As a small business, you might not have a marketing team devoted to increasing customers and sales. This is where online forms for marketing can play a major role in your success.
How can forms be used for marketing?
Small businesses play a crucial role in shaping the economy. They add value to communities and a unique touch to the shopping experience. However, in the modern business landscape, small business owners must leverage a variety of technologies to stay competitive.
Online forms are dynamic, customizable, and reliable. They have the potential to improve your small business’s marketing strategy, automate daily tasks, and increase sales. In this blog post, we will share how you can enhance your marketing automation & communication by using online forms.
Create and Improve Communication
Online forms can be a gateway to communication between you and your customer and are generally the first avenue of contact. You can set up forms for various purposes like basic contact, requesting a quote, or subscribing to your newsletter to provide a more successful way of retaining customers and building their trust.
Online forms can be embedded onto your website or shared with customers via links on your social media handles. Instantaneous and hassle-free access to you will encourage customers to reach out, increasing engagement potential.
There are also many ways to gain a following on social media outside of organic outreach. Try hosting a giveaway to increase your social media following by using a giveaway entry form.
Lead Generation and Audience Research
Leads are vital for the growth of any business. And by using online forms for marketing that help track and store leads in a database, it’s easier than ever to gain deeper understanding of customer behavior patterns.
With Cognito Forms, you can build custom lead generation forms to collect basic information from a prospective customer. Use this to collect warm leads (people interested in what you’re offering) and use that data to target your audience with relevant product or service offerings.
When a user submits a newsletter signup form, they’re expressing a desire to consume your content regularly, thereby opening a new channel for marketing communication. By using modern systems that help track and store leads in a database, it’s easier than ever for marketing teams to gain deeper understanding of customer behavior patterns.
Utilize Zapier integrations to automatically collect leads and sync them with your CRM.
Take it a step further by customizing your contact form to gather information that allows you to better serve your customers. For example, a sleep consultant will want to know specific health information to be able to give advice and treat accordingly. Or a photographer will want to know their client’s information before sending over a contract.
Sell Your Products or Services
You don’t have to rely on external platforms for online sales. They’re probably more expensive, too. Setting up payment and shipping details via online marketing forms with Cognito Forms can streamline the transaction process for potential clients.
Adding product descriptions, pricing, and quantity options can make your customers’ online shopping experience easier. Try setting up your first sale with our free basic sales form template.
Collect User Generated Content
Are you looking for an easy way to gather content from your audience? With online marketing forms, you can gather files, blog posts, documents, images, and other types of content through customizable forms.
This is particularly useful if you’re seeking guest posts, contest entries, or any other type of user-generated content. The best part? You won’t need to grant backend access permissions to anyone.
Even better, you can also collect content anonymously by customizing your form settings. These are perfect for bloggers, job board creators, real estate listing websites, or anyone who wants to showcase content created by their audience. And with our Save & Resume feature, customers can start and come back to their submission later. Give it a try!
Make Event Registration Easy
If you’re hosting an event for your small business, online event registration forms can make it easy for your audience to sign up. It can also display details like the preferred date, time, and location to streamline event planning.
Not only does this allow you to gather important leads and promote your services and products, but it also ensures better communication with participants and a better way to prepare for your event. Unlike platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, where contacting event attendees may be challenging, forms provide a direct line of communication via email. This opens opportunities to nurture leads and ultimately converts them into paying customers.
Efficiently Gather Feedback
Feedback like testimonials, reviews, and ratings can act as social proof of your products and services’ quality. Using satisfaction surveys and or a customer feedback form, you can gather valuable insights about how customers perceive your business and what needs improvement.
With the right questions, you can understand what products or services customers want more of or where customer service could be improved.
Is your brand and your product making an impact on your customers? Use our free brand awareness survey template to collect feedback on the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and gain insights into your brand’s influence.
Grow Your Small Business
Customer engagement forms can be the glue that holds together various aspects of your small business. And by utilizing the full potential intuitive data collection, you can streamline your marketing strategy and simplify communication.
Investing in the creation of customized online forms for marketing and incorporating them into your daily business operations can spur growth in leads, increase customer engagement, boost online sales, and ultimately, enhance your business’s overall performance.
Haley N.
Haley, the Content Specialist for Cognito Forms, helps customers discover how they can use the product to elevate their business. She knows that when it comes to getting things done, Cognito Forms is the perfect tool. When not at work, you can find her hiking, listening to podcasts, or buying plants.