My company's website was recently reviewed by a blog for the Internet Marketing Report. If you haven't checked the publication out, it's worth a look. It's an eight page newsletter that quickly discusses articles covering all aspects of internet marketing. It's a great compilation of articles covering what is working for other companies, but the reason it gets passed among my staff is that it has short reads that reminds everyone in the department on the fundamentals of marketing on the internet. I highlight the points I want to make sure my team see, and they look forward to seeing the newsletter.
While the review provided some good feedback, the writer and I got into a discussion of one of the larger points of their review - form length. The premise of the review revolved around the fact that we ask for a lot of information on our brochure request form. The writer felt that we should be asking for a few basic fields and everything else should be collected later, which got me thinking about what led us to the form length that we currently have. We've tried multiple iterations of the form over the eight years I've been with the company, and there are reasons for each and every question, but also reasons why.
I explained to the reviewer that, as a manufacturer of an expensive product, our distributors don't want to receive thousands of unqualified leads that aren't willing to fill out a few fields in the form. The value the customer receives for their information is well laid out on the page - brochure, cd-demo, engraved samples, and even a start your business guide. 15 fields that ask for their contact info, how they learned about the company, and a few other questions isn't too much in my opinion. We've set up the form with no required fields, allowing the prospect to provide as much or as little information as they want. Once the distributor receives the lead, they get an instant feel for how qualified the lead is by how much information they were willing to provide.
Sometimes, as marketers, we get so fixated on lead generation that we forget that what makes a lead good for one company is not the same for another company. An address gets me only so far. If the lead also has provided me with a comment that they are interested in glass etching or wood engraving, I can customize the packet I send them with specific samples and brochures that they never would have seen otherwise. Or I can focus the packet on our starter laser if that seems to be the best fit for their application. Or if they ask a question, we can start an immediate conversation that gives the lead a great first impression of the company for being extremely responsive.
The other part of the equation when making a decision on form length needs to be what can the infrastructure of the business handle? In this blog I talk quite a bit about how to market a mid-sized manufacturing company, and current lead management personnel will determine what kind of lead generation you want to target. Our leads receive an extensive lead packet, which means that we want to do more qualification of the lead than someone that is just sending a response email to the prospect. It's important to keep this in mind because if you get in over your head, the entire reputation of the company is affected by slow response times.
I am currently testing some different setups of the form, taking into consideration what they said in the review and I'll be curious to see if it increases the response rate. I'm definitely appreciative of the review and the feedback on the site, (and definitely check out this great resource!) but this is one change I won't be making. It's different for every company, but we've found that our situation demands lead qualification over lead numbers.
