When it comes to your business’s lead management, you can’t do much without knowing who your leads are or how to contact them. It’s not enough to strike a first spark of interest unless you can keep the flame burning.
This is why lead management is much more than simply advertising. You need to tend to your new leads if they are to become satisfied paying customers.
But first, you need to bring those potential customers into the fold. To do that, you need to find out more about them.
This is what lead capturing is all about. In this article, we’ll explore everything you need to know about lead capturing, and guide you through how to set up a lead capturing system that really delivers.
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Try monday sales CRMWhat is lead capturing?
Lead capturing is the process of finding out about your potential customers. It involves gathering the key bits of information about them, so you can reach out to them and keep them engaged and interested in your product or service.
You need to:
- know what drew their attention
- understand what they want from their relationship with you
- know how to keep in touch with them
That means offering a simple and attractive method for your prospective leads to tell you about themselves. The data you typically might want to capture includes:
- Name
- Email address
- Phone number
- Business sector
- Interests and preferences
- Online behavior
- Brand interaction history
Let’s look at a few approaches and strategies companies can use for lead capturing.
Read: The Lead Management Process: A Practical Guide
4 top strategies to capture leads
1. Lead capturing forms
This is the most common and familiar method that companies use to gather lead data. If you’ve ever signed up for an email list, downloaded a PDF report or ebook, or registered for an industry seminar on a company website, you’ll have filled in a lead capturing form. It could be as simple as a single email address field, or it could be a multi-step questionnaire.
2. Landing pages
A landing page is a standalone web page your lead “lands” on after clicking the link that grabbed their attention. It has two purposes:
i) It can give your potential customer the specific information they’re looking for, so they don’t have to wade through your full website.
ii) It can also present a lead capture form for them to provide information about themselves.
3. Advertising campaigns
While lead management is not simply advertising, advertising campaigns are great for lead capture. An effective way to generate interest in your product or service is to offer prospective customers a taster. For example:
- a free trial or a freemium version
- a quiz or competition
- a free online course
- a gated, downloadable asset
Whatever you decide to offer in your advertising campaign, you should use a lead capture form to capture your lead’s email address (at minimum) before they can access the offer.
4. Pop-ups
When someone has spent some time engaging with your website, or perhaps scrolled past a particular point on the page, they’ve shown you they’re interested. This is when a pop-up prompt can be used to take their interest further. A pop-up can cover the whole page (with an exit X should they rather not opt in), or it may appear subtly and less intrusively at the bottom or at the side of the page.
Want to see how monday sales CRM can make managing the leads you capture effortless?
Try monday sales CRMHow to develop a lead capturing strategy
You need to decide on what best suits your company and your approach. You also need to consider the impression it will make on your leads.
What you don’t want is to annoy or put off a lead who, up until now, has been interested in what you’re offering. This is why it’s key to plan out and develop a great lead capturing strategy, and to be open to testing and modifying it until you find that lead capture sweet spot.
Here are 5 questions to guide you towards a thorough and effective lead capturing strategy:
1. What is your objective?
Establish a realistic lead capture goal. For example, set a monthly revenue target, and work out how many leads you would need to convert to reach that target. Consider your lead conversion rate—that is, the percentage of leads who become customers—and use this to calculate how many leads you need to sign up.
2. What are you going to offer your leads?
Decide what will be an irresistible yet cost-effective offer for site visitors. Can you create an ebook that has high potential of converting the reader into a customer? Can you host a webinar to showcase how your product will hit your visitors’ pain points? Make sure that the “reward” you’re offering comes across as a good deal for what you’re asking from them.
3. How will your landing page and lead capture tools look?
Think about what specific information you want your leads to share with you. What visuals or wording will catch their interest and encourage them to engage? Decide on the best formats and tools to use, from a simple email box to a multi-step form or a pop-up. Check out customizable templates and examples with apps like Typeform.
4. How well does your lead capturing work?
Make use of A/B testing of different variants of lead capture tools. Use your CRM’s data analytics and reporting tools to gauge engagement and conversion rates.
5. What can you do to improve your lead capturing?
Based on what works and what doesn’t, change things up. Adapt your working, your approaches, the position or timing of your pop-ups. Assess, iterate, assess again, until you hit on the best approach to meet your lead capture goal.
What is lead capturing software?
Lead capture software collects and aggregates data about your potential clients, so that you can analyze it, report on it and provide actionable facts to your marketing and sales teams to inform their strategies. It helps you build a database of customers and visitors to your site.
Incorporating lead capturing tools into your analytical CRM helps you gather and store data about your leads, and to analyze that data for trends, behaviors and preferences to better inform marketing and sales teams so they can offer better service.
Monday sales CRM is one of the best rated software platforms for lead capture. Check it out today.
Try monday sales CRMWhat features do you need in lead capture software?
1. Lead scoring
Lead scoring is a way to rank leads by assigning them a score based on their priority or their potential—for example if they are raw, warm or qualified.
With monday.com, you can customize the parameters you want to weight, score and rank your leads by, which will then be done automatically for incoming leads so that you can know where to target your lead nurturing efforts.
2. Integrations
By connecting your CRM to the existing tools your sales team already uses, you can manage the whole span of your sales pipeline capturing, communicating, and engaging with leads without having to switch tabs.
For example, monday.com integrates with Facebook Ads to manage your campaigns. SurveyMonkey and Typeform can help your teams engage leads and capture lead data, while Clearbit helps you manage that data effectively.
3. Analytics
You need to be able to track and understand your lead capture metrics, so your software tools should offer advanced reporting and analytics. Key metrics to access and analyze include the lead source, frequency and number of engagements and sales opportunities.
Knowing where your leads came from or how much they engaged with your site can give you valuable insights to inform your future strategies and campaigns.
Why should you automate lead capturing?
For example, by setting automatic notifications when a lead opens an email, or automatically assigning leads to reps when they are qualified, you can maximize lead management efficiency.
Automation not only helps you find leads, but it can help you find higher quality leads. By automating data collection and behavior analysis, and assigning lead scores, you can get a clearer picture of which prospects have the best potential of becoming repeat customers.
FAQs
What is the most popular software for lead capturing?
You can find a useful tool for comparing the very best lead capture software solutions here. You’ll find products rated for ease-of-use, customer support, functionality and value for money. Take a look at how monday sales CRM rates here.
What is a lead capturing page?
A lead capture page is a type of landing page that attracts the visitor with an attractive offer—for example, an ebook, webinar or free course. To access the offer, the visitor submits some basic information—usually an email address, and perhaps their name and company. This allows the marketing teams to collect contact details for interested leads and potential customers.
How can you optimize a lead capture page?
Keep it short and simple. Don’t overwhelm your prospective customers with too much to do. If you want to capture a lot of data, chunk your lead capture form into two or more short pages rather than one long one.
Make it personal. Adapt and segment your lead capture forms and pop ups to reflect where your leads are coming from, so that you recognise their interest and behavior. A generic form is not going to encourage your prospects.
Streamline and organize lead capture with monday sales CRM
monday sales CRM is an intuitive and customizable no-code platform used to manage, automate, and centralize your entire sales cycle. It can make managing and automating your lead capture strategy a breeze:
- Collect leads on your website through Facebook campaigns or via other sources
- Centralize and qualify every lead in one place
- Automate follow-ups and assign leads to reps automatically
- Use email templates for fast email creation
To find out how monday sales CRM can improve your lead capture and supercharge your lead management strategy, get in touch using our very own lead capture form!
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