As one of the leading CRM systems on the market, Salesforce enables you to automate virtually all types of lead nurturing and customer management processes.
To guide you on how to set up your Salesforce org for lead generation, we’ll be going over 4 easy steps that will boost your lead generation campaigns and conversions in a heartbeat.
1. Use the Salesforce Pardot Form Builder.
Form design is an essential component of lead generation. To create a form that your visitors will actually want to fill out, it will need to have the following attributes:
- The form should be on an aesthetically-pleasing landing page
- The form must be intuitive and easy to fill out with relevant information
You can easily implement this with the native Pardot Form Builder. Forms are created with a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, rather than with code. You’ll also have access to features such as Progressive Profiling, Email Validation, Bot Protection, and personalisation.
You can find a step-by-step guide on creating forms with the Pardot Form Builder here.
2. Create a Salesforce campaign for every form on your website.
Once you start mapping out your customer journeys, Salesforce really begins to shine. To map out these journeys in Salesforce, you’ll need to know exactly how you first generated each lead. By default, Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms only capture the name and basic demographics of site visitors signing up. While this isn’t a bad start, it doesn’t tell you the reasons these leads got involved with your brand.
You can fix all of this with a simple hack — create a separate campaign for each form on your website. To do this, simply create your campaigns first and then “associate” each form to its corresponding campaign. You can achieve this by including the Campaign ID and Campaign Member Status on your forms. If you need a more detailed guide on how to do this specifically, you can read a Salesforce article that explains the entire process here.
Salesforce automatically gathers data for every campaign you’ve created and since they’re associated with specific forms, you’ll be getting data specific to each of them. This will enable you to see how many leads each form is generating, how many are converting, and other key metrics.
You’ll also be able to see which form your leads come from. This will let you know exactly why they signed up in the first place, and what type of follow-up message it will take to nudge them further along the buying process.
3. Capture URL parameters to see the path to conversion that leads take.
Building on our last hack, we’ll take this a giant leap further by capturing URL parameters with hidden fields on your forms. This will tell you which page leads are on when they convert, but you can also use this technique to map out the journey they took prior to converting.
Before you can implement this, you’ll need to add these parameters to your URLs. For instance, you can add something like mail_camp=# to the URLs for traffic that comes from your email campaigns. Thus, the URL for a lead who lands on your product page from one of your email campaigns could look like this:
https://yourwebsite.com/product/?mail_camp=444
On the other hand, the URL from an organic visit would look like:
https://yourwebsite.com/product
After you’ve added these parameters to your URLs, you can create a hidden field on your forms that automatically grabs them and tags them to your leads’ information. So you’ll know exactly which path to conversion every lead took and you can use this information to map out customer journeys in Salesforce and send leads tailored messages, which will be based on the path they’re taking.
This is particularly valuable if you have the same form on different pages.
4. Stop spam with the Honeypot Technique.
To thwart spammers and bots, you might want to enable the CAPTCHA feature in Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms. Although this is one way to approach the issue, you’ll be adding a cumbersome step to filling out your forms for leads.
One simple, but highly effective alternative to this is known as the Honeypot Technique. This involves creating another hidden field on your forms that is designed to catch spam bots. When these bots come across your form, they’ll fill out every field, including the hidden honeypot field. You can then set a rule that blocks form submissions when this field has been modified. Genuine leads will get through with no problems.
To set up a honeypot field on your forms, simply use display: none; in the CSS of the field you wish to hide. Then set a JavaScript rule that blocks submissions when the honeypot field has been filled out. You can also use Leadformly to achieve this, which comes with honeypot fields on all of its forms.
We hope these hacks have given you an idea of the lead generation potential Salesforce has to offer and a few ideas on how to improve the results for yourself.
