Do you study how the top advertisers and agencies design their performance lead gen forms?
We've spent years doing it, and we're going to share a few tips to help you increase lead quality and volume.
Lead Gen Form Evolution
An embedded form is a fairly traditional experience. You probably created your form on something like Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, TypeForm, etc, and then placed it on your site. The form is typically surrounded by content, and it's usually placed at the very bottom or side of the page.
This style of landing page design has exploded in popularity thanks to drag and drop builders like Instapage and LeadPages.
It's popular because it works better than the options we all used to have in the past. There's definitely a place for it. Especially if all you're collecting is a few fields of information.
After spending millions of dollars on ads (oh yeah, we run traffic too), we've found that this style isn't ideal for performance lead generation. Most advertisers (lead buyers) require much more information to be collected. Those simple embedded forms just don't do the trick.
This is why we built FlipForms, the premier multi-step form builder for high performance marketers.
Multi Step Lead Gen Forms
Our customers have high conversion rates because 1) they're talented marketers and 2) they utilize the multi-step form strengths that help guide users through the process without struggle.
Multi-step forms give the user a smoother process, and offers the opportunity for the advertiser to learn more about the user's needs without an intimidating process. No one wants to fill out a form that looks like a visit to the doctor's office.
Instead of gathering basic information like an old school form, high converting multi-step forms can collect 14-25 data points and maintain a 30% conversion rate.
So... should you embed these multi-step forms on your site like the old school forms, or build them on a standalone sub-domain (you can do both with FlipForms)?
Embedded Multi-Step Lead Gen Forms: Good Idea, or Bad Idea?
Most FlipForms customers that use our embed feature place a form on their homepage. This is a great spot if you go this route. When we originally built FlipForms, customers were also embedding their forms on landing pages.
Embedding is super easy to do, and you can have a mobile responsive form on any page you want. It definitely adds some freedom to your lead generation strategies.
There are a few advantages to embedding your forms:
- You can place them ANYWHERE
- Testing forms is easy - just replace the embed link
- Use the power of FlipForms where you have organic traffic
- Affiliates/Pubs can place your form on their site easily for a co-branded experience
Most of our customers don't embed their forms though. While we've spent millions running traffic, there are others that have spent billions. If you study them for a few minutes, you'll notice that they go a different route. The top lead gen companies in the world take users to a sub domain experience (just the form).
Sub Domain / Standalone Form Experiences
Most people that want to embed their forms do so because they want there to be a landing page experience involved. Some media buyers do this to appease ad channels like Google, and others are seeking high qualified leads through education. We do this too with our own contact form.
If you visit our contact form, you will also notice that it lives on a sub domain. It's a standalone form, living on a subdomain, which is our preferred method of lead gen.
Here's why we love standalone forms:
- We've stripped out distraction for the user - no menus, no rabbit holes
- We can test different experiences - no content, some content, lots of content
- Clear purpose - the user is here to find out if they __________ (qualify, learn more, etc)
- Tracking - Our extra scripts / pixels (data) are dedicated to the form experience - not the rest of the site
As you can see, there is a ton of flexibility and options that are available when you use a standalone form. It's why the big guys do it too.
If you're focused on growing your business or performance marketing agency, then mixing in a standalone form experience for your paid media is highly recommended. With the ability to add content (use Bootstrap to customize your user's experience), creating a sub domain / standalone form checks off all of the boxes most companies want with all of the additional benefits.
Now that you're evolving your lead generation strategy, which path will you take? Let us know! Get started with FlipForms.
