7 Ways to collect leads besides old-school forms

The most common way to collect leads is by forms, like this one:

But nobody likes to fill forms.

Forms don’t add value to users but marketers. It is the moment when a conversion happens, where we can measure our marketing efforts and collect personal information for further contact.

To get value—call it a free trial, content, or any reward—they must fill a form.

The form is the payback – and it’s a point of friction.

So I wanted to think of how I could make forms friendlier or how a SaaS company could remove forms from their site?

In this article, I try to solve that with real examples of ways you can start collecting leads with friendlier forms or not forms at all.

Social signups with Google or Facebook

I’m the biggest fan of these.

Whoever came up with this, I respect you.

sign-ups format image example
Example of the “excruciating way” and the easy way to sign ups.

Facebook and Google signup buttons resolve some pain points for users:

  • They don’t need to type input.
  • They don’t need to remember the email they used.
  • They cannot use a false or misspelled email.
  • They don’t need to remember a password.

The only objection I have heard of using them is that they are not meant for large tickets or companies, but individuals.

So it’s suitable for SaaS companies that offer a self-service or are targeting individuals within a company. Other more consultive sales processes need larger forms.

My responses to those objections are:

The decision-making process within any company usually starts with an individual, not the entire organization.

It’s a false dichotomy to say that you use social signups OR forms.

You may combine them by getting contact details through the social signup and asking further questions with a simplified form.

Social Media CRM – Leadklozer

LeadKlozer is a social media CRM that recently launched a lifetime deal on Pitch Ground.

I found it interesting because it combines social media monitoring with contact management capabilities.

The concept is simple: many people may engage with your social media posts and pages.

Most of them will never go to your site to fill a contact form.

LeadKlozer tracks all those social media users who’re liking, commenting or sharing your posts to sort them and qualify them in a list.

Most of the social media analytics is anonymous and at an audience level; Leadklozer makes it on an individual level.

We cover in greater detail how LeadKlozer helps you collect social media leads without making them filling forms in this blog post.

Video perks- Vieworks

One of our next lifetime deals is Vieworks we will launch soon.

Vieworks help you convert leads from your videos, by using video perks.

The concept is straightforward: reward users for watching your videos until the end with a perk or reward.

If they watch an entire video—or a percentage of it—you can offer a discount, coupon, content, or whatever good enough that encourages people stick with your content.

Here’s a good example:

We wrote an article about video perks use cases.

Facebook groups memberships questions

Facebook groups have better organic reach than business pages.

They have great exposure; many users don’t go only to Google to get answers but join groups to have actual conversations and support, making yours findable.

Facebook will also promote your groups as suggestions when a user is browsing other groups.

Something I’ve tried that brings dozens of contacts is membership questions.

When someone wants to join our closed group, we ask them if they want to get free access to our app and, if so, they should provide their email:

Besides the email, you can take a look at their Facebook profile to know more about them and if it’s not too spammy, you can reach them out on Messenger.

Enriched data

The longer the form, the fewer leads you get.

Yet, some would say that long forms get more qualified contacts.

So you need to balance between short forms to get volume and questions to get more information from contacts.

Not really.

There’re data enrichment tools that let you bring more data points or inputs from contact just with their email.

These tools mostly need emails and match those emails to names, companies, average income, social media platforms, and dozens of more fields from contacts.

And what is the use case?

You may ask only for a business email in your forms, and these data enrichment tools would bring the remaining fields without making users fill them in a form, increasing your chances to convert.

A great example is Clearbit:

Once I visit their homepage, they show my business logo in that illustration, and if you look at the popup, they’re suggesting me to use Hubspot. Chances are that they know I’m a Hubspot user.

Their accuracy is creepily good and pricing is acceptable:

Clearbit pricing

Chat interfaces

Unlike forms, chats are conversational.

Their interface makes interactions and data collection way more seamless and personalized. Just look at this example from Drift.


As you can see, chats are seamless to generate conversations through flows that are personalized based on user responses.

If I visit their pricing page, for instance, I’d expect a different message and I’d expect they would collect my email.

Here’s another example, but with Facebook Messenger:

When it requests my email, it automatically suggests it from my Facebook account.

Scraping

Finally, you can pull contacts automatically by using web scraping tools.

Like Google has a web crawler (or spider) to understand your website’s content, you can use scraping for many purposes.

A common use ases for B2B marketer and outbound sales teams are LinkedIn contacts scraping:

The result is a list of contacts that these tools scrap automatically based on your queries or criteria.

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Udit Goenka
Udit Goenka
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