Last updated - June 14, 2022
One of the basic steps of marketing is generating and following up on leads. And, one of the best places to manage this is your own website. How do you make sure that you are capturing as many relevant leads through your website? Primarily through the strategic use of contact forms. There are several ways to do this in the WordPress WooCommerce space. However, more than simply using one of the advanced tools for lead generation, you need to devise some strategies that will actually work. In this article we will discuss some WooCommerce lead generation strategies that you can adopt while working with contact forms.
The importance of WooCommerce Lead Generation
As a WooCommerce store owner, what is the significance of lead generation for you? On an average day, your website will get a particular number of visitors, as you can see on your Analytics panel. How many of these visitors are converted into customers? And, more importantly what are the chances of these people visiting your site again. Each and every visitor who stumble upon your site through an organic search is a valuable lead. If you are able to convert a significant percentage of these visitors to customers, it might be a huge boost to your revenue. The fact that they already came to your website means they are interested in some of the products or content that you are offering.
How Contact Forms help in Lead Generation?
When you have a WooCommerce store, investing in a premium contact form plugin would be a wise thing to do. That is because most of these plugins will help you customize you r contact forms to manage the specific needs of your site and customers. More importantly, they will help you create an efficient workflow for your marketing efforts. In addition, they will help you measure the success of all your marketing initiatives including lead generation and follow ups. And, most of them are flexible to integrate with other marketing tools.
Here is an article that details some of the best contact form plugins for a WooCommerce store.
Also, understand how you can customize login and registration forms on WooCommerce?
Some of the popular contact forms you can try for your site are listed below:
Now, while using these awesome solutions, you have to follow a few best practices that will help you get the best results. Let’s look at a few aspects.
Have a strategy on the information that you need to collect
When creating contact forms optimized for lead generation, you need to be sure about what information you need to collect from users. Fundamentally, you need some information that will help you pitch a business case to them. This is particularly relevant if you are operating in a B2B model. You might want to know the company information, their budget limit for the project, etc. On the other hand, if it’s a B2C user, you definitely need an email ID to start with. In both cases, you can provide some space for the user to leave a description.
Again, you need to make sure to keep the forms compact, so that you get the necessary information for your follow up, without boring the user. You should also focus here to weed out spam. Fundamentally, the goal of your checkout form should be to collect only as much information that you need for the next email you are sending them. This might need some trial and error before getting it right.
Decide on the required and optional fields
It is a good idea to make a field ‘required’ only if it is absolutely necessary for a follow up. In the case of a B2C user, the email id itself is enough, and every other information, including the product they are interested in, can be good to have. Now, for a B2B user, you might need some more information like the company name, and a basic idea of what they do. Even here, simply an email ID would be enough, but you can be more targeted with your email if you have some additional information about the company.
In any case, going by the basic human psychology, it is better to make more fields optional. Chances of people using the contact form will be more if you have only very basic information as required fields. If you keep unnecessary fields like address information as ‘required’, chances are more that people will simply choose to not use the form.
Use conditional logic effectively
Sometimes the information you want to collect from a user can be very well tackled using conditional logic. It will help you ask relevant information in a more specific manner. For example, you can categories into general and project specific. For someone who chooses the general contact option, you can display one set of fields. And, for the project specific one, you can include fields that will help to collect information relevant to each project.
In fact, with conditional logic, you can segment your customers better, and offer more personal experiences. And, you can avoid collecting irrelevant information from users who won’t be able to contribute further to your business development targets. It will be a win-win, as customers would not be subjected to the torture of filling up irrelevant information, when what they are looking for is totally different.
If you are looking for strategies to identify and segment customers better, here is an article that can help.
Run A/B Tests
When you start out with the process of lead generation, you might be just shooting in the dark. However, you really don’t need to do that as there are several strategies to test your process to get the best outcomes. A/B is what we are talking about. You can use two versions of the same form and use them for a period on your store, and then compare the results. Naturally, the one with a better conversion rate will be the one to follow. There are several elements to consider if you want to get the best results from A/B testing.
Read our article to understand more about A/B Testing for a WooCommerce store.
You can also create multiple versions of the same form to test on your audience, and this is called multivariate testing. Here are some useful tools that you can use to create A/B tests on your site.
Make the contact forms easily accessible
Most of the websites follow the standard procedure of keeping a contact form at one fixed location. This might work for certain stores, however if your business is more dependent on following more leads, you need to make it more conspicuous. For example, if your business model requires the customer to contact you to discuss terms, then a contact form should be a more lively presence on the site. Perhaps all your pages need to have a form that will enhance your lead generation process
Exit intent popup forms
You can use popup forms to generate leads on your website. These forms are really capable of generating a lot of leads as they often use advanced strategies like determining exit intent to display your contact form. Opt-in forms are a proven way to improve conversions and lead generation on your online store or website. Here, we will look into two interesting opt-in tools that you can use.
Optimonk
Optimonk is a great tool that will help you a lot in converting site visitors into customers. It will help you identify new visitors and returning visitors to your site, and you can construct a message accordingly. This will help you to be more targeted in your approach to users. Similarly, you can also use the information of what pages a user has visited, to show specific messages. For example, a particular customer who has spent a considerable time on a product page might be interested in that product. If you are showing a popup form with an offer for that product, there are more chances for conversion.
Optimonk also helps you display a form based on the country of a customer. If you have different strategies for customers from different countries, this can be a real booster to your efforts. Similarly, based on the user behavior, you can create specific forms. One of the most important uses for this kind of contact forms is in reducing cart abandonment. the users who have open carts often hold the most potential in terms of conversion for a WooCommerce store owner. So, it is especially important to focus on converting users with an open cart, as there are just one step away from being a customer.
Cart content and value based targeting of Optimonk can effectively help you approach users to prevent them from exiting your site. Often it is the best time to offer a free shipping coupon or to recommend a complementary product. The pricing plans start at $29 per month, suitable for a website with a monthly traffic of 5000 users.
Check Optimonk website to see the pricing plans or get started with a free trial!
Popups by OptinMonster
With the help of OptinMonster, you can create a variety of forms (8 types to be precise), based on the specific requirement of your website. Apart from the targeted popup form, you will be able to feature floating bars on header and footer, boxes triggered by scroll, sidebar forms, etc. It also helps you create forms specific for mobile devices. With the help of this plugin, you can combine some of the most useful strategies in conversion optimization, such as exit intent and behavior based targeting. It also helps you with A/B Testing and advanced analytics insights.
Create forms with visual elements
Generally website visitors would be averse to filling out forms. If you are creating contact forms that doesn’t look like conventional forms, it might generate interest. For example, you can use visual elements like icons, which users can simply click instead of actively filling out several fields. You can create a form, where the user needs to enter just the basic information. And the additional information can be added through simple clickable elements. The reason for this that the users can avoid active thinking and making a choice, which is needed when they have to fill a form. Passively clicking a visual element from available choices will be much easier to do.
Here is an article that will help you understand this concept in website design more clearly.
Watch out for data privacy regulations
Through contact forms you might be collecting a lot of personal information of your users. Make sure you are complying to the all data privacy regulations including GDPR. And, it is always a good idea to collect data that has real use with your business strategy.
If you want to understand the nuances of GDPR, here is an article that may help.
Effective lead generation through contact forms
Contact forms are one of the most potent tools for a website owner to ensure consistent lead generation and follow ups. For any visitor on your website, it is the primary channel of communication with you. If a contact form is not apparent to visitors, they might simply leave your site and go elsewhere. With the strategic use of contact forms, you can very well convert a lot of your visitors to customers. We have discussed some of the popular WooCommerce lead generation strategies and tools in this article that will help you create efficient contact forms. Make use of all the traffic to generate more sales or collaborations for your business.
