How to Improve Your Lead Capture Forms in 5 Steps

Not getting enough leads from your lead capture forms? Then you’re in the right place.

In this guide, we’ll help you improve your lead generation forms by following a simple yet highly-effective five-step process.

For an even deeper dive, check out our episode on user engagement forms from Operation: Automation:

Let’s go.

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How to improve your lead capture forms in five steps

1. Focus on a specific customer paint point or desire
2. Genuinely understand how to solve their pain point
3. Show you understand their problem and promise to solve it
4. Don’t ask for too much in your lead capture form
5. Deliver on your promise

Step 1. Focus on a specific customer pain point or desire

People sign up through lead capture forms with hope or an expectation…

They’re hoping that after signing up, they’ll:

• get the solution to a particular pain point or 
• get something they desire or learn how to get it

For example, people who fill out this form from Shane Barker’s blog are hoping to learn how to become an influencer on Instagram:

So in this lead capture form, Shane focuses on a specific desire that some of his audience would have — gaining followers or influence on Instagram.

He understands their desire and promises to show them how to get their desire if they fill the form. 

The bottom line here is this: the process of building your lead capture form starts from understanding a specific customer pain point or desire.

Step 2. Genuinely understand how to solve their pain point and give them their desire (or show them how to get it)

It’s one thing to understand a specific customer pain point…

It’s another to know how to take that pain away.

If you don’t genuinely know how to solve a problem, it would be hard to convince people to sign up for it and give you their email address. 

And even if you do convince them to sign up for something without really understanding their pain points, the truth will eventually come out and your lead capturing efforts will be futile.

So your best bet is to understand how to solve their pain point.

For instance, if a pain point they have is (following our example above) not knowing how to build an engaged Instagram following, the first thing you need to do is understand how to do it.

You can understand this by either:

• Trying to build your Instagram following and get real-life experience on how it’s done, or
• Study or interview people who have built their following successfully and share your learnings

Once you understand how to solve your customer’s problem, then you can build your form and communicate how well you understand their problem while promising to solve it.

Step 3. Show you understand their problem and promise to solve it

When you’ve really studied a specific pain point your customers have or a desire they want, you can easily empathize and communicate with them.

In your lead capture form, show them you know what they’re looking for.

Here’s how to do that:

• Use your headline copy to speak directly to their pain point or desire
• For example, Digital Marketer has this lead form under their posts and you can see how it targets newbie marketers’ desire to “get better at marketing.”

This is only an example, but you get the idea: let your headline copy speak to your target audience’s pain point or desire.

This applies to both – your signup forms and overall landing pages, too.

• Use your description to show visitors how you’ll be solving their problem 

The purpose of your headline copy is to catch your visitors’ attention and make them interested in learning more about what you’re offering.

So in your description, which is right after your headline copy, tell them how you plan to solve their problem; this will help you build their trust in your offer.

For instance, notice how Digital Marketer uses the description section in their form to explain exactly what marketers will get when they sign up for this offer:

And when visitors click the blue button, they land on a landing page where they go into more detail about what’s inside their offer:

All this helps to motivate visitors that signing up for their offer is well worth it.

Step 4. Don’t ask for too much in your lead capture form

Marketers often make the mistake of asking their website visitors for too many things too early into the relationship they’re starting to build.

Of course, it’d be great to have your lead’s contact details, phone number, or information about their annual budget right from the start.

But to collect that data, you’d have to add several form fields into your lead capture forms, making them longer and making your ‘ask’ bigger.

Studies like the Email Marketing Benchmarks report have shown that longer forms generally observe lower conversion rates.

That’s because website visitors evaluate their choices when asked to do something. And if they don’t see enough value in the offer, they usually abandon the lead capture form and exit the website.

To improve your conversion rates, you’ll want to keep your lead forms short and only ask for basic information like name and email.

Once your website visitor fills out your form, you can follow up with them by asking additional questions or observing what content they engage with.

This process is known as progressive profiling, and it helps marketers capture leads without sacrificing quality.

You can learn more about this process by downloading our free guide:

Step 5. Deliver on your promise

It’s easy to make promises that’ll get visitors to sign up.

But what happens after they sign up?

Are they happy after receiving what you promised on your forms or landing page?

Here’s the thing: if they’re not happy after receiving whatever you promised them, you might lose them forever. And that could mean losing a lot of money.

Because when you create a lead generation form, you’re most likely doing it to get sales. And if that’s the case, people signing up on your forms are potential customers.

So, if they signed up for a guide (or any other type of lead magnet) and the content doesn’t deliver on the promise that made them sign up, they’ll unsubscribe, and you’ll lose them. If they signed up for a free consult and the call goes south, you lose them. 

In the end, your lead capture form becomes a waste if you don’t know how to solve the pain point you promised to solve.

On the other hand, if you deliver on the promise you made on your lead gen form, your audience will be interested in your services/products, and that could lead to sales.

Speaking of which, GetResponse recently ran a study on lead magnets that have the highest conversion rates. If you’re not sure what you should be offering in your signup forms, that’s a great place to start your research.

Conclusion

Don’t be annoying with your forms. Be smart and use every opportunity on your site to collect emails without sacrificing giving your visitors a great user experience.

There are a lot of lessons to take away from this guide, but here are the most important ones:

• Let your form focus on an offer to solve a specific customer pain point or desire. This way, your visitors can focus on your promise and consider signing up for it.
• Genuinely understand your customers’ problems before building any lead capture form. This will help you communicate your offer more precisely and get quality leads.
• Start with a shorter form to collect essential information like name and email. Use a process called progressive profiling to keep learning more about your leads.
• Deliver on your promise. If possible, over-deliver. It would make them trust you after signing up and be interested in buying what you’re selling — of course, if it’s useful for them and they can afford it.

Whether you’re setting up or optimizing your existing lead generation processes, you’ll want to use a reliable marketing software that’ll help you attract, engage, and manage your leads with confidence.

GetResponse Lead Generation software can help you achieve all that and much more. With powerful features like forms and popups, landing pages, lead generation funnels, webinars, or paid ads, you’ll attract quality leads in no time.