If you have a lead generation site, and you are actively engaged in search engine optimization and/or pay per click advertising, it’s a good idea to have a lead form. A lead form is simply an online form a visitor fills out if they want a quote, want to be contacted, or are interested in getting more information about your products or services. These forms can be tracked with analytics programs or with pay per click conversion tracking. Tracking can give you information about how much it’s costing you to generate a lead and where the leads are coming from - in particular, what search engine queries generate leads for your site. These forms are likely to generate at least a little bit of spam, and if you don’t have the proper safeguards, a lot a bit of spam. So it’s not all sunshine and roses with lead forms, but it’s typically worth the tracking information.

Besides tracking information, there’s other value to lead forms. A good lead form will have an open text field where visitors can make comments or talk about why they are contacting your company. The stuff a visitor enters in that spot is a valuable little piece of documentation. When I’m managing an account, I like seeing that information because:

• It shows me the language visitors are using in describing a company’s products and services. Abbreviations, technical jargon, and other related terms tend to surface in these kinds of lead requests. These terms are all valuable for pay per click campaigns and for targeting specific terms with SEO efforts.

• It shows me what most people are requesting. Is a certain product hot? Is there a recurring concern that can be addressed in the website? What stage of the sales cycle are visitors in when they submit an inquiry? These questions can all influence content recommendations for a site, help you estimate the value of a lead for different sources, and help improve targeting in pay per click campaigns.

The sales people in a company are probably not the ones managing the pay per click and search engine optimization campaigns unless the company is a small one. From my experience, there’s a gap in communication between those managing internet marketing campaigns and those fielding sales calls. Even if you interview a sales person later about the kinds of leads they’re getting, you won’t get the valuable detail that comes from a documented request submitted through a lead form. Someone with internet marketing experience can notice details that probably aren’t important to the sales department.

Documenting Leads (Briefly)

There are different ways to setup a lead form so that leads are well documented. My favorite kind of form is setup like this:

1. Simple form with client side JavaScript checks to help visitors fill in the fields completely.
2. Processing script with server side validation to filter out spammers.
3. Thank you page with relevant pay per click conversion scripts and a unique URL so that it can easily be tracked by programs like Google Analytics.

Generally, the processing script will email lead information or input it into a database and send email notifications that a new lead has been acquired.

Besides emailing the sales team, the script might also email the person who manages your internet marketing campaign. In the case that a leads database has been setup, the person managing the internet marketing campaign might also be given access to your database. Setting this up isn’t terribly difficult, but if you’re going to do a custom setup you have to worry about things like database permissions, security, and SQL injection. Salesforce offers web to lead functionality that manages these things for you, but it is super-easy to spam if you don’t setup some validation and hide your “oid” from spammers (a Salesforce oid identifies your account for web to lead submissions).

The good news is if you are a larger company, you probably already have a setup like this or are very capable of quickly providing a setup like this.

Conclusion

The important part to remember is that the people managing your internet marketing campaigns find input by web visitors who become leads useful. Giving them access to this information - straight from the horse’s (visitor’s) mouth - can add value to your leads.