Discover how you can build intelligent forms with your marketing automation platform.
Running a successful marketing campaign is often decided by the amount of engaged leads you can capture, and to do this, you need a form on your respective landing pages.
Today we are going to take a look at the Eloqua marketing automation platform and delve a little deeper into building intelligent forms on your website.
Whilst each marketing automation platform is different, please understand that the concept described here is similar across the leading platforms (Eloqua, Marketo, Infusionsoft & Silverpop to name a few).
Here is a short video highlighting the power of intelligent forms within Eloqua.
Keeping accurate records via forms
Your initial contact with your prospective customer will likely be through name and email only. As a rule, it is much easier to grab a person’s first name and email, instead of attempting to get 5-6 different questions answered.
The rule of thumb is, the more you ask for, the less your landing page and form will convert. So keep it basic.
This means you are going to have to gather more information as time goes on. This is where marketing automation platforms, such as Eloqua, Marketo and Infusionsoft, really shine.
In return for their name and email you supplied them an enticing guide/resource/PDF download or video series. Right now the lead is engaged but it would be a far stretch to call them ‘hot’, as you only have the minimal information.
So what we need to do is keep the conversation going to build a better profile with each prospect over time.
How do we get them to add more details?
One of the keys with marketing automation is the ability to track every single lead and automate certain parts of the process once the initial step is complete. Here are some possible ideas to build out the lead profile:
- Once they sign up for your resource guide or PDF download, offer them a chance to attend one of your webinars, asking for further details (last name & phone number).
- Automate your initial follow up with further helpful resources to keep the conversation flowing and at each level, asking for 1-2 extra bits of information (what products they are interested in, their field of work, company name).
The beauty of these platforms is the forms can work intelligently at every step of the process, only offering them questions on the sections they haven’t answered. This removes redundant fields they have already supplied and doesn’t annoy them by asking for the same information again and again.
This is what we mean by intelligent forms.
In the background, the database is auto populating and giving the sales or customer support team, more and more information to have a more interesting conversation on the phone, thereby increasing conversion rates.
As you can see in the Eloqua Intelligent Forms video above, you can create as many questions within the form as you like, including multiple choice, long form answers, short form answers, radio buttons and more. Every time someone fills in the form, the database is getting updated and you can even trigger a lead to the sales team based on certain actions.
Creating actions from forms – Referred to as Processing
Each of the marketing automation platforms allows you to trigger a range of next actions once a form is filled in and this is where it gets really interesting.
Once a prospect fills out a form you can:
- Update the database
- Add them to a new campaign
- Automate a series of follow up emails
- Update the lead scoring mechanism
- Add them to a shared list (if they bought something and are no longer just a lead)
- Add them to a monthly newsletter campaign
- Plus much, much more
If you are running a financial services firm, it is important that you are implementing or working to implement these marketing automation strategies in your business.
You will find it will free up a lot of your team’s time and allow you to be more efficient with every communication piece you send out.
If you need assistance with you marketing automation tasks, such as creating a campaign, building a complete process or writing the target emails, then give us a call today on 1300 630 883 and we’ll have a chat about your goals.
