Capturing email addresses for lead generation is as easy as ever and can be done for free with our five-star rated WordPress plugin, Forminator.
Whether you have a service-based business, an eCommerce site, are selling information – anything that brings in an income from the internet – lead generation is a term that needs to be a part of your vocabulary.
This article will show you step-by-step how to use our free, 5-star rated plugin (if you haven’t yet, download Forminator from WordPress.org) to grow your email list, build profitable marketing funnels, and increase your income online.
Plus, we’ll be going over content marketing and details about having a foundation to bring people to your site – and ultimately opt-in to your form.
It’s easy to do. All it takes is an understanding of how lead generation works and implementation. You won’t need a massive marketing budget or marketing experience. And with the help of Forminator, you can have everything you need to generate leads.
We’ll be covering:
- Step 1 – What to Include in Your Forminator Form
- Step 2 – Fields and Design
- Step 3 – Integrating 3rd Party Apps
- Step 4 – The CTA Button
- Step 5 – How to Test Your Form with A/B Testing
Also…
- How to Monitor Your Form’s Performance with A/B Testing and Forminator
- What Lead Generation Is in Digital Marketing
- Why You Need an Email List
- How to Drive Traffic to Your Website and Forminator Form
- Page Layouts
- What is Content Marketing
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Skip to any section that you’re curious about, or get the full spectrum of lead generation by reading the whole article.
After browsing through this, you’ll be able to take the “lead” in lead generation and increase sales! It all starts with – you guessed it – a form.
Let’s first take a look at…
Step 1: What to Include in Your Forminator Form
Step one is creating a simple form. If you’re new to Forminator, check out this article to learn how to set up a form in a few clicks.
As we go through this, there are several essentials that we’ll take a look at, including:
- Fields and Design
- 3rd Party Apps
- CTA
There’s a ton of customization and options that will vary for everyone’s unique situation. However, there are some universal things to consider, no matter what your circumstance is.
Step 2: Fields and Design
To begin with, you’ll need to consider what Fields and Design to include.
This will vary depending on what you’re selling. Do you need to ship a product? You’ll need an address field. Gotta text new clients? Include a phone number field.
How about design? Is the layout good for your consumer? What about the colors?
Whew! There’s a lot to consider. But don’t worry, because it boils down to a straightforward approach.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your forms as simple as possible when it comes to fields. The more information you ask for, the fewer people will complete your form.
So, if you don’t need a piece of information about a user – don’t ask for it. Keep in mind that you can always ask for details down the road if they opt-in. Try to limit the number of fields you use.
With the design, you’ll want something that aesthetically works well with the rest of your page’s layout and sticks out (especially the CTA button, which we’ll get into later).
This is done in the Appearance area. For example, edit the Design Style.
In the Appearance area, you can also adjust the Colors, Fonts, Font Container, and even add your Custom CSS.
For more on customizing the appearance of your form, check out our documentation.
Step 3: Integrating 3rd Party Apps
The next step is to include 3rd Party Apps.
One great thing about Forminator is its ability to connect to 3rd party apps with its Integration. Integration is perfect for building an email list, keeping track of opt-ins, organizing your contacts, etc.
A significant part of lead generation is collecting emails, which you’ll need to do. Luckily, you can easily integrate with MailChimp, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, and more.
Just click on the plus (+) by any of the applications. Each one has a different setup, and it will walk you through the process.
For example, with MailChimp, you’ll enter your API Key and an Identifier to distinguish between integrations.
After entering your information and clicking Connect – it will appear in Connected Apps under Applications. You can even set up multiple accounts!
Then, once connected, you simply go to your specific lead generation form and implement the application by Activating it. Just click the plus (+) sign.
What’s nice in this example is you can also conditionally send data to apps. That means you can choose where the forms submission data goes between apps. For example, add email addresses to a specific campaign or list.
There are a ton of customization options.
Also, add apps to keep track of submissions on applications, like Google Sheets.
Choosing where your information goes is up to you. There’s the right combination of options for you and your marketing team.
Need more help? We have an article that walks you through setting up your form with 3rd party apps.
Step 4: The CTA Button
So, you have your form created, the fields you want to include, and have added a 3rd party app for email (and anything else). The next step to creating this form is a Call to Action (CTA) button. This is the button the user hits when they want to enter their information.
Make sure to customize the text and appearance. You don’t want something that blends in with the page. It’s essential to make it stand out, so it’s easily noticeable and gets clicked (e.g. bright, bold colors).
Each form has a CTA in Forminator and can be edited however you’d like.
Instead of just “Submit,” something like “Try Us for FREE!” or “Get a 50% Discount TODAY!”
A big incentive for a user to click the CTA is to offer something of value for free. An example would be a free course or eBook. Maybe a discount coupon for an order. Whatever it may be, make it worth it to the users who enter their information.
For an additional resource for stepping up your CTA game, read our article.
Finally, now that you have your form completed, it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty of implementing it.
Step 5: How to Test Your Form with A/B Testing
The best way to test your form (well, as you’ll see, “forms”), is with A/B Testing.
A/B Testing – also known as split testing or bucket testing – compares two versions of a web page or app against each other to determine which one performs better.
This will help determine what changes need to be made to your form and what to include and exclude. Without doing this, you’re guessing at what’s providing results.
Forminator lets you duplicate your form to perform A/B testing. This, along with a plugin like Duplicate Page, which allows you to duplicate your page, makes testing easy.
To duplicate a form in Forminator, click Duplicate from the gear icon on any form from Forminator’s dashboard.
After hitting Duplicate, a new form will be created. Then, it’s just a matter of changing one thing about each form, directing just about the same amount of traffic to both pages, and then comparing the views vs conversions.
How to Monitor Your Form’s Performance with A/B Testing and Forminator
Views vs conversions are all accessible in Forminator’s dashboard for each form. You can see the Last Submission, Views, Submissions, and Conversion Rate.
After comparing, you can see what works best for conversions!
You’ll discover what text, conditions, colors, and more perform best. It may take a lot of time (and tweaking), but it’s well worth it to establish a fantastic lead-generating form.
So, now that we’re testing what form works for opt-ins, let’s take a deeper look at the fundamentals of lead generations and how to implement it as well as possible.
What Lead Generation Is in Digital Marketing
Lead Generation is the process of rousing up interest for your business or service. It’s called what it is because the people you stir up interest are called Leads.
To elaborate further, someone becomes a lead when they express interest in your business (and/or) offer, typically by giving you their contact information (e.g. email address).
After they offer their information, it’s a matter of making a sale and keeping them as long-term customers. Here’s an example of how it works – from initial attraction to closing the deal.
A webform does this – and where our Forminator kicks things off by a user opting in with their email address. This brings us to…
Why You Need an Email List
It doesn’t matter what you’re selling online – an email list is essential, and you need one. But why?
An email list is your primary method of communication when it comes to online marketing. Collecting leads with email addresses is typically the best way to market out to people interested in what you offer.
More often than not, a visitor to your website won’t buy anything upon their first visit. That means that you’ll need to get in touch with them.
Several sources (e.g. here) say 95% of website visitors will NEVER return to your site. Plus, getting people to go to your site in the first place isn’t always easy. So, if a user makes it to your site in the first place, it’s crucial to establish a relationship with them to ensure they’ll return.
Those sales off an initial visit typically don’t happen because of various factors. Maybe they need to think over a purchase, or they’re skeptical about your site because they’ve never heard of you before. Additionally, folks are more distracted, with more people working from home than ever! Maybe the baby started crying, and they simply forgot to hit “purchase.”
Regardless of why they didn’t buy upon their first visit, it doesn’t matter. Keeping in touch with them by email lets them know that you’re around, and they had interests in what you were offering at one point in time.
This is when you can market out sales or promotions and let them know why you’re awesome. It can take numerous emails over a long period before the message hits home for them, and they get their wallet out.
There are numerous ways to create an engaging marketing campaign.
First, though, you need to get a user to opt-in in the first place.
Page Layouts
You have your form, your website, and something to offer. The last piece of putting your form on the Page Layout. Whether it’s a landing page, your homepage, or somewhere else – it needs to be easy to locate and enticing for users. Here’s a little bonus tip on what to include.
The page that holds your form should be free of distractions. Preferably, the entire page should be about the form, and everything else that can be left out should be.
Below is an excellent example of a page layout and form from Row House. Though they have a video background, you can see how the primary focus is the form. The video showcasing exercising just amplifies the want to opt-in, and the form is relatively simple with just the necessary information needed.
Be sure to exclude any header or footer because that can distract the user away. Most themes have this as an option when setting up a page.
In a nutshell, having a separate page for your lead generation forms is usually the best bet. You can also have them on the main page, but distractions may be an issue. Here again, A/B testing would be helpful to determine what performs better.
How to Drive Traffic to Your Website and Forminator Form
Once you have a great website and form developed for eCommerce, a service, or some other revenue-generating platform, you want to shout from the mountaintops Hey! Everyone visit my site! It’s incredible, and you’ll love it!
There are a lot of ways to get people to visit your site. Of course, the key is to bring genuinely interested people into what you have to offer.
That’s where word of mouth, search engine optimization (SEO), and ads from Facebook or Google can work.
Some of those ways are free (e.g. word of mouth), and others cost money (e.g. Facebook Ads). So, what’s best?
Paid vs Organic Traffic
When it comes to website traffic, there’s paid and organic.
Paid traffic is – you guessed it – paid for by using ads to attract people to a website. Organic traffic isn’t paid for, which might include someone searching on Google for your particular niche, referral traffic from another website, or maybe they just happened to stumble upon it.
Both organic and paid sources have their place. However, it only makes sense to use both if you have a budget and know what you’re doing.
Which one should you focus on to drive traffic to your website and your opt-in form?
There are some recent stats by HigherVisibility that shed some light on this.
“Roughly 25.8% of internet users use ad blockers.”
“B2B and technology companies generate twice as much revenue from organic search than any other channel.”
“Organic search drives 53% of website traffic, while paid search drives only 27%.”
In this day and age, the organic search seems much more valuable than paid. However, don’t get it wrong. Paying for ads can generate a ton of traffic (and revenue) to your site. That being said, it can also cost a lot. You’re paying – and it’s not cheap.
Therefore, it might be investing more heavily in organic traffic. And a good way to do this is with Content Marketing.
What is Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a strategy in marketing that’s used to attract, engage, and keep an audience. It does this by creating and sharing articles, podcasts, videos, and other relevant media.
If you’re reading this article, it’s a prime example of content marketing here at WPMU DEV. We’re constantly churning out helpful content that our users will (hopefully) enjoy!
We have an opt-in option for our blog and other content. If the content includes solutions that users find beneficial, they may use us (even for free with plugins like Forminator).
In a nutshell, people buy from people they know and like.
Content marketing is all about offering relevant material to the right audience. We do this on our site itself and our email lists.
Top Four Content Marketing Mistakes
Of course, there can be some slips along the way. Here are four content marketing mistakes that a lot of people make.
- Not Enough Off-Page SEO: Many websites don’t work on improving their domain rating and building backlinks. Adding keywords and other SEO-friendly content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) is often neglected. Free plugins like SmartCrawl can help in this department. Also, we have more information about ranking higher in our SEO Checklist. (BTW – did you see what I did there? I offered a free resource to help and additional information – which is another good example of content marketing!)
- Bad Content: It’s easy to whip something up quickly and post it online. However, it’s vital not to make a habit of this and publish quality content. This will keep users engaged and help you rank higher in the SERPs.
- Not Having a Strategy: Beyond brainstorming, you need to build a solid strategy based on data. This means researching competitors, keyword research, and a thorough understanding of your target audience.
- Expecting Instant Results: No results come immediately after releasing quality content. It can take some time. However, releasing quality content regularly will translate into a steady flow of people ready to purchase from you.
There’s plenty more to Content Marketing. Be sure to read our article: Content Marketing 101: How to Drive Traffic, Win Fans, and Get Sales with Your Content.
Staying In the Lead
As you can see, there’s a lot you can do regarding lead generation with Forminator and some due diligence. Building an email list and marketing out to customers can be done quickly and relatively easily!
All it takes is a great form, integrations, A/B testing, and essential knowledge of content marketing.
If you don’t have Forminator already, give it a try. It’s free and easy to use. It’s your ultimate 5-star lead generation magnet.
Be sure to stay in the lead when it comes to lead generation!
And a special thanks to Ibaka at Databoy Pro Sites for some of the tips featured in this article.
Databoy Pro Sites is a conversion-focused web agency. They help companies optimize their digital marketing to foster lead generation & improve sales productivity. This involves creating, managing, and promoting websites.
