Learn how online surveys can help you with effective lead generation. Get inspired by practical examples and concrete survey questions.
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Before we start explaining how to create a lead generation form, we have a short story for you to grasp how essential lead generation is. And two short definitions:
A lead means a person who is interested in the product or service you sell.
Lead generation is the process of capturing the interest and nurturing of your target group with the end goal of converting prospects into customers.
There was a company called Sandra that sold project management software with the same name. This software could be used by various companies, from small and medium businesses to big enterprises with subsidiaries all over the world. Some brand awareness already existed and Sandra’s website had approximately 500 visits per day. Sales people in this company had already a long list of potential prospects but some of the contacts were outdated and the source of many contacts was unknown.
The idea of trying to present and sell their product to all of these contacts scared the sales representatives really bad. They knew that it wouldn’t be worth it since they were not sure if these contacts were even interested in buying Sandra. Therefore, they decided to come up with a comprehensive lead generation strategy. They recreated the website and observed the behavior of visitors. They created a lot of content including e-books, use cases, case studies, checklists and ultimate guides on how to approach project management (so that visitors get relevant content at every stage of the conversion funnel).
At each touchpoint (e-book downloading, newsletter registration, or even browsing through the website and blog) they retrieved information about leads from a lead generation form. They tried to get not only the name and e-mail address in an exchange for the free materials, but they also asked about how big the company was, what content would be useful to read or if there was any interest in buying Sandra.
After some time of constant collection of this priceless data, Sandra’s salesmen were able to sort out only prospects with high interest in a purchase of the project management software. This saved a lot of their time while not bothering those who were just discovering Sandra in the early stages of the conversion funnel.
Sandra’s people managed to segment their leads and identify the Most Qualified Leads (MQL). That is probably the most important “why” of using lead generation surveys.
It is also related to the very intention of the prospect who got in touch with your lead generation questionnaire. Is it a person who might buy your product or is it someone just enjoying your free content? You can ask in the form.
You can also find out if the person filling out the form is the one to make purchase decisions. If not, through the contact you got you can always ask for a contact to a person, who is in charge of purchasing products like yours and provide him with suitable content or an offer to book a demo.
Furthermore, you can find out other information like what the biggest pain points of the prospect are or how experienced the prospect is in the field your product is related to. All the details you get from the questionnaire will help you map prospects moving through your conversion funnel and learn how to meet the needs at their specific stage.
Always ask for the basics. Ask identification questions that will help you assign the respondent to a given segment.
Then ask for the intention. It will enable you to specify the needs of each segment.
You can also ask about what type of content suits the best to your readers.
Happy are those who discover the pain points of potential prospects. It will help you fine-tune the product to meet the real needs of your target group.
If appropriate, you can also find out about your prospect's proficiency in your area. Again, let's use project management as an example:
The question is how likely is the visitor to fill out any form without a “reward”? Not very likely. You need to motivate the prospects to fill out any survey. Here is a list of lead generation nurturing that might motivate the leads to fill out the survey:
When a visitor to your website decides to download some content or sign up for a newsletter, you can ask them to fill in your form, for example in a pop-up window. We’ll talk more about embedding the form into your website later.
Another touchpoint that is a great moment to ask questions is when the prospect is about to order a tailor-made plan (SaaS projects being a typical case). It is usually a plan created individually for enterprises that are not satisfied with the capabilities of smaller packages. The prospect is determined to make this purchase, therefore it is quite likely that they will be willing to fill out the lead generation form.
If you want your prospect to fill out the form at some point where you don’t have any “rewards” like free content or tailor-made plans, you have to motivate your prospects even more. You can offer a discount, quantity discount or free shipping.
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There are three options for how to embed your survey into your website. Survio generates the HTML code for you, just ask your website designer to include the code into the current code of the website.
There are also other options to share your questionnaire. Their objective is to catch your target group on channels they naturally use to get in touch with you:
Choose from 19 question types including the NPS question type.
All questions are fully editable, you can add or delete answers, set up a condition of obligatory question, add an image or video, choose the format of the answer (e-mail, number, date, text).
Especially lead generation forms have to be short and clear, your prospects have no time to waste. Pay attention to what question type you use, because mischosen question types will cause data bias and you will lose their testimonial value. We have prepared detailed articles to various question types for you to make sure you are using them in the right way.
You don’t have to be a professional methodologist in statistics to analyze results manually or in another specialized software. Survio will process the analysis for you automatically. Just watch your results in comprehensible charts and tables. You can change the chart type and color, you can filter your data by answers, by date, by completion time, by source and other parameters. All of that can be done directly in Survio. In one click you can generate a report of your results in the most common formats (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, CSV or Google Sheets) for subsequent editing and use.
Sandra’s people didn’t come up with the lead generation strategy just to have something interesting to do. They needed to allocate financial resources and human labor in a better way. Data is something that will shine light on areas where you are struggling to make new decisions and changes. Think about a new lead generation strategy for your company and create your own lead generation forms.
