saves you from adding leads in your CRM with emails such as sugarybum@hotmail.com.
Still not convinced? Here are 7 more reasons you should ask for a company email on your forms:
1.You get the first or last name
You are more likely to get either their first name or last name from a lead’s company email as very few companies allow their employees to use aliases for their company email.
2. You get the company name
Another reason to insist on company emails is that you get the company name as it’s most often the domain of the email address.
3. You get the website address
The website address can be derived from the company’s email as it is most definitely the 2nd part of the email after @.
4. You get the country
In most marketing automation systems you can set the IP address of a country to be automatically captured as a hidden field in a form which then translates to the country.
If you use HubSpot, they maintain a proprietary database of company IP addresses and can then automatically populate all the company details of that lead in your CRM from information that is made public.
5. You get the # of employees
The number of employees is another benefit that HubSpot provides through its proprietary database once the IP address is captured.
6. You get annual revenue
A company’s annual revenue is also automatically populated from the Hubspot’s proprietary database once they’ve picked up the corporate IP address of the lead.
7. You get the industry
Who would have ever thought you could get so much from an IP address? But yes, the industry as well is also often public information and can be added to your CRM once the IP address is collected and the company can be found in HubSpot’s proprietary database.
So what’s missing
What other information are we dying to collect or believe is a must have or our sales teams will think of us as incompetent.
1. Job title
For one reason or the other the job title is often seen as necessary but maybe asking this next time the lead attempts to download something might be more useful. You can easily set this up as a progressive field in HubSpot.
2. Phone Number
Having a lead’s phone number is often thought to be critical? But after just downloading one eBook do you really think it’s wise to call a lead? Most likely not. So again this is another opportunity to use this field at a later stage when the lead progresses through the funnel and interacts with your company a bit more.
3. Address
I know for global teams it is often necessary to collect City or State in order to allocate the relevant leads to the respective sales persons but more often than not the country is enough for this allocation. If you absolutely need it then add it also as a progressive field.
4. Custom Questions
This is always a nice addition to your forms as you do collect meaningful information. However, like a first date some questions are best asked at a later stage. So once again outside of your contact us form and demo form these fields are best added as a progressive field.
Hopefully after reading this you are at least willing to try this strategy of asking for just an email address and see if your conversion rates improve. But if nothing else at least be willing to give your leads a break and reduce the number of fields in your landing page forms.