Most B2B marketers in the enterprise space are handed the responsibility for improving the quality of their leads, as well as hitting an MQL quota. After all the work of campaign development, in the end “success” usually boils down to getting a targeted campaign prospect to submit a form. Here are some tips to make those forms more effective.
Tip #1: Match your forms to the value of your content.
We all know that form conversion isn’t only about the number of questions you are asking. Knowing the value of the content and where the prospect is in the buying process helps inform your choices about:
- Whether you should be asking any questions at this stage
- What questions are most useful for profiling at this stage
- What questions are most likely to be answered at this stage
- What questions may be off-putting
Key tip: Use techniques such as buyer personas, data segmentation analysis, even focus groups or questionnaires to help define and refine the questions that you should be asking at each stage of the buying cycle.
Tip #2: Audit your existing website forms.
The largest marketing channel consistently delivering leads to Sales is usually the company website, but B2B marketers typically spend the least amount of time making sure the website forms are in alignment with their assigned verticals/products/solutions. Time and again marketers develop landing page after landing page to promote assets for their campaigns, duplicating efforts and complicating management. Take some time to review your website landing page forms to make sure:
- They match the value of your content
- Each form is functioning correctly (for example, confirm that form submits are getting through to the assigned campaign in the company’s CRM with all the data showing up correctly)
- Localized versions are in alignment, if you are responsible for multi-language campaigns/regions
Key tip: Allot time to align corporate website landing pages and forms as viable avenues to receive campaign traffic. Use query string parameters to pass along your other campaign IDs to that form, in addition to the default campaign ID for the website traffic. This approach allows you to utilize the same landing page and form for your campaigns and still be able to distinguish the campaign source for each form submit.
Tip #3: Continually review and update your forms for greatest effectiveness.
Both newly hired B2B marketers and those already pounding the pavement of their target audiences should take some time to review all the forms at least once a year, if not once a quarter, to:
- Align the forms and the content surrounding them with all of the current/planned marketing campaigns
- Update the questions and select lists as needed to ensure that they align with the company’s lead scoring system
- Address data quality issues by initiating/updating a data washing program or process
- Remove form questions that are not critical to improving conversion rates, and that you may be able to have answered by a third-party data appending service
Key tip: Sending the right communications at the right time to a target set of prospects requires an established cadence around form maintenance and data quality. Utilizing a third-party data appending service, such as the Demandbase Real Time ID for Forms, can alleviate some of this burden and free up valuable time while also enhancing your segmentation capabilities.
Tip #4: Don’t make your known prospects fill out forms again.
Marketers in the B2B space generally equate “form submit” with “MQL,” but this doesn’t mean that every individual has to actually fill out a form! Don’t you find it annoying when you have already filled out a form to get to a white paper, and then are forced to answer all the same questions again for the next offer from that company?
Once you have data on a prospect, don’t present the same questions again for your follow-up offer. (One exception is when you can prefill known fields during progressive profiling.)
Key tip: Use a blind form submit for follow-up offers. You’ll find it will improve your MQL numbers as well as enhance your segmentation process.
Ultimately, the most effective forms are the ones that are informative for you and painless for your prospect.
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