Capturing Leads with a Sign-Up Form

  • Updated

In digital marketing, web forms are essential for initiating engagement with your prospects and customers. Web forms are essentially a handshake between you and a prospect, who provides contact information in exchange for something of value – whether it's a webinar, premium content to download, a limited-time offer, or simply requesting to be contacted. With Act-On, you can create professional-looking forms in minutes and with minimal clicks.

Allowing prospects to sign up for a company newsletter can give you a great pool of prospects to begin nurturing. In this guide, we'll show you how to create a basic sign-up form to begin capturing new leads.

Instructions

Create a new form

Your form will capture your prospects' information. A new Act-On form or form template will include the recommended basic fields for capturing this information. You can also insert additional form fields to capture any other information you'd like to collect.

Need more guidance on creating Act-On Forms? See our Forms Composer User Guide.

A few things to consider:

  • Your form needs a strong call to action. Whether you’re linking to a form from an email, web page, landing page, or social media, you want to make sure readers know what the value proposition is and what they get by completing your form.
  • Consider form placement on your website or blog when designing your form fields & layout.
  • A simple link to your organization’s privacy policy and a promise that none of the prospect's information will be passed to third-party websites will help build trust with those completing the form.

Tip! Short forms are usually better.

We’ve conducted numerous A/B tests to determine if a long or short form will convert better. In all cases, the short version has won. However, make sure your form is still long enough to collect the information you need. A form that asks only for a visitor's name and email will not be as useful as one that also asks for their phone number and company name. Your leads might also avoid filling out a suspiciously short form for fear of being spammed.

That said, prospects who fill out longer forms may be more motivated, so while you may get fewer leads, they may be better quality.

Test your form

It's a good idea to test your form to make sure it's behaving properly before you publish it. Visit the Review tab in the Forms Composer to:

  1. Preview your form in multiple browser windows to make sure it works across the board. 
  2. Test submit the form to find any process flaws, and make sure the flow is as designed.

Tip! Preview the mobile version of your form.

47% of emails are opened on mobile devices now, and people reading email on their phones and tablets are more likely to fill out a form that is mobile-compatible.

Publish your form

Decide where and how you'd like to deploy your form so that prospects can fill it out. There are two ways to publish your Act-On form:

  • Act-On Landing Page – Use the form block in the Design tab of the Landing Page Composer to embed your form in any of your Act-On Landing Pages.
  • External web page – Embed your form in any external or third-party webpage by grabbing the embed code.

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