Use Your Website Forms to Get More Than Just Contact Information

By: Craig Spooner

We have the tools to target our marketing to educators more effectively than ever before. Nearly any aspect of a campaign can be personalized and automated, but what about your website?

You may be saying, “Huh? How can I personalize my website for different readers?” Well, with the advent of marketing automation software like HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot, websites are no longer limited to being static, online “brochures” for companies to show and tell about themselves. They are now your eyes and ears into the online world. Your website can tell you:

• What visitors are doing once they arrive on your site;
• What pages they are viewing;
• How they are navigating around; and
• When and where you are losing them.

With the emergence of new features in website automation, the most valuable work you can do on your site is tracking your visitor’s activities, engagement, and user experience while they are exploring your content.

There are many aspects of your website that contribute to a positive user experience, but few are more important than the design, placement, and use of your web forms. (Check out this blog on landing pages for more as well!) Web forms allow your visitors to communicate with you. Used properly, they provide you with insights into a recently converted lead. They also give you the ability to gather key information without directly asking for it. For example, rather than asking a visitor if they have budget to purchase a solution like yours, why not ask them what type of funding they have used for a purchase like this in the past? This will allow you to determine if they have budget and let you know what bucket that money would come from.

However, if used improperly, web forms can easily frustrate site visitors, pushing them to leave your site (and potentially never return). How many times have you visited a site and said, “This is too complicated—I’m going to look for something easier?” I know I have. Let’s take a closer look at web forms, their role in shaping the user experience, and the steps you can take to improve their performance and increase engagement.

Why Website Forms Matter in Education Marketing

Let’s start with the basics: web forms allow you to capture information from your prospects in return for a valuable piece of content on your site. Forms act as a communication bridge between you, your content, and your prospective customer. Web forms are extremely important for many reasons, but here are the four most crucial.

• Monitoring the validity of your content: You can tell a lot about the content you’re creating based on the number of form submissions it receives from your audience. A frequent issue we see when working with clients is the amount of information they request for a specific content offer; they either ask for too much information or not enough! Put yourself in the shoes of your prospect and ask what information you would be willing to give in order to get the information in a piece of content. The more valuable the content, the more information your prospects will offer up in return.

• Tracking users through content on your site: Web forms also act as an important data-gathering and prospect-monitoring tool. If you’re currently using marketing automation software, you can immediately track any web form conversion and monitor that specific user’s engagement with your site. You’re also able to see what specific content offers they are interested in based on what blogs they read, what pages they visit, how often they come back to your site, and what links they clicked, allowing you to target subsequent outreach to each prospect based on what they want to see.

• Segmenting your database: Now that you’ve built forms specifically targeted at your buyer persona(s) and are tracking those new contacts through your site, it’s time to start putting these converting visitors into buckets for future nurturing campaigns. Web forms act as a database for all users that have interacted with a specific piece of content. With a simple investigation, you can group together prospects based on the content they converted on and build outreach campaigns that feature like-minded content, personalizing each user’s experience with your content and increasing the likelihood that they will convert or engage with your site and your company further.

• Testing: While the end game is to ultimately see as many education decision-makers and influencers as possible complete your form and enter your marketing funnel, that doesn’t always happen. Looking at your views-to-clicks then clicks-to-conversion rates will give you a window into how effective your form truly is. If the conversion rate is low, potentially you are asking for too much information, while if the conversion rate is extremely high, maybe you can get away with asking for a bit more?

The main takeaway from this blog post should be to create more specific web forms tailored to your buyer persona(s) and the content you create specifically for them. Taking the time to double-check the value of your content from your prospects’ points of view will help you deliver content to your prospects that they will value, increasing the chances of future conversions and giving you the insight you need to create content that matters to your audience, not just your company.

Thank you for sharing!