There are countless things you can automate whenever someone fills out a form on your website, especially if you're using a tool like HubSpot. You can streamline your entire sales and marketing operation from the start. Just by setting up the right kind of workflows and automation on the back end of a form submission, you can make a number of awesome things happen.
Today, we're going to look at 10 website automation ideas that you can do when someone fills out a form.
1. Onboarding emails
This almost goes without saying, but we promised you 10 ideas, so we're saying it.
How you treat new contacts at the outset will influence your entire relationship and can make or break a deal. That means you need to treat them like they're a person. A lot of marketers go wrong here and send out follow-up emails that immediately ask them to buy a product or book a call. The marketers treat them like a wallet; they don't provide any value or recognize that there's a human on the other side of the equation.
With your onboarding emails, treat people like actual people. Be kind to them and give them more value before you start saying, "Look at me! Look at all this stuff I want you to buy!"
2. Generate a lead score
You may already have all the different criteria you need and all the different ways that people can get qualified to get passed to the sales team. Or you may just have a long list of all the people who are already in your database, which means you need to set those criteria.
Based on the form submission and the questions you asked, you can determine and give each prospect a lead score based on their answers. Ask questions like what type of business they have, their job title, etc., and give the answers a weighted score. You can also measure engagement whether they're engaging with the form, returning to the website, reading your follow-up emails, and so on. Those will all represent a numerical likelihood that they will proceed to the next step and/or buy from you.
3. Segment the list
Next, you'll segment people into separate groups or categories based on what they're doing and their lead score. You'll give them a higher or lower score based on the information you've collected. This tells your sales team which prospects are good candidates for closing a sale and which ones need more nurturing.
The more specific you can be, the more you can do with them, like tailoring the follow-up information in your nurturing campaigns and your contact relationships with them. You can be more specific in what you provide them during their buyer's journey. The more you do this, the better chance you have of engaging them and turning them into valued customers.
4. Create a specific offer
With those segmented lists, you can create a specific offer or conversion event for each list as a way to move them forward. The offer doesn't have to be a buying decision, it can be for further engagement. It could be an invitation to a trade show, an invitation to a sales demo, or it actually could be a coupon for their next purchase.
You can create deals and events based on the forms they submit. That's because you can track every single person who fills out the specific contact form. You can see where they are in the pipeline and keep track of how many deals were created in a month and how much revenue is tied to it.
5. Assign a sales contact
Creating a deal or offer allows you to track the information so you can start assigning those people to sales reps or marketers — someone inside your team who will track that contact and continue to nurture them through the sales pipeline.
Anyone who doesn't have a sales or marketing rep is just sort of floating, and they will often fall through the cracks. If no one looks after them, they won't be nurtured or receive follow-up contacts.
6. Create sales or marketing tasks
When someone fills out a form to book a call or get a consultation, that lead should immediately be assigned to a rep. And that rep should have some tasks assigned to them about the new lead. That could include personalized outreach, a sequence of events, or even just some initial tasks like connecting with them on LinkedIn or making a phone call.
7. Automate workflows
This is where things get pretty cool for me because I really like this stuff. I love the idea of creating a unique website experience based on where people are with their journey and your company, as well as what they've digested and engaged with. Whether it's their first visit or their 15th, you can create something new for each person whenever they show up.
For example, someone who comes to our site for the first time might see more of a general public-facing kind of website, and be offered a lead generation component where the visitor can download a checklist or guide.
The next email they receive contains a link to our website where it's tailored specifically to their persona, whether they're a marketing agency owner, business owner, or marketing director at a corporation. The content will address what it's like to be an agency owner, business owner, or marketing director. That wasn't their experience the first time they showed up, but it's there now that we've found out their information and segmented them into lists.
8. Retarget them on other platforms
You can retarget your visitors based on the information they've provided so you can start sending ads to them via Facebook, Instagram, Google display ads, and so on.
We can create these retargeting lists to send them the next level of information. For example, if they downloaded a checklist, you can now retarget them to come to your website and sign up for a webinar or special event. They'll get hit from a lot of different angles in a lot of different places, just because they clicked a few buttons and submitted a form.
9. Update forecasting
When we create automated deals and offers, we're also tying a value to each lead in the form of a dollar amount. When we do that here at Web Canopy Studio, that creates a forecast inside of our sales pipeline inside of our HubSpot reporting. Now we actually have an accurate report of our leads, where they are in the pipeline, and the value of a sale if we can close it.
So I can see that, for example, we have three new companies come in as leads that want to talk about buying our services, our deals, and a forecast of what we'll close this month or quarter. That all gets automatically updated just because those forms were submitted. As they engage and re-engage, they are all given weighted scores that will move them up or down the pipeline and updates the value and closing potential of each prospect.
10. Book directly into a calendar
In any sales process, there are plenty of points of friction where you can lose people For example if you're trying to manually book an appointment, there's often an email back-and-forth of trying to make it happen. "I'm available Tuesday at 4:00. Is that good for you?" A day later, they reply, "No, that's not good for me. How about Wednesday at 9:30?" "Oh, I can't do Wednesday. Is 11 good that day?" And so on.
It happens all the time, and it's one of the biggest causes of people falling out of a sales process. You can eliminate a lot of this just by letting people book directly into your calendar. If you're not doing that, you're creating more roadblocks and friction points where you lose people. Just look at the success of Calendly, where individuals can let other people set up appointments on their own calendar based on each person's availability. So why not offer that same convenience in your sales team's automation?
We're just scratching the surface of our awesome website automation ideas, but there are plenty more. There are so, so many things that can happen whenever someone fills out a single form. Almost instantaneously, these things can be triggered and set the sales nurturing process into motion.
We can help you do that on your own website. If you haven't already, take the website conversion assessment. You'll evaluate your website and how it's performing. You'll be given a score and a free personalized report on each section and an idea of which items you should address to improve your own website conversion.
