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Ready to turn missed opportunities into business wins? In this episode, we’re diving into how your follow-up strategies after someone fills out a contact form can make or break conversions. Aaron Weiche, co-founder of Leadferno, reveals why swift action and engagement are critical for success.
Optimize Your Online Forms for More Leads Summary
Key Takeaways
- Broken Contact Forms: 4.8% of small business contact forms are broken, meaning lost leads right from the start.
- Lack of Auto-Responses: 85% of contact forms do not send an auto-reply, missing an easy opportunity to engage potential customers immediately.
- Slow Response Times: The average response time to a new lead is 17 hours and 49 minutes, which dramatically reduces conversion rates.
- Poor Follow-Up Practices: 42.6% of businesses never respond to inquiries, leaving high-intent leads unaddressed.
- Limited Multi-Channel Use: Only 20% of businesses use text messaging to follow up, despite it being a preferred communication channel.
How to Optimize Your Online Forms for Better Conversion Rates
Your website’s lead forms can either be a powerful tool for generating business or a black hole where potential customers disappear. Unfortunately, most businesses fall into the latter category. If your lead forms aren’t converting as well as you’d like, it might be time to take a hard look at what’s happening after someone clicks “submit.” Here’s what you need to know to optimize your online forms and boost your conversion rates.
1. Fix Broken Forms – The Silent Killer of Leads
It might sound obvious, but if your lead form is broken, you won’t be getting any leads at all. According to recent research, 4.8% of small business websites have broken contact forms. That’s nearly 5% of businesses who have effectively shut the door on potential customers before the conversation even starts. Check your forms regularly to ensure they’re working correctly. Test them yourself, use different browsers, and get a fresh pair of eyes to see if anything is off. A simple test could be the difference between a new customer and a lost opportunity.
2. Set Up Auto-Responses to Engage Leads Immediately
Here’s a shocker: 85% of contact forms don’t send an auto-reply. That’s a massive missed opportunity. An auto-reply email is one of the easiest ways to engage a potential customer immediately. It’s simple to set up, and most form solutions include this feature. Your auto-reply can reassure the lead that their message has been received, tell them what to expect next, and even offer additional contact options. Think of it as the digital equivalent of a firm handshake—an essential first step in building trust and starting a conversation.
3. Reduce Response Time to Improve Conversion Rates
We all know that speed matters when it comes to lead response, but did you know that the average response time to a new lead is 17 hours and 49 minutes? The reality is, if you’re not responding within five minutes, your chances of converting that lead drop by 80%. For most businesses, a response time of nearly 18 hours is far too long. Evaluate your internal processes and ensure your team understands the importance of speed. Use tools that notify you instantly of new leads and consider templates or scripts to help speed up your initial response.
4. Don’t Be a One-and-Done – Follow Up Multiple Times
Following up just once with a new lead is like betting all your money on a single number in roulette. Yet, 65.5% of businesses make only one follow-up attempt after receiving a lead. To increase your chances of conversion, you need a structured follow-up process. Make at least three attempts, using different methods like email, phone calls, and text messages. Remember, persistence pays off. You don’t want to become a nuisance, but making a few additional efforts to contact a potential customer could be the key to closing the deal.
5. Use Multiple Channels for Follow-Up
Sticking to one channel for lead follow-up is another common mistake. 71% of businesses use only one communication method—typically email or phone—when trying to reach new leads. But people have different communication preferences, and it’s important to meet them where they are. Adding SMS to your follow-up strategy can make a big difference. Research shows that only 20% of businesses use text messaging, even though it’s one of the most preferred communication channels. By diversifying your follow-up methods, you’re more likely to reach leads and make meaningful connections.
6. Streamline Your Lead Forms for a Smoother User Experience
Too many fields in your form can discourage potential leads from completing it. Each field you add is like another brick in a wall they have to climb over. Instead, stick to the essentials: name, email, phone number, and a brief message. You can always gather additional information in follow-up conversations. Simplifying your forms not only improves the user experience but also increases the likelihood that a lead will take that first step to connect with you.
7. Ensure Clear Communication Throughout the Form Process
There’s nothing more frustrating for a potential customer than filling out a form and wondering if it was submitted successfully. Make sure your form submission process is clear. Redirect users to a thank-you page that confirms their submission, outlines the next steps, and reaffirms your commitment to follow up. This simple change can reduce uncertainty and increase trust, setting the stage for a productive relationship.
8. Leverage Technology to Improve Lead Management
If your leads are being sent to an overcrowded email inbox, chances are they’re getting lost in the noise. Instead, consider using tools designed for sales and customer communication, like two-way SMS messaging platforms. These tools can help you keep track of leads, respond faster, and offer multiple ways to connect, whether it’s by text, phone, or email. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for your leads to reach you and for you to reach them.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing your online forms is about more than just tweaking a few settings. It’s about creating a seamless experience for your potential customers and ensuring that no lead slips through the cracks. By fixing broken forms, setting up auto-responses, speeding up your response time, using multiple follow-up methods, and leveraging technology, you can drastically improve your conversion rates. Remember, every form submission is an opportunity to start a conversation—make sure you’re doing everything you can to keep that conversation going.
So, take a few minutes today to review your lead forms and your follow-up process. You might be surprised at how a few small changes can lead to big results.
Optimize Your Online Forms for More Leads Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is back for his second go round on the Agents of Change podcast. He is the co-founder and CEO of Leadferno, a conversion platform for businesses to close more leads faster with text messaging. He is an entrepreneur, founding and leading multiple software companies and digital marketing agencies for over 25 years.
Today, we’re going to be looking at how you can generate more business by what happens after people fill out your contact forms with Aaron Weiche. Aaron, welcome back to the podcast.
Aaron: Rich, thanks for allowing me to be a repeat offender. I’m happy to be here.
Rich: Excellent. Now we’re talking today because you’ve done some interesting research into website forms. Talk to us about that.
Aaron: So those who know me, no secret, I always have strong opinions. But what’s even better than when you can actually back it up with some real data and numbers. And so I always love being able to do this kind of research.
At Leadferno, since we’re all about conversions, we were introducing a feature having to do with being a contact form and lead capture on websites. And it led me to say, let’s get some numbers behind my inkling and thoughts that there’s holes in some of the things that happen with contact forms. And there’s also some really bad behaviors that small businesses are guilty of once that lead comes across their desk and how they reply to it, how fast they reply to it, if they reply to it, all of those things that go along with lead management. So that was the initial spark that created us to do this research and to look into this.
Rich: And so what were some of the findings that came out of this research?
Aaron: Yeah, this is one of those interesting ones, Rich, where you can easily see when I start to share some of these numbers and we talk about things, I think the overall, where just about anybody who is come across this read the research, saw the stats, they’re like, I’m surprised, but I’m not surprised, right? It’s contained on both ends, just based on the factors of if you’re a small business owner, if you’re a digital marketer, how you know and understand these things.
But maybe first I do want to set up just so people have a good understanding about what went into this research, so they know. My survey is a little wider than I just asked three of my friends what happens with their small business websites. So we researched 225 small business websites across three different verticals, home services, medical, and then professional services. We grabbed these 225 from top 10 local pack ranking results. So they’re either in that map three pack, or when you click into the local map finder they’re in the top 10 there.
So these are established businesses that are doing some amount of digital marketing and are highly relevant in their service and the location areas that they’re servicing. We made sure they had at least 25 reviews, so we could get some proof of their customer base. But on average, the ones we submitted to average at about 130 reviews. So very mature in that what we submitted to them was very lead focused, right? These were not just, “Hey, are you open today?” or, “What’s going on?” or, “My friend told me about your business.”
We were getting very specific reaching out to a landscaper and saying we want to put on a 10 x 18-foot paver patio in our backyard with a fire pit, can we get together for an estimate? So very high signal to being a qualified lead for them.
We gave them all of their information. We always submitted during morning hours and early in the weeks. We weren’t pulling Friday at five o’clock, we’re going to submit this and see what happens. We actually wanted to give the business the best opportunity possible to shine with how they responded and their actions that they took.
And then lastly, we tracked what went on. How did they reply and engage us after we submitted this lead via email, phone calls, and text messages over the next month after it was submitted.
So with that, let’s just cascade through a couple of things. One that I was at least encouraged because I thought it might be a little bit worse, but 4.8% of the contact forms we went to were broken. And I think this is one where if we didn’t have our criteria, if we would have gone into people under 25 reviews, lower ranking, things like that, we would have saw some of these paying less attention to their digital landscape and more broken forms where you see their WordPress short code displayed on the page, the submit button doesn’t work, right? One way or another, the user just can’t even fill it out. And we’re not talking now about its submitted and then it doesn’t work, because we know that happens as well. But we did have a handful that right out the gate, I went to the contact page and we couldn’t even fill out a form, see a form, whatever that might be.
The next thing that you might find interesting that, to me, I would include this if there ends up being like three takeaways from you and I talking today. This would be the first takeaway, because it’s so simplistic and so easy to do and so underutilized. Only 15.6% of the forms we filled out sent an auto reply email back. And to me, for something that’s included in most form solutions, just takes a couple of minutes to set up. If you’re not instantly replying and saying, “Good news, we got your form submission. Here’s when you can expect a reply back…” or what you can expect as a next step. Here’s how you can reach out additionally, if we’re not getting back to you fast enough, or you prefer a different way to connect with us. To see that almost 85% of these forms aren’t doing this simple step that is giving them just such a leg up over everyone else that isn’t doing this. That was really mind blowing to me.
Rich: So just to pause here for a second. Because obviously, online forms are a big part of our business. And I’d like to think I’m hyper responsive when I’m on the receiving end of them. But like you said, only 15% sent out an auto reply, which is a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of thing on most of these forms. And in my mind, this is also a chance for you to brand yourself and set up your branding, set up the tone, the voice of your company, and to start building a relationship with somebody. And it only has to happen once on your end. And then it automatically happens until the end of time itself.
For anybody who’s listening, the barrier to being better than your competition is not very high. We’re talking about you can step over the limbo stick and not have to go under it at this point. So please continue on.
Aaron: Yeah, I just thought, like I said, that one’s mind blowing. And just as you pointed out, Rich, two minutes to set it up and then it works for you forever. And it is a really valuable tool and touchpoint that should not be ignored.
After that, probably one of the biggest things that we were looking to have come out of this is understanding what is that speed of response look like. In our world, we often call it ‘speed to lead’, how fast is the business getting back to this prospect? And what we saw across all of our responses was that average time fell below just 18 hours. So 17 hours and 49 minutes is what the average response time was for that first human reply to when we submitted that lead.
Now when you compare this to other studies that have been done that show that the likeliness of converting a lead drops 80% after five minutes, and you’re going hundreds of times outside of this with that response time of almost 18 hours.
I wasn’t surprised by this time at all. I’ve seen other studies and research show something in a similar slot to this. But it’s still really eye opening that to call someone back, send an email, text them back and whatever else, will still take that business on average up to 18 hours is pretty incredible.
Rich: Yeah, and again, I can understand that you might be in a meeting. And I guess this depends on the kind of business you are. I might be in a meeting, I might be an all-day meeting, it might take me time,. But the idea that there’s a lead sitting out there. And I know that there’s a very good chance that this person filled out my contact form and my competitor’s contact forms, like there’s no way.
I don’t want to be first to respond to this person. And I have other thoughts on being too responsive. But this to me seems again, it’s a very easy step that we can take to just improve some of our response times. Even if it’s more, not a canned messages and automatic, but I have a script that I use when I do get in a form that feels like it could lead to something where I ask some follow up questions. But at least I’m establishing that line of communication with the person completing my form. So again, barrier to outperforming your competition is still pretty low at this point, I think.
Aaron: Yeah, and when you put this and you compound it with the lack of an auto reply for the vast majority of these, they’re going 18 hours wondering, did they even get my form? Is anyone handling this? And yes, that’s going to lead to, I’m either going with who contacted me first if I did fill out two or three of these, or after a certain amount of time, which can differ for each consumer, you start feeling like they didn’t get this. They’re not getting back to me. I’m going to reach out to someone else, or they’re too busy.
So now they are prequalifying themselves and saying no to you and moving on to the next. And by the time you might get back to him, they’re like, I already got it solved, thank you. And that lead is out the door.
Rich: I know. There’s no worse feeling than not knowing if your email actually reached the person you were trying to intend. And I talked to my team about this. I always say, it’s like you’re stuck in traffic and you’re behind an 18-wheeler, and you have no idea in this non- moving traffic, are you just one light cycle away from moving forward or is there a stuck bus up ahead that you’re going to be there for 12 hours. You can deal with either one, but you need to know.
So this is why I always tell my team, you follow up and you follow up quickly You let them know even if your message is, “Hey, this is great. We’d love to talk to you, I don’t have any time until tomorrow or next week. Here’s a link to my calendar, let’s get something on the books”, whatever it is. But let them know that a human being saw your email, saw your contact form came in, and it’s being acknowledged.
Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. Filling out a contact form shouldn’t be your lottery ticket and you’re hoping to find out will my number be called today?
And along those lines, here’s the other eye-popping stat out of this. This one did floor me. 42. 6% never replied. Not one, not a reply to almost half. And when you think, Rich, you’re in the business of digital marketing and generating leads and whatever else, you understand that small business owners, marketers, what are they constantly saying? I don’t have enough leads. When we see that almost half of them get a lead, high signal, high intent lead, and they’re not even following up with it once because they either lack process or enough touch points or follow through whatever that might be, like that one was mind blowing to me.
Rich: Absolutely. That’s absolutely aggravating. And I’ll be honest from me, because I always respond to the emails or I’m always handling emails that come in. I may not respond to 40 percent of the leads because I put leads in air quotes because most of them are, they’re obviously come-ons, somebody wants to sell me something. That’s how we’re talking about here. We’re talking about somebody who is literally, I have one hand on the mouse and one hand on my wallet. Please get back to me. And almost half of those are not being responded to. Like that to me is crazy. So some of them might get lost in a spam folder, we can talk about that as well, but it just sounds like there’s no urgency from the business to actually act on these sorts of things.
Aaron: Yeah. And I thought I’d include as a sub layer to this one, we broke down by those three industries too. And interesting enough, even though they always get a bad rap, home services, contractors, everything else, they were actually the best. Only 39% of those failed to give a reply. Medical at 40%. Professional services was the worst. So accountants, lawyers, real estate, 50.9%. So that one did tip over, half of them did not respond to our lead being submitted.
When we break down that speed to lead time, that 18 hours, just to give some more structure to what went into that is that we saw only 10 percent of the lead responses were within the first hour. So now you have a very small, so if you start to break down, I gave you the stat about how much better conversion is when you contact in the first five minutes. Now, if we even say, all right let’s be reasonable. You’re doing a lot of things. You wear a lot of hats as an owner, a salesperson, your role within the company. But being able to get to it, shifting gears within the hour, only 10 percent of businesses were able to do that. And that kind of golden area of five minutes we saw just 3% of forms submitted were responded to within that, another 4% in that five minute to 30-minute range, 3% in that half hour to hour.
So even if we expand it further, 75% of the responses fell outside the first four hours. So if we think of that as in half a day for someone to get back to you, three quarters of them couldn’t even respond with half the day to get back to that consumer and prospect.
The next thing to take a look at too, is how many times are people following up? And this one was of a lot of interest to me just to be able to see how much effort do people put in when they get this lead. They have a name, a number, an email address, and very specifics on what this person is looking for. And we all get, it can be hard to get in touch with prospects especially if we’re turning around and giving them a phone call right away. Just think with all of us, we look at our phone, we see the number. If we don’t know the number, we’re immediately thinking, do I need to take this right now? Because here’s where mine’s at or what I’m doing whatever else. Within this, we saw that 65.5% only made one attempt to follow up with that lead.
So I look at this from those of you that might be college basketball fans and know what they call a ‘one and done’. You go to school for one year and then you’re declaring for the NBA draft right away. 65% of these were ‘one and done’. They were only going to make one attempt at a very solid, qualified, you have all the information and buying intent, a signal to it. We saw another 13% make two attempts, just 8% make three attempts, 4% at four attempts, and then 8% at five or more attempts.
And obviously this can get a little crazy, right? I had two of them that made 16 and 18 follow up attempts each over the next month, which at some point I definitely felt holy cow, you are probably going way too far. But it also showed they have a process. Some of it was automated and they realized like, hey, we might turn someone after five, after 10, and they’re willing to continue to put in the work. And I have a lot more respect for those than the ones who made one attempt and that’s all they can muster up.
Rich: Maybe I could get those names after this call is over, Aaron. I’m looking for a salesperson, so yeah, we can just talk about that offline. Admittedly, those people probably are using some automated CRM software. I pride myself on over following up, like just continuing and literally getting to the point where I’m emailing somebody saying, “Listen, I haven’t got a letter from your lawyer saying cease and desist, so I assume it’s okay to keep following up.” I turn it into a joke, and yes, at a certain point I realized the lead has gone cold ‘m just going to drop it. But better to try too many times than not try enough.
Aaron: Yep, absolutely. And with that, we also tracked what’s the mix of channels that they’re using to try to follow up with these leads, right? Phone calls, emails, text messages. So when we looked at that, we found that 71% of all the lead responses just used one channel. So even if they made two or three or four attempts, they were doing them all by email.
Now once we expanded that to two channels, so say they’re going to call and text you since they have that phone number, or they’re going to call and email. 24% were using two channels and just 4.65% attempted all three channels.
Now, I always throw out there you need to make sure that when they’re submitting that form, you have a disclaimer that you’re going to try to contact them by whatever contact forms and numbers and email addresses they were giving you. So make sure you have that stuff buttoned up on your disclosures before they hit send.
But I was really surprised at just the lack of variance with some of them not to make an attempt at least at two different channels. I get for a lot of businesses, they really feel like phone calls are best, and so we want to get them on the phone right away. But if you call them and you leave a voicemail, which a lot of times can feel like a faux pas to some people too. Like I’m never going to listen to my voicemail but at least gives you a receipt that you made that attempt with them, and to try to get them to call you back, turning around, not sending an email after that.
And another, specific interval timing, even the next day is really crazy not to do that. And in this day and age where most people, we have shown in our previous studies that SMS is the most preferred channel over phone calls and two to one over email. If you’re not sending a convenient text in that, even saying, “Hey, we’ve tried you by phone and email and haven’t connected, maybe a text is easier. Are you still interested in our services?” To me, that’s just a wasted opportunity. If you have permission to text them, you have their number and you’re not making that simple attempt.
Rich: I completely agree. And I’m just sitting here because obviously I’ve got my sales hat on while I’m listening to this and I’m just like, I can feel the hairs in the back of my neck stand up because I’m getting so frustrated. Because for me, assuming it’s a decent lead, I’m going to email them a few times.
And there’s a certain point, usually it’s after the second email, where I’m like, the number of times that people make a mistake filling out a form is high. So at that point, I will call them, I’ll leave a message and I’ll say something like, hey, maybe the email or maybe my email, they gave the right email address, but it went into their junk folder because they don’t know my email address and so that’s how it ended up.
So I agree with you. Having that second form of follow up, and we don’t use SMS, but after listening to you talk, I feel like this is a missed opportunity. I can see that this is the best way because we want to communicate with prospects and customers on the channels that they want us to communicate with. So giving them multiple options just makes sense.
Aaron: Yep. And that’s what we found in this too. When we broke down only 20% of follow-ups included a text message at any point with it. So again, when you talked about low barrier low bar to be able to get over, only 20% are using texting at all in any of their responses at any time. And just 9.3% use texting as either their first response or as an auto reply to let that customer know that they received their information.
So again, a lot of opportunity there with arguably the most popular, easy to manage communication channel. But if you’re not asking for permission to use that right way as a follow up and then engaging in it, you’re wasting that most popular, easy to use channel by not reaching out to them with an SMS message to try to get that next step.
Rich: All right. So sidebar right now. And so I’m old school. I’ve got my phone, I’ve got email. I of course have a cell phone, every human being does, but I separate my personal life from my professional life on the cell phone. Like I never use my cell phone for texting.
You may have the solution, but for those of us who don’t want to use our cell phone to reach out to a customer, what are the options from a company standpoint where we could text somebody? Like what is the software or the solutions? I don’t even know if this is something you do but you know the industry. How can I use my computer to then send a text rather than to send an email or a voice call?
Aaron: Yeah. Thanks, Rich. Because you did just play right into exactly what we do. So we offer two-way SMS texting, and there are a number of solutions that do this, right? So I’m the same way I have given out my personal cell phone, very little in business life. But what this allows me to do is text with customers using the Leadferno app.
So we have both a web app and we have native apps for your phone. So now your business conversations are all contained in there. And there’s a number of other benefits where you can pass conversations to other people on your team. You can log them, you can track report all of those kinds of things that go along with it. So if you look into business texting and really you want to pair in on two-way SMS texting, you’re going to see a lot of solutions.
I would love for you to look into Leadferno, but there are a lot of options that are out there. The area that we play in a little bit differently is we combine this with lead capture and generation. So the thing that our product does is we place floating call to action widgets on your website, letting them know, do you have a question? You can text us right now.
We also encourage other conversions, like you can request a call. We now what was part of this research is we have an embeddable contact form that instead of being powered by email is powered by text messaging. So when they fill that out, they get an auto reply text message. And maybe that’s using this as a segue when we talk about what don’t do, what you shouldn’t do, or how to clean some of these things up.
One of the big things, and again, take it with my bias based on my product and what I do, but email’s just shitty. It’s crowded, you get hundreds of other messages every day of spam, whatever else. How does a lead stand out in your email inbox? If it comes in at the right time, or the wrong time, that might have to do with if it’s visible and if it’s seen. And so we see a lot of that, and we saw responses to this survey where a business would reply three days later and be like, sorry, I just found this lead in my spam. Something trips and now their contact form, which is their main digital lead provider, is going into their spam folder.
We had a couple others that were like, hey, we just found out our email that this is assigned to is broken. So there’s definitely things with forms that can make them a little bit brittle and email and some of its challenges and overuse. And just the difficulty we all have organizing our email, that can make that really difficult.
Now when you take these leads and you’re sending them into an app like ours, now you’re getting instant push notifications that it’s a lead. And when these are coming in, these aren’t spam requests, they’re not your vendors, they’re not other things that are contacting you. It’s really putting those on an island so that you can focus on them.
You’d never turn on push notifications of your email because you would have six million push notifications every day and week, that again, now you’re just blasting the same noise at a multiplier instead of being able to see, here’s important new business on someone that has questions or wants to take a next step to work with me.
So email is definitely one of those major culprits that you should be thinking about. If my super important, valuable leads are just going into email, is that the right tool for something that’s so important and valuable to my business?
Rich: And I spend all day tied to my desk. So for me, email does work. I know your personal opinion on it and I’ve got things set up to make sure that I get back to everybody, but I can imagine that if you’re in the trades and you are on the road, literally the entire day fixing pipes or whatever it may be, that getting those text messages or having an app that texts, that’s going to be critically important so that when you do finish that project that you’re on right then you can immediately get back to somebody and get that next job.
Aaron: Yeah, totally. And when you consider advantages too of like a shared inbox. So if you’re small, you could be one person in a truck. But if you’re a three, five, 10-person business in a shared inbox, everyone has access and sees that notification that lead came in. So whoever out of the three or the five of you is available to first respond to them and make sure that they get a touch point and you’re starting to help them, you can make that happen.
And then based on what they need or clarify, yeah, they might be a better fit for someone else. Now you can assign that lead to them. And now that person knows, here’s who I need to work with. I see the conversation on what the other handle, it can be a lot more easy to manage and eloquent and forward and fast than trying to forward emails and things like that.
We also get into things where, I’ve worked with small business who are like, we don’t even know where a contact form goes anymore. I think it used to go to Sarah. She quit and we don’t have access to her email. There’s just so many things that can come up when people don’t have control over those elements.
A couple other tips to point out for people with their forms, especially contact forms. Keep it to the fields that you actually need to capture. I get it’s great, we all want a highly qualified lead. But when you look at each field in a form as a brick in a wall, you build that wall too high, you’re really asking a lot of that customer to get over the top of it. So really consider what fields are needed to start this conversation and make sure I can follow up. And if there’s a lot of fields that are optional on here, I should be cutting those out and using that in my follow up process to capture that information instead of it being a tell us everything or you can’t work with us up front.
The next thing is when we were able to give stats in this on response times and things like that, when you’re using just email to reply, you don’t have that information. You’re not able to track and be like, “Hey, Rich is really great. On average, he’s replying to our new leads in 32 minutes”, which is awesome. We’ll keep trying to improve that, but we know that we’re getting to them fast.
When you use an application built for sales and sales responses. Now you have tools to track things like first reply time, average reply time, time from open to close, which staff members/agents are the ones handling these. So now you can create competitive situations, you can benchmark things, and then you can improve upon them as well. So for people serious about this, when you take a look at apps that can help you track and report on those things, now you actually can put numbers to it, you can benchmark, you can improve what you’re doing with it.
Rich: Awesome. Outside of integrating SMS, which I think is still fairly new for most businesses, I know that there’s a lot of businesses that are already using it, but I think for the majority of businesses at least that I see, adding SMS into their online forms is something new. Outside of that, what do you feel are some of the best ways that people or businesses can improve their responses when they do get these leads to make sure they’re taking full advantage of them?
Aaron: With anything visibility, right? So even if you can’t track or do whatever else you should be talking about response time on these leads. And even if you have to manually do it to some extent, you should be spot checking what that response time is. If you’re the owner of a business or a marketing manager or whatever else, no one has any idea what timeframe, or you guys don’t have a commitment or management isn’t saying Hey, If we get a new lead, however we can, we want to respond within the first hour.
If those things aren’t happening, they’re not going to magically happen by themselves, right? So creating some amount of visibility, creating some golden rules or all that talking about it and finding some ways to spot check or to look at how that happened I would say that you definitely want to be able to do that. So that there’s, you’re never going to improve something if you’re not focusing on it, that brings a focus to it.
Rich: I’d also like to add in, and it builds on something you said earlier, it’s just not getting the autoresponder. Then all of a sudden it’s a black hole. Did anybody actually even get my email? Is this form working? One of my personal frustrations is when I fill out a form and I stay on the same page and there’s no clear indication that the form was actually processed. And then I’m like, should I fill it out again? I don’t know. And so the more you can do to make it very clear. And what I usually recommend is that we send them to another page, which also makes tracking much easily easier on the Google analytics side of things.
But everything you should do is to make it very clear that lead is important. That it is being seen, it is being processed. And I think this gets to your point of the autoresponder to their email, having somebody follow up as a human, with an email or with an SMS message or with a phone call after that. And then attempting multiple ways, because they may have put in the wrong information or they may have something set up that’s not letting them you get through to them. And it’s just critically important that if you want this business, that you let them know that you’re actively trying to reach them.
Aaron: Yeah, no, that’s a great tip, Rich, and one you see all the time, right? Some forms below the form will be one little sentence in green submission confirmed. And if you didn’t scroll the right way, you won’t even see that on the screen So if there isn’t something definitive, absolutely you should be forwarding them to a new URL and to a page that screams ‘we got you, we hear you, we’re going to be following up with you.’
And to me, you just also really made me think of the point in of this is we have one aspect, the 42% that aren’t responding at all. That is a major red flag, right? That’s a huge problem. But after that, all these other things really is death by a thousand cuts.
So when you look at this, when your form is asking too many questions, when you’re not giving them a clear signal that it’s been submitted, which is When you’re not sending an auto reply, when you’re taking too long to reply to it, when you’re not making enough attemps or using the right channels, right?
Most business, most people listening right now, it’s okay, I’m offending five of the eight Aaron just listed. And it’s just a lot of small tweaks to really improve this to have better process, better protocols around it so that you can close more of these leads that you work so hard in time and money to get to come across your email inbox or your plate.
Rich: I couldn’t agree more. Because the thing that you need to fix first is those conversion points. Because what’s the point of spending money on SEO or Google ads or social ads if you’re just sending somebody to a form that doesn’t work or that doesn’t feel right or you don’t follow up with them? And so it makes sense to take this moment in time and just really take a look at every aspect.
I would recommend that everybody go and fill out their own contact forms. If you’ve got a sales team, see how they respond. So maybe you use some fake information and use your home number, so they actually follow up with you. But even make sure, is the message on your landing page or your thank you page saying what you want? Is it in your company voice? Every step of this is an opportunity to start building relationships and building your brand. And you’re missing out if you’re not doing all the things that you talked about today and all the other things that we discussed.
Aaron: Yeah, no, you’re absolutely correct. And when you think about this in terms of the shifting landscape of search results and visibility and things like that, conversion has never been more important. It is more expensive and harder to garner that attention and visibility. So if you work someone far enough down your funnel to a conversion point where they’re willing to raise their hand and say, “here I am, here’s who I am, here’s what I need, and here’s how to get ahold of me’, and you are not leveraging and maximizing that to its fullest ability, you’re really going to be missing the boat on this.
Because for most people, traffic growth and visibility growth is extremely expensive and very hard to come by. You need to be squeezing every ounce out of the bottom of the funnel that you can.
Rich: Absolutely, preach Aaron. This has been awesome. If people want to learn more about you, learn more about Leadferno, where can we send them?
Aaron: Yeah, please go to leadferno.com. If you click to our blog, you will see this research and you can break it all down for yourself. I’m also very active on Twitter/X at @AaronWeiche, and of course on LinkedIn as well. So I’d love to engage in any conversations or follow along as I continue to do research like this a few times a year.
Rich: Awesome, Aaron. Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time today.
Aaron: Thanks Rich.
Show Notes:
As co-founder and CEO of Leadferno, Aaron Weiche is dedicated to helping businesses close leads faster by identifying gaps in follow-up processes and creating a strategy in areas they may not be taking advantage of. Check out his blog and connect with him on Twitter/X and LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.