How to Get More Entries From Your Marketing Forms

Are your marketing forms not getting submissions as you wish they would?

Why so?

You just have spent the last few weeks polishing the strategy behind your marketing form, double checking which important fields will make it to live, and picking out the colors based on their psychological effects.

But, still your forms are hardly getting entries. That’s a tough one.

Your forms are practically useless when you can’t get data from them.

But, wait.

Did you manage to check your basic form KPIs? Like your views vs. entries ratio? Not yet? Okay, check it first and get back to reading this.

If you’re using EmailMeForms, you can easily check this data right on your Form Manager. Just click on the form, then “Usage”. You’ll see something like this.

digital marketing forms usage statistics — How many views did your marketing application form get last week? Month? Year? You can easily tell with this graph.

So, how’s the traffic to your form? Almost nothing? That explains the trickling responses!

Don’t sulk yet. You can do something about it right now. You’re just not hitting the right exposure on your forms. Try to get more eyeballs on your forms. This will most likely solve your issue.

And you don’t have to spend 35% of your marketing budget on digital advertising just yet. Here are almost zero-cost methods of getting more entries from your marketing forms.

Ask your list to fill them up

In other words: launch an email campaign.

This one is a straightforward and boring advice, but hey, it always works.

Turn to your list. Determine who are eligible to answer (in other words: target a segment). And think of the benefit that they’ll get from answering your forms or surveys.

For example, if you’re sending out a marketing survey to determine the hourly rates of freelancers worldwide. A benefit that you can use as a motivator is the free report that you’ll be creating based on their answers. As freelancers, they are curious if their rates are on par with industry standards.

Now, craft that email.

When writing the email, remember these tips:

Personalize it
Ask nicely
Be straightforward about your intention
Include the “what’s in it for them” to stir action
Experiment and do more of what works

If you need inspiration, I have shared an actual email copy of one of our marketing emails here.

There, you’ll also find the A/B tests that we have undertaken to increase our overall open clicks by 150%.

Use compelling videos in tandem with your forms

Over the years, you can see a surge of content in the video department.

Of course, humans are visual creatures. How can our brains not respond to videos when 20% of it was made purely for vision alone.

If you’re still not convinced, maybe these video marketing statistics will help.

80% of all web traffic will be ruled by video by 2019
Adding videos to landing pages increases conversion rates by 80%
59% of company decision makers would rather watch a video than read a post

Convinced now? Great!

So, how can you leverage this on your content marketing forms?

There are a couple of ways:

Embed a video into your form
Midway through the video, add a call-to-action (CTA) that opens up your form

We did the latter when we were brewing a special beta program for our form users. Here’s how it looked in our video.

We added it near the start of the video. We also made the appearance of the CTA as less intrusive as possible because we’re sending it to a super handpicked list. We didn’t want them to be distracted by a flashy CTA. Besides, we were already confident that they’re all interested in what we’re offering.

We also knew that our prospects are forwarding the videos to their friends and colleagues. The CTA was also made for those referrals.

As for your inspiration for this tip, you can check out Wistia’s Guide on generating leads through this method.

Ask creatively through social

The next one is something you might be already doing a bit—posting your bare form link in your social networks with a caption that runs through the lines of, “Please answer my form”.

Uhm. So did it get you a reply?

If not, you need to level up your ask game.

Make your marketing form creative and attention-grabbing. But at the same time, make it clear to your audience what the form is all about.

Instagram stories

Stories is a refreshing way to advertise things. According to agencies, Instagram story posts get 2-3X more engagement than regular content.

That’s some stats.

So, the next time you’re posting a story of your latest product arrivals, you can just add a link to your purchase form when your audience swipe up.

Same goes when you have a new workshop. You can link up to the application form.

marketing application form instagram story — Love the idea? Get more inspiration from here.

Facebook groups

When you’re working on your Facebook marketing, you’re probably thinking about pages and ads. You’re forgetting something that is super helpful: Facebook groups.

Yep, marketers and small business owners are leveraging Facebook groups. It’s hard to build an authentic one with true engagement, but you don’t have to build your own just to advertise your marketing form.

Find a group to invest your time in. Build relationships in there. Be active. Most especially, give value to the group.

When you have built a network in there, you can once in a while, when appropriate and when rules allow, pitch your offer and post a link to your form. Or you can just send the link to your form in messenger.

Facebook Page

If you get a lot of visits on your Facebook Page, it’s time to turn that traffic into leads and revenues by:

This way, your leads won’t have to leave your Facebook page just to book an appointment with you. All they have to do is drop their details right into your marketing request form right then and there.

Ignite your form’s viral looping

Lastly, here’s a passive tip that powers up your email signup form or any other marketing form even more: leverage the thank you page.

Add social sharing buttons on your form’s Thank You Page so your form fillers can help share the word.

This practice is common to course creators, webinar hosts, and other digital entrepreneurs. If you’re one of them, you will want to add this tweak to your marketing form template right now.

It lets your form fillers share your form with their followers and connections, who are possible target prospects too. They are possible look-alike audiences.

Here’s how Gabby does on her free video training course confirmation page.

confirmation page social shares — Add social media share buttons on your confirmation pages.

Clicking on the Twitter icon lets you tweet this:

share webinar twitter — Get people to spread the word about your thing.

And clicking on the Facebook icon lets you share it:

share webinar facebook — Reach more people on Facebook.

You can easily configure this in your own form’s confirmation page too and score the chance to be viral.

Social media icons aren’t the only thing that you can add to your thank you page. Get more entries (and even sales!) with these equally interesting confirmation page ideas.

Before you go fishing for entries

Don’t get too excited and do everything on the list right after you read this article. There are a bunch of things that you should make sure of.

Namely:

Your strategy behind your marketing should be solid. Your digital marketing forms are merely means to getting the leads (or the sale)—they won’t make up for an unattractive offer.
Be absolutely sure that your forms are not annoying your users.
Follow the commandments of creating an effective form.

Now, when you’re 100% convinced that all these are set, it’s time to get the bait out and catch more form entries!

As for how to share your EmailMeForm forms (if you’re using them), here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it. Learn how to distribute your form by sharing a link, embedding a code or integrating it with your website like Wordpress, Blogger or Wix.