Create a Lead Capture Form To Convert Visitors

What is a Lead Capture Form?

A lead capture form is used to collect leads for your offers and nurture those leads through your marketing and sales funnel. This form is placed on various landing pages that are promoted throughout your marketing channels alongside offers to entice visitors to convert. You should A/B test your lead capture forms routinely as well as ensure you have a proper campaign in place to manage the completed form. For example, once a lead capture form is completed, direct leads to a thank you page, send them a welcome email. Also, you can publish the lead into your customer relationship management system so your sales team can follow up. This often requires many technologies, custom software, and a great deal of patience. And, if you want to make updates or changes, those typically take weeks and involve lots of people. Not ideal for today’s fast moving markets and customers. DailyStory’s Customer Engagement Platform enables you to create and publish beautiful lead capture forms that are integrated with DailyStory. Lead capture forms all work with DailyStory campaigns, workflow, and scoring. So you can go from idea to execution in a matter of minutes. Plus, there is no custom software development required.

Create a DailyStory Lead Capture Form

Creating a lead capture form with DailyStory is easy. There are only three requirements: you must have a DailyStory campaign, you must include an email address as a field, and you must URL that you send the person to after they complete the form. The URL can be a thank you page, a download or anything else. Next, you can add form fields. Fields, such as Company or First name, map directly back to DailyStory lead fields. You can also use your own fields and this data will be available when you view a converted lead. If you added Google reCAPTCHA integration, you can enable that for your form as well. Google reCAPTCHA prevents robots from completing forms. Finally, you can drag-and-drop to rearrange your form layout however you like. This controls the order of how the fields in the form are shown. Designing your form is very, very simple. The real power comes when it is time to publish your form.

Using your DailyStory Lead Capture Form

When you save your new form, it is immediately ready to use. You have several options:

• Use the pre-built lead capture page
• Build a custom landing page or squeeze page
• Add a lead capture form in WordPress
• Use in Medium and other publishing platforms
• Use the API

Use the Pre-Built Lead Capture Form Page

DailyStory provides a pre-built lead capture form that is immediately ready for you to use with any of your lead capture forms. After you save your new web form, click on the Page link in the right column. This will open a new tab in your browser with your pre-built lead capture form. This pre-built form includes social sharing tools, validation, and Google reCAPTCHA support. It is also fully mobile-friendly and can be published as an embed in other publishing platforms, such as Medium. However, you cannot edit or change the user experience of this page. If you want to change the user experience you need to design your own landing page, squeeze page, or use a pre-built template.

Build a Custom Landing Page or Squeeze Page

A DailyStory Page enables you to quickly and easily build basic landing pages, squeeze pages, thank you pages or any other type of web content. You control the all the HTML/CSS of the page. Wherever you want the DailyStory lead capture form to be displayed you simply select the form to use and include a *|FORM|* merge tag in your content. When this content page is published it appears as follows.

The example above shows a content page with an unstyled form. You can use CSS to control the form’s layout more precisely.

Add a Lead Capture Form in WordPress

If you are running WordPress and DailyStory, install the DailyStory plugin to use WordPress shortcodes. The DailyStory WordPress shortcodes enable you to easily create a lead capture form in any WordPress page or post. For example, use the [ds-webform id="#"] shortcode and specify the id of the lead capture form. Then, use the shortcode anywhere in a WordPress page or post. The above form is used for DailyStory’s Contact Us page.

Use in Medium and Other Publishing Platforms

Part of your content marketing strategy should include publishing content on other platforms, such as Medium. You can include DailyStory sign up forms and lead capture forms directly in many of these sites. The benefit is that this makes it easy to include a squeeze page, newsletter signup, or include any other offer without requiring the reader to go to your website or open another page. For example, adding your lead capture form in Medium is simple. Copy the URL to the pre-built lead capture form page and simply paste that URL into your Medium content page. Medium will detect the DailyStory URL and display your form.

DailyStory lead capture forms support oEmbed. Services such as Embed.ly and IFramely are used to embed DailyStory forms in a variety of applications.

Use the DailyStory Web Form API

The DailyStory Web Form API is documented here for PHP and .NET. But you can use any technology as the samples demonstrate how to use DailyStory’s REST API. You can browse the SDK samples on GitHub too.

What happens when the form is submitted

When a DailyStory lead capture form is submitted several things happen: a new lead is created in the campaign associated with the lead. Next, the lead begins the workflow associated with the campaign. This can include sending a welcome email, scoring the lead, and more. And, DailyStory automatically sends a new lead notification email to all the people in your business that have a DailyStory account. This lets them know that a new lead was created. The notification email contains helpful links back to the lead and campaign in DailyStory.