Form Strategy Best Practices

Contents

Best Practices: Form Strategy

Nurturing or Email Newsletters The people in your nurturing stream are already known to you so we do not recommend the use of forms in Content Tracks if your only goal with the form is to measure activity. It creates unnecessary friction for your visitors and is actually not needed in order to track engagement as the platform can track that automatically based on the click through from the email.

If your goal is to have someone request a trial or raise their hand for a demo, then we recommend two options:
1. A “persistent call to action” button that is part of your Content Track appearance (instructions), and/or
2. Have a pop-up form after a significant length of time. In general, we recommend 90 seconds of engagement but that can vary depending on the type of assets in your Content Track and their reading time.

a. The title of the form should be very clear (“Would you like to book a demo?” or “Questions for a sales person?”) and the form should be as minimal as possible. Consider just asking for an email address and phone number as you already know the name and company.
b. Pre-populate any form fields that you do show.
c. These forms should always be dismissible

Form Length Consider having several different forms in your Forms Library and varying them by length. As a marketer it’s easiest for you to have one form that you use over and over, but is that truly creating the best experience for your prospects?

There may be times when you really only want to ask for email address (ex: a social media link to a light piece of content such as a video)
Your “talk to sales now” form is definitely going to want a phone number in it, but do you always need to ask for phone number?
Are you asking for content in your form that you could easily get from a data append service? For example, company size, industry or revenue data will be much more accurate from a data append service than via a form fill anyway.

Dismissalble vs Non-dismissable

Yes, you’ll probably get more form fills if your forms are non-dismissable (“hard gate”), but the quality may suffer. If your goal is to get the right engaged buyers in front of your sales team, you’ll have a higher chance of success by not forcing people to submit your form (“soft gate”). That way the people that do submit it are truly hand-raisers and are showing genuine buying intent – your sales team will love that! You also have the option to hard gate a particular asset, while keeping the promoters live, so you don’t stop someone from bingeing on the rest of your ungated content. They might even come back to the asset with the form and decide to fill it out based on being able to see the rest of the content in the Track; now that’s an engaged prospect.

When is the ideal time to pop up a form in a PathFactory Content Track? There is no one-size-fits-all answer here as it depends a bit on the “meatiness” of your content and your goals with your campaign, but here are some general guidelines:

You know best – read over your whitepaper, watch your video – how much time does it take you to understand or to have meaningful engagement? That is usually a good place to pop a form up.
45 seconds – we see good results when a form is shown around the 45-second point in someone’s engagement. They’ve had enough time to decide that something is interesting enough to share their information, but they haven’t departed yet.
3rd asset – when someone has consumed 2 assets and then jumps to their third, they’re showing engaged intent. This is an ideal time to ask them for some information.

Updated on April 14, 2023

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