Online lead generation campaigns are an essential part of many business’ operations.
They aim to capture essential details, such as a prospect’s name, email and phone number, so the person can be followed up by a sales team.
Many companies will also choose to include extra questions and fields so they can capture additional information about a prospect and ensure they are qualified. This can include details such as:
- Company
- Occupation
- Income / Revenue
- Products / Services they currently use
- What time frame they are looking to make a purchase in
However, in their forms, most companies will typically include only closed-ended questions (questions which can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no" or with a specific piece of information).
Now, while close-ended questions can provide helpful information about whether or not a marketing campaign is generating qualified prospects. They cannot provide the same depth of insight that answers to open-ended questions can provide.
Open-ended questions encourage people to express themselves and elaborate on their situation, problems, frustrations, wants, needs and experiences.
They typically begin with “What,” “How,” or “Why.”
For example:
“What is your biggest frustration with __________?”
“How do you feel about _____________?”
“Why are you looking to ________________?”
The answers to open-ended questions often contain rich insights which can help you:
- Determine how serious and motivated a prospect is (the more serious and motivated they are to find a solution, the greater detail they will typically go in their answers)
- Determine more accurately whether you are reaching the right people with your marketing campaigns
- Provide you with rich and rapid feedback to improve your existing marketing campaigns by matching the phraseology your prospects use to describe their wants and problems, with the copy used in your campaigns
- Provide you with new ideas and angles to test in future campaigns
- Provide valuable information about the lead when your sales force follows them up
A Valuable Tool For Both Marketing Agencies & Large Organizations
Adding open-ended questions to a lead capture form can be very valuable particularly to large organizations and marketing agencies.
In large organizations, marketing teams can get rich insight and feedback about leads coming through the campaign without having to wait for feedback from the sales team.
They can also use the answers to pick up ideas and phraseology for use in future marketing campaigns. Something that would otherwise be difficult.
Likewise, rather than wait from feedback from a client, marketing agencies can use answers from open-ended questions in their lead capture forms to quickly gauge and improve a campaign.
A Tip To Help You Maximize Form Completions
As best-selling author, Ryan Levesque, shares in his brilliant book, Ask, one thing you can do to improve the percentage of people completing a form, is to break it down into steps.
I personally like to break a form into two steps.
On the first step, the most essential information is collected. Typically, this is name, email and phone number – as well as any essential qualifiers.
After those details are collected, the lead is presented with the second part of the form, which contains extra, but non-essential information, including open-ended questions.
If someone does not have time or chooses not to complete the second part, at least you’ll have their contact details to follow them up.
However, you’ll be surprised at how many people will fill out the extra details on the second part of the form.
When someone is willing to go to the effort of submitting their details to be followed up, they are in a state of pain and wanting help. Which is why you’ll see so many people take the time to provide rich answers to open-ended questions.
Summary
If you are running online lead generation campaigns, try adding in open-ended questions when capturing people’s details.
You can use the answers they provide to evaluate and improve your campaign very rapidly and you’ll be surprised at how willing people most are to share details about their situation, frustrations and wants.
