Website Basics Part Three: Generating leads with html forms
You have searched and found a great domain name, you’ve written some superb copy and built a fantastic looking site, and it’s hosted for all the world to see. We’re almost ready to start promoting our site and getting visitors, but there is one very important step yet…
A visitor to your site is of no use to you unless you can convert them to a prospect. You need a way getting their details so you can contact them about your business opportunity. You could of course just have an email address on the site - that would certainly work, but how do you know that they will give you all the information you require? You could include a telephone number, but then you’ll be wasting your time answering calls instead of generating more leads and supporting your team!
The answer is a form. You’ve probably used forms many times when surfing the web. Every time you enter your username and password on a site, every time you fill out a checkout page… that is an HTML form. An HTML form is a collection of elements, text boxes, buttons and selectors which a user can fill out. Typically it might contain fields for name, address, email, telephone etc. There will also be a ’submit’ button which the user clicks when finished.
The form is not a complete solution though - a form must pass it’s data to a script (short program) which will process the information and email it back to you. If you’ve gone down the road of hiring a web designer, or buying an ‘off the peg’ site then your form and script will all be dealt with. If you’ve built your own site however you will need to also write the form and script. Forms are reasonably straight forward - you can find all the info you need about them from many books and websites but try looking at W3Schools to begin with. Their tutorials are excellent and easy to follow.
Scripts are a little more complicated and require a scripting language, specific hosting needs, and possibly specific permission setting on your server. Unless you already have some programming experience I would suggest first speaking with your hosting company and asking if they can provide a form2email script for you, or if they can suggest one. Alternatively try one of the many freely hosted scripts such as the one at WWWTools.
One final point… Instead of having the emails directed straight to your inbox, why not use an autoresponder? Your hosting company should be able to provide one and they are often included free of charge. The script would send the information to your autoresponder which then emails you the user’s details, and also send them an email thanking them for filling out the form… You can also include further information about your business or links to your other sites further promoting your business.
Well we should now have a fully functioning website, next we need to attract some visitors…