When it comes to inbound marketing and sales, collecting information about existing and potential customers is essential. It's important for businesses to keep offering relevant and engaging content to assist customers in all aspects of their user journey. However, this can be a challenge, managing all of all customers' information is not an easy task. But, this is where HubSpot forms comes in handy, helping to make segmented and relevant pieces of content for your leads.
With HubSpot, you can easily set up and manage all of your forms, helping you to gather plenty of valuable information and convert your visitors into leads. So let's get started…
Simply put, HubSpot Forms are an online form tool used for creation, however, it is a lot more than just that. They are an intelligent method to capture user information from inbound marketing and sales efforts. Using this tool, you can efficiently add forms to your site, no matter whether it was created in HubSpot.
HubSpot Forms work very intelligently because it is directly linked to your CRM. You can take advantage of features that collect data and enhance the data with new information. Once you have made changes to your chosen form, these will then be reflected across all of the areas this form is used, helping to free up time and increase efficiency.
There are several great features of these forms, such as pop ups. When specific criteria is met, the form can act as a pop up. For example, if a visitor is reading a blog, a pop up may appear after they have been reading it for 5 seconds. The form can also be placed on a particular page on your site that is relevant to the visitor, such as a product page.
In addition, there are many templates that can be used and built upon, such as registration forms and contact forms. Each form can be created uniquely to your business by adding relevant fields that can appear to unknowns and existing customers.
The smart feature called progressive profiling makes segmenting possible and is available with HubSpot Enterprise and Professional. It ensures you don't complete the same task more than once by queuing up form fields, helping to gain more information about customers. For example, using webinars and guides at the start of the user journey, the same form can be used in both locations. Workflows should then be set to depending on the chosen landing page, so that contacts get the content they want.
If you also have a certain piece of information about a contact, such as their name, then there's no point in asking it again so instead new information should be asked, such as job title. Doing so, will help to improve the CRM and fill it with more information, making it easier to segment contacts, as well as prioritise what work needs to be completed first.
Within HubSpot’s CRM, each form is linked directly to a property, these are the data fields where information on deals, contacts and companies is stored. This ensures information from each form is instantly being put in the correct field. To enhance the data quality even more so, validation can be defined by the user input, such as a field may only contain mobile numbers. There is also the option of having dropdowns, so that only a certain number of choices can be selected, such as location including options such as; England, Spain or France. This reduces the likelihood of spelling mistakes occurring. In case an issue arises, a help box can pop up when a user is filling out the fields.
- Consider the mobile experience
- Ensure questions are straightforward and simple
- Use just one column
- Provide help texts for common concerns
- Arrange form fields in order of easiest to most difficult
- Enable autocomplete
- Enable input validation
To expand on this…
One top tip is to always have the user experience at the forefront of your mind, this is key when users are filling out the forms. To make the form filling out simpler for the visitor, it should be user friendly, only ask relevant questions and keep the form short and sweet. For example, if a visitor is trying to access a guide for the first time, you may not need to ask for a mobile number, instead just a name and email address. If questions are too personal, they may not think that the piece of content is worth it.
Both mobile and website will look different, so this also needs to be considered when forms are being filled out. Is the text jumbled, or is it still nicely laid out with clear organisation?
To ensure the user is fully understanding at all times, providing helpful popup boxes of text can be the way forward. This will help the user know what to type and make sure they know where the information will be used.
Another tip is to put the fields within a single column, arranging questions from the simplest to most difficult. This makes it more manageable for those answering the questions. Validation and autofill can also be enabled to help the process speed up and be performed correctly.