15 Best Practices for Building Effective Lead Capture Forms

Looking for ways to build effective lead capture forms?

Good lead capture forms aren’t built by accident. There are proven strategies and best practices that go into creating lead capture forms that convert and make a measurable impact.

You can work really hard building a lead form or getting traffic to your site, but if you aren’t using some of these simple ideas, people may never complete your form.

So, we gathered this list of tips to create a lead capture form that converts to help you turn all those website visitors into leads and customers.

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Lead Capture Form Best Practices

Creating a lead form is easy, but creating one that actually converts can be tricky for some people. It isn’t hard — just check out these tips to create a lead capture form that converts.

1. Display One Field At a Time

It’s important to make your lead capture forms stand out and invite people to focus on them without distractions.

An effective strategy to make your forms more engaging is to display one field at a time. This can be easily done by enabling the Lead Forms mode in WPForms.

When the Lead Forms mode is active, WPForms automatically inserts page breaks next to each field to split your form into multiple pages.

At the same time, it automatically adds a progress bar, which is highly effective at enticing leads to complete your form. Plus, it makes your longer forms more compact so users can fill them out more conveniently.

In a nutshell, a multi-step form offers the following important benefits:

• Reduces fatigue by displaying only one field at a time
• Creates intrigue with a progress bar to improve completion rates
• Concise layout makes it easier to embed the form in a popup, sidebar, or footer.

The best part is that the WPForms Lead Forms mode also gives you stunning styling options. You can customize the container around your forms and change the colors of your buttons, progress bars, and more in just a few clicks.

2. Take Advantage of Lead Gen Form Template

WPForms includes 1,700+ form templates. You can find various lead capture forms in the template library if you’re looking for inspiration to create the ideal lead gen form for your business.

These templates are excellent if you want to make quick work of creating multi-step lead capture forms, having all the right elements in place to ensure your form is optimized for conversions.

3. Use the Right Call to Action (CTA)

Submit button text and colors can impact form conversion rates. This may sound odd, but 3% of people will abandon a form if the submit button just says “Submit.”

Instead, try to use relevant text for your form submit button that clearly indicates what happens when a user submits the form.

When you clearly indicate the goal in your lead form CTA button, it sets the right expectations and entices the visitors to reach that goal.

The best part is that customizing button text is incredibly easy in WPForms. You can edit the text from the Settings menu in the form builder and change the color of the CTA button using the Lead Forms advanced styling options.

And don’t forget to track button clicks in WordPress so you know which ones are driving the most traffic.

4. Make Your Forms More Visual

Forms typically consist almost entirely of text. But people love interactive forms!

You can make your forms more accessible by adding graphical elements wherever possible.

For instance, if you have a Radio or Checkboxes field in your lead form, you can use icons for every option.

Icons are easily recognizable and grab the user’s attention faster than textual content can. It’s a simple but effective way to enhance the design quality of your form and improve user experience.

And a strong user experience always leads to higher completion rates, so it’s a great way to boost your lead generation.

Another way to make your forms more interactive is by using the Conversational Forms addon.

Much like Lead Forms,  Conversational Forms display one question at a time, mimicking a real-life face-to-face conversation.

Tapping into the power of conversational marketing is a brilliant way to increase conversions on forms.

5. Use Conditional Logic

Using conditional logic to hide or show form fields based on previous answers is a smart way to keep your forms concise and organized. It’s incredibly easy to set up conditional logic with WPForms.

With Conditional Logic, you can ask the right questions and get people into your sales funnel through your lead capture forms sooner.

6. Don’t Ask for Too Much Personal Information

Sure, you want high-quality leads. But, the best lead form is a simple one. Try not to overcomplicate it by asking for addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and more, all on the same form.

Online form statistics show that asking for excessive information in a form decreases conversion rates by up to 5%. Ask for just the contact information you truly need at the time, even if that’s just an email address to grow your email list. You can also split the form into multiple steps to make the forms more user-friendly. if you want to learn more, check out this guide to create multi-step lead forms easily.

7. Send Confirmation Messages After Form Submission

With form notifications, you can set up your lead capture form to automatically send WordPress emails whenever someone submits your form. That way, you can stay on top of leads and help your forms convert at a much higher rate.

You can even create a conditional form notification email that emails specific people based on criteria from the form. It’s a great idea if you’ve got different sales people working with different types of customers.

For example, say your rep Mary only works with new leads from your mortgage application form who need over $400,000 for a new home, but your rep Jason works with those whose loan amount is under $399,999. You could set up emails to go to each person based on how much someone asked for when they filled out the form.

And if emails aren’t enough, WPForms also lets you get an SMS notification from your forms.

8. Connect Your Lead Capture Forms to Your CRM

Would you like to automatically enter your lead information into Salesforce, Google Drive, and more?

WPForms comes with a variety of native integrations that allow you to directly send data from your form to a CRM or a marketing tool.

For instance, you can save lead information in a Google spreadsheet. Or send contacts to your email marketing tool like Drip, Mailchimp, and more.

And in the rare event that you can’t find a direct integration in WPForms, you can use a plugin called Uncanny Automator.

Uncanny Automator lets you put your entire WordPress site on autopilot by connecting existing plugins together and automating routine tasks.

With Uncanny Automator, you can connect WPForms with MemberPress, Slack, WooCommerce, Zoom, and much more.

You can also do things like automatically register a user for a Zoom meeting when they submit a form.

An alternative to Uncanny Automator is the Zapier addon. Just turn it on and set up your zaps, and you’ll be storing the data from your lead forms into all sorts of awesome programs of your choosing.

9. Capture Leads from Partial Form Submissions

Did you know most potential customers who start filling out your lead capture forms never actually finish them?

The WPForms Form Abandonment addon collects users’ information even when they don’t hit submit. For a lot of people, you can even set up your email marketing service to automatically email these people to invite them to come back and complete the form.

Another option is to enable save and resume for your lead generation form. This will give users a link they can follow to pick up filling out your form where they left off.

10. Learn More About Your Audience

By turning on Geolocation for your forms, you can see where your leads are coming from. The user’s country, state, and city information gets collected and included in their entry.

And this information can give you a lot of power to make your lead capture forms convert even better if you have the added insight about who is filling out your forms and from where.

You can also connect the WPForms Geolocation addon to Google Maps or Mapbox to turn on address autocomplete and make it easier to fill out your lead generation form.

Check out the post on how to install and use the Geolocation Addon with WPForms to set this up now and start finding out more about your visitors than ever before.

You could also add a country dropdown list if you want a simple way to record your visitors’ locations.

Another way to learn more about your audience is with the User Journey Addon.

This feature lets you see which pages and posts your visitors looked at before they submitted a form. With these insights, you can optimize your site for even more conversions.

11. Make Your Lead Capture Form Secure

If your lead capture form doesn’t appear secure to your visitors, they are much less likely to complete it. So setting up CAPTCHA is a great idea and can comfort your users.

Be sure to check out our ultimate guide to building spam-free forms for more information on keeping your forms safe and appealing to your website visitors, as there are several different types of features you can use for added security.

12. Make Your Terms of Service Scrollable

Speaking of privacy, you may want to add a ToS or privacy policy to your form. But if it’s too long, it could hurt your conversion rates.

Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this. You can easily add your Terms of Service agreement in a scrollable text box.

13. Honor User Privacy

Your lead form should be compliant with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

And this isn’t just a suggestion that won’t impact your conversion rates — some visitors are actively looking for forms that respect GDPR compliance. And if they don’t see it, they may just turn away from your form completely.

You have the option to adjust your form settings to do things like Disable User Cookies, Disable User Details, and more. Your users will love you for it.

14. Incentivize Users With a Giveaway

People love a good giveaway (and who can blame them?) If you’re trying to get the word out about your business or a product through a lead capture form, try converting it into a giveaway. It serves as an excellent incentive for people to offer you their contact details in exchange for a chance to win something for free.

There are lots of WordPress giveaway plugins out there, but our favorite is RafflePress. Take a look at our tutorial on how to host a giveaway on your WordPress site for more information.

15. Try a Survey or Poll

If your goal is to engage your visitors a bit during the lead capture process, why not try using a survey template as your lead capture form?

Not only can you gather a ton of information, but the survey style of the form makes it easier to invite people to complete it. It’s incredibly easy to set this all up with the WPForms Surveys and Polls addon, so you can have your forms converting like crazy in no time.

Bonus: Draw Inspiration From Other Lead Capture Form Examples

To get inspiration for your forms, it’s a good idea to look at others that work well. Check out our post with these awesome landing page lead generation form examples (also known as a lead capture page) to see how other people are making lead capture forms.

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Lead Capture Form Best Practices FAQs

Here are a few commonly asked questions about best practices for lead capture forms.

What Is the Best Way to Capture Leads?

There are many popular lead capture strategies that work for different types of businesses. For instance, you can use a lead magnet to attract potential customers to share their contact info with you using interactive online forms. You can also target forms to qualified leads using popups. Giveaways are another effective way of generating leads. You can find more ideas in our list of lead generation statistics. No matter your strategy, your lead generation process will almost always start from a web form.

What Is a Lead Capture Form?

A lead capture form is a contact form that collects information from visitors. This is with the hope that you can convert them into a customer.

Contact forms come in many shapes and sizes. And when built with conversions in mind, a contact form can easily become a successful lead capture form.

So now that you know what a lead capture form is, let’s take a look at the best ways to build a lead form that actually converts so you can start to collect leads now!

What Are the Most Important Fields to Include in a Lead Capture Form?

A lead capture form should be kept simple, with only the most important fields such as the Name and Email. You should also include a Paragraph field to allow a visitor to explain what they’re looking for. If you’re offering services, you should also include Multiple Items, Dropdown, or Checkboxes fields to allow the visitor to select a service they’re interested in obtaining from you.

How Can I Segment My Leads Using Lead Capture Forms?

You can segment your leads by defining how the connection between your form and your marketing/CRM tool should be processed. For instance, if users can make selections in your lead forms, you can use one of many marketing integrations supported by WPForms to specify which audience segment the lead should be added to based on their selections or preferences.

How Can I Use Lead Capture Forms to Grow My Email List?

You can use a simple newsletter signup form and connect it with your email marketing service to easily grow your email list. Using services like OptinMonster, you can even display a newsletter signup form template from WPForms and embed it in a targeted popup to maximize email signups.

Next, Track Your Form Conversions in Google Analytics

And there it is. You now know some great tips to create a lead capture form that converts so you can make more money from your business online.

WPForms includes awesome entry management features so you can monitor your lead generation form submissions. However, you might also want to check out this tutorial on how to track form conversions in Google Analytics to get even more data on your users.

So what are you waiting for to ramp up your lead generation efforts? Get started with the most powerful WordPress forms plugin today. WPForms Pro includes tons of free lead capture form templates to get you up and running in minutes, plus offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

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