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.