One of the best methods for lead generation is the old “contact us for a free consultation” or “contact us for a free proposal” method, where you have a short form that the interested party fills out and sends to your email inbox. It’s very effective and still used by the majority of businesses that generate leads online. In fact, even businesses with extensive advertising budgets that spend thousands per month on Adwords and other PPC platforms will often use lead gen forms. However, many of them actually provide the “free proposal” before further contact has been initiated. For instance, they have the interested party fill out all of the details that are necessary for the proposal on the lead gen form, and immediately after it’s submitting the business gets to work on providing that proposal.
With lead generation forms, you’re bound to get a lot of people who aren’t really all that interested in your product or service but just want your proposal. They could be competitors, people who are comparison shopping and want access to your prices, or any number of things. For this reason, it’s good practice to utilize an autoresponder sequence on lead gen forms. It works like this:
1. The user fills out and submits the form.
2. You send out an autoresponder shortly after that asks the user to schedule a call with you, because you’d like some additional information on their business before the proposal can be finalized.
3. If you don’t receive a reply, you have 2-3 continuous autoresponders that go out over the next few days encouraging the user to setup that call to see if they are still interested. Of course, if the call is in fact scheduled, there needs to be an action built into your autoresponder software that shuts off any further emails.
What happens is, you essentially eliminate all of the junk leads that get submitted through your form. Anyone that actually schedules the call is a highly qualified and extremely hot lead that is likely to convert.
There you have it. Have you ever implemented an autoresponder sequence for a lead generation form? Did it work as expected? Feel free to leave a comment or contact us if you have any questions.