S. 3 Ep. 31 – Save Time With Smarter Website Forms

Intro: You know those moments when you’re doing what you love in your business, maybe it’s standing onstage or creating content, whatever it is, you’re totally immersed, and time just seems to slip by? This is called The Flow State. At Speaker Flow, we’re obsessed with how to get you there more often. Each week we’re joined by a new expert where we share stories, strategies and systems to help craft a business you love. Welcome to Technically Speaking.

Taylorr: And we are live, solo. Look at us go, Austin.

Austin: Boom, another solo episode. So exciting. It kind of feels weird to not have a guest.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: But it’s nice. It’s nice too, there are pros and cons. The different versions of Technically Speaking make it interesting, which is cool.

Taylorr: Yes. Yeah.

Austin: For those of you that do podcasts, experiment a little. Try doing a solo episode if you’re doing interviews or switch it off. Change of pace is nice. Variety is the spice of life, as they say.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure.

Austin: Philosopher Austin at the table.

Taylorr: Yeah, there we go. A little Austradamus, Austindamas, something like that.

Austin: Thank you. I don’t know about that. I don’t know if that’s brandable, but I like the idea. So, it was a good idea.

Taylorr: Well, it’s also nice too because then we can get into some weeds, some more technical types of conversations that can help make business systems a lot easier, which is the whole point of our existence. So, today we are unpacking website forms and how to save time by being smarter with them, getting them to talk with your technology, the context for using them. And so, we’ve compiled a list of questions that we get asked all of the time when it comes to website forms, especially since when we onboard new people, we’re always connecting website forms; these are the most frequently asked questions regarding them. 

So, we thought we’d give you guys a peek behind the curtain, some of that logic behind how we think website forms should interact with all of your business systems. So, Austin, I think the first question we should just start with to lay out the context of this episode, is why is this important to begin with?

Austin: Yeah, well, I think maybe the answer is twofold here. So, for one, I think that it’s really easy to think of business systems purely in terms of the technicality of the buttons that you need to click in order for the technology to do what we want it to. But it’s really kind of like one of those situations where it’s a blend of the art and science to some degree, there’s a philosophy that you have to come into the building process with if you’re going to get the outcome you’re looking for. And if you take a step back for a second here, right? 

Really what we’re talking about is one specific way that somebody can flow through your customer journey. Because people could come into your world from a lot of different ways; website forms are certainly one of the more common, but you could get handed a business card at a conference, you could opt people in while you’re onstage. There are all of these different gates as we call them, in terms of how people come into your sales purview. Website forms, and this transitions into the second major point here, is just one of the ones that’s kind of a non-negotiable in 2023 and forever. 

I think everybody knows that a website is critical to you demonstrating to the world that you’re actually doing what it is that you’re telling people that you’re doing. And if you do websites well, it should not only be an authority builder, but it should also be attracting business to you, right? And there are a million conversations to be had about the ways that, that works. But certainly, a website is necessary, I think everybody agrees on that. And so, if we are combining this sense that a website is necessary and we have to think about systems from the context of the customer journey. We need to outline what needs to happen when somebody comes through one of those website forms, right? 

And so, not only do you have to consider the process piece, but if you’re going to do this well then ideally, you’re leaning on the technology to some degree to make that process substantially easier on you, the person managing it behind the scenes. So, why are we talking about this today? A, because the fundamental principle of having a website form is necessary and, B, we want to reduce manual actions being taken wherever possible. And the outcome of that is a website form automation. What do you think?

Taylorr: Easy as pie. Yeah, I think the one, as pie, is it cake? I don’t really know. I don’t know, I went with pie, man, so here we go.

Austin: I’m with it. Yeah.

Taylorr: Yeah. I think the other thing too is with website form automations, particularly; ideally you get your systems to a point where the data is telling you a story, right? Especially if you have a contact form, you have a Book Me Now form, maybe a lead magnet, maybe a blog sign-up; knowing what forms people are submitting in your systems and then tailoring that customer journey to where they came from. And then ideally being able to look at your data and say, oh, yeah, wow, contact form submissions have gone up by this much and these lead magnets are working and turning into leads this often. You can get as distilled one day down if you’d like, where you know exactly how much a new newsletter sign-up is worth, right? 

And so, that’s the endgame, if you can get your data to tell you a story of what forms are being submitted and when and wherein, they’re coming from and you don’t even have to think about it, the system just knows. Not only are we going to be able to save more time, but over time we can make more intelligent decisions as to how we can improve the capturing of leads from our website. Which outside of it being a brochure is the whole point, is how do you get people into your world and attract them? And so, having that data at your fingertips to know how to improve what you’re offering on the website to bring in more leads, that’s where it all starts.

Austin: Hundred percent. Yeah. The data-driven decision-making part of this is, I think maybe the less sexy part of it, right? Because everybody thinks about website form automation in terms of time-saving and button clicking and stuff. But not only do you get more data if you do website forms really well, but you get data that’s more usable, and I think that this ties into the bigger picture here of making the website forms really useful. So, before we continue into the tactical components, let’s get a little bit more granular with the types of website forms that exist. We’ve identified four major categories, I think; there’s probably room for debate about some others, but do you want to break those down for us?

Taylorr: Yes. Okay. So, there are four types of website form automations. The first is your standard contact form; these are people who are interested in having a conversation right now. You have subscriber forms, which are, let’s say, just sign up for my newsletter. You have lead magnet forms, which are things you’re offering as a free type of value that indicate kind of what they’re interested in or what problems they have to solve. They’re not just signing up for a newsletter, they’re signing up to receive something, which kind of tells you that there’s a problem for them to solve. 

And then the fourth one is, purchase automations, which I think often gets overlooked since they’ve already bought and you’re like, okay, what else needs to get done? But in fact, it’s really just beginning when something gets bought. So, those four; contact, subscriber, lead, purchase.

Austin: Yeah. The reason that I think the labels are useful too is because each of those forms has a slightly different outcome, right? So, for a subscribe form, the expectation of the user is, they’re being added to your email list and now we’ll be receiving whatever emails you send out. It could be a newsletter, could be blog updates or podcast updates, it could be general offers and promotions about the things that you’re doing. But people are just saying that I want to hear from you, generally speaking. With a lead magnet, there’s a specific thing that they’re getting. So, while they still may be added to your normal email list where they’re going to receive the ongoing emails, you’re offering them something specific in exchange for that email address. 

So, what’s different about the lead magnet subscribe form is that you have to deliver the thing that they ask for. In addition to that, a lead magnet by definition should create a more qualified lead than just a general subscribe form, right? Somebody who submits a subscribe form, I just love your content and want to see it. But if you’re building a lead magnet in a smart way, I guess you could say, then what that means is that by having their interest in that lead magnet, they should be inherently more qualified based on that interest than a general subscriber. And then a contact form; somebody just wants you to chat with them. 

So, forget the email marketing stuff, they’re saying, hey, talk to me. And usually that means a sales conversation is about to be had, so you’re going to prioritize a one-on-one communication with that person. And, obviously, a purchase form means that now they’re a customer of some kind, so not only are you probably adding them to email marketing, not only are you adding them to, maybe, a more one-on-one, sort of, nurturing environment since they’ve taken a step depending on what you’re selling, obviously.

But you also want to track the actual purchase, as you were mentioning, how about how much money they made and when it happened. And then, theoretically, what do you need to do to fulfill whatever it is that they purchased, right? So, each of these major categories of forms has a different outcome that you’re looking for, and if you can be clear about what category of form that you’re working on an automation for fits into, then you already should have a basic understanding for what needs to happen after the form is submitted in order to do it really well. So, there are the labels and some extra context.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Austin: I think we probably covered that, fair enough, right?

Taylorr: Yeah. The one thing I think I’ll add is for some people, right? You guys may be using meeting, calendar embeds on your website over a contact form or maybe your contact form is slightly buried to encourage people to book more meetings with you. For the sake of our conversation here today, we’re going to bundle those two things up. So, if you’re using a standard contact form and then you schedule a meeting after, fine. If you use a meeting form like Calendly or ZoHo bookings or whatever, then that’s going to be considered a contact form for the sake of labels throughout the rest of our examples.

Austin: Yeah. An even better contact form because you get to skip the step of having to schedule a meeting. Strong reason to believe that, that even; shortcut.

Taylorr: You want to work smarter.

Austin: Yes, exactly.

Taylorr: It is interesting, not to go down a rabbit hole here, but it is interesting how few of that we see, it really is a lot of contact forms. So, I don’t know, if you’re listening to this, test it, throw your meeting link up there instead one day and see what happens. If you get so many meetings, they’re not worth it, maybe go back to the contact form. But I’d be willing to believe those people who are booking a meeting, you’re saving lots of time and getting people to the finish line a lot quicker.

Austin: Yeah. Not to mention you don’t have to worry about people dropping off between submitting the form and scheduling a meeting, the outcome has already been handled. Yeah.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: Yeah. You should bypass business development. No, that’s a good point. And look, if you want the meta-layer of this, right? We’re the ones teaching this, go to Speaker Flow’s website, it will be challenging to find a contact form. It’s there, you could find it, but it’s not front and center. What’s front and center is Book A Meeting With Us, let’s jump right to the outcome that we’re looking for.

Taylorr: That’s exactly right.

Austin: Now to, sort of, tangent off of this a little bit before we move on to more of the tactical stuff, something that we just talked about is this distinction between somebody that’s going into the email marketing realm versus the one-on-one management realm, and what we’re talking about here is CRM. So, breakdown for people why those two things are not the same thing and maybe in what instances they should be the same thing.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure. So, think about a funnel, right? Let’s just stick to some common language we’re all familiar with, right? The whole idea of marketing, especially like, let’s think really top of funnel, so the very entry point to your world; it could be speaking, you could be putting a social post out there, you could appear on a podcast, you’re building awareness, basically. Now, all of these people coming in from the top of funnel, you’re doing one-to-many marketing and those people aren’t really your audiences yet, if you think about it. If you go and speak, you’re speaking in front of somebody else’s audience. 

If you’re posting on social, even though it shows you your follower count, you’re borrowing that audience from Facebook which trusts you to post or LinkedIn or whatever it might be. And same with a podcast, you’re borrowing an audience. So, the whole point, first and foremost, of some type of form subscriber lead contact or purchase is to move people from their audience into your audience. But you’re still going to be one-to-many marketing at that point, if they’re a subscriber or maybe they submit a lead magnet, these types of people, they kind of need vetting and you can usually go down one of two paths, but a standard subscriber, they’re just going to stay in the one-to-many realm until they raise their hand and give you some inclination that they might be interested. 

So, for example let’s say somebody subscribes and then maybe a few days later they finally get that lead magnet that tells you they have that problem. Well, now that person, let’s assume again the lead magnet is good, it’s telling us that we can solve a problem for them. That’s when we now want to maybe consider going to the one-on-one approach with that person and build a personal relationship with them since we now know what their problem is. For people who just want your content, it’s not worth your time combing through 5,000 email subscribers who have never engaged with you and doing one-on-one stuff. 

Ideally, you have mechanisms like a lead magnet or a contact form that then says this person is qualified for one-on-one. So, the whole idea of the funnel is that you’re moving from first taking other audiences and turning them into your audience, then continuing the one-to-many marketing until people give you some insight that say this person is qualified for one-to-one interactions. And that’s how you really build a strong inbound type of machine because you’re constantly finding new audiences, you’re marketing to them regularly and they’re turning into one-on-one interested people.

So, for the most part, anybody that submits a subscriber form or a lead magnet, they’re always going to be on the one-to-many list, so your regular newsletter, the thing you’re delivering for them. But the only asterisk is that with lead magnets, if you’re doing them right, ideally you take those people and also initiate one-on-one outreach to book a meeting. Then with contact form and purchase automations, we’ll get into this a little bit later, but those people are already ready for one-on-one, except if you’re selling a really low value product on the purchase side, and the goal is to continue to sell those. But we’ll unpack those weeds more specifically later. The main takeaway is you want to be thinking about your marketing engine from an inbound perspective as shifting from one-to-many to one-to-one based on key events that happened.

Austin: Yeah. That was beautiful.

Taylorr: Think I summed that up right?

Austin: Oh, yeah, for sure. Well, I love that you made the distinction too, that it’s a pattern, it doesn’t mean that it’s always that way; context matters an awful lot. Here’s another scenario where I think it makes sense for you to think about the distinction between these two layers. And this is specifically, we’re Speaker Flow, so if you’re listening to this, probably standing on stages is a part of your thing, it’s oftentimes that the end user of your product or service, meaning getting up onstage, the end user of that isn’t always the economic decision maker. 

The best contrast here is going to be something like an association event versus a corporate event. If you’re getting hired by a corporation to go in and speak at an internal meeting, most likely you’re speaking to a bunch of employees at that company and employees aren’t probably going to buy a keynote from you. That’s not always true, but most of the time an employee isn’t going to buy a $10,000 keynote from you, right? The company buys the keynote from you. And so, if you’re opting-in a bunch of people from your audience, which you can definitely do with a website form, you don’t want those people to be mixed in with the high-ticket sales people, right? 

So, we’re parsing them away from those high-ticket decision makers so that we’re not cluttering up our database. The contrary to this, though; to show the distinction that not all audiences are decision makers. If you go speak to an association, probably every one of those people that are sitting in the room there have their own businesses that can hire you to do something for them. So, those people may very well need to go into both email marketing and into the CRM, meaning the one-on-one versus the one-to-many thing so that you can sell something to them. So, you have to take into mind context here, everything that Taylorr and I are saying is true from a general perspective, but this is where it makes sense to work with somebody like Speaker Flow because we can help you to teach you this layer.

Taylorr: Shameless.

Austin: Shameless plug, just saying.

Taylorr: Shameless, geez.

Austin: Yeah. But really, though; you have to think about it from the perspective of the customer journey. I think that’s the main takeaway here.

Taylorr: Yeah, that’s right.

Austin: Okay. So, let’s get specific. Why doesn’t somebody submitting a contact form go into email marketing?

Taylorr: Yeah, it just boils down to permission. When somebody’s submitting a contact form, they’re expecting one-to-one stuff, they haven’t necessarily opted into anything. Now, you could have a checkbox, which I know a lot of you do, on your contact form that says I want to have regular updates. I think you should give them the option, because if they can stick around in your back pocket, it’s just another opportunity for you to indicate who you are and add value and all of those things. But fundamentally, they just haven’t opted-in for that specific thing. They’ve opted-in for you to reach back out one-on-one and try and have a conversation with them. They haven’t necessarily opted-in for your welcome series and your biweekly newsletter and yada, yada, yada. 

Especially with high-ticket decision-makers, you just want to really respect their inbox and the things that they’re subscribing to. You can leave a foul taste in people’s mouth by just automatically adding them to your list. And then imagine they get your welcome series the second after they submit a contact form, well, they’re going to very quickly regret that decision potentially, because they didn’t necessarily opt-in for it. So, again, it just boils down to permission. We just want to make sure, especially with the type of buyers we work with that we’re respecting their bandwidth as much as humanly possible.

Austin: Yeah, that is so true. And respect really is the dominant thing here in the west, meaning in the US and Canada in most ways. But it’s actually not even just a respect thing in other parts of the world, we’re talking GDPR is the one that everybody references and because it’s the most stringent. But in European countries, and if you have people that come to you from Europe regularly, you really need to be aware of this. You have to explicitly state and the word explicit is the technical word that they use; explicitly state that you’re going to add somebody to your email marketing list if you do that. 

And the reality of getting hit with some, sort of, GDPR violation; though, I’ve never actually seen that personally play out. There are stories of people getting hit with gigantic seven-figure fines for violating that condition of adding a checkbox that says I consent to being added to your email marketing list. So, it’s a best practice from the respect perspective no matter where you’re at in the world, so do that. If you work with Europe, you have to do that because it’s a law. People need to be aware of that.

Taylorr: That’s exactly right. Totally agree. And this also is the exact reason, the segue kind of down the email marketing path, right? You don’t use email marketing tools for cold outreach, the same reasons why you have to opt people in when you’re importing lists and so on, the double opt-in procedure, so many people really just want to spray and pray and that is just the fastest way to destroy relationships and to Austin’s point, potentially get into some trouble with the way you’re currently managing your lists. So, again, best practice, both out of the legal perspective but also just the respect side of it too.

Austin: Yeah. Our clients deserve that too. I think we all inherently feel that, and this is a great way to demonstrate that that’s actually the truth. So, not to mention, from the perspective of somebody submitting the contact form, it’s a little bit jarring to submit a contact form and then shortly thereafter receive some generic email not referencing at all the thing that they communicated about.

Taylorr: What they did. Yeah, it doesn’t match the customer journey.

Austin: There’s dissonance. Yeah. You really want to think about the experience of the person. So, there’s kind of another component here too, though, right? Because a lot of people, okay, so anytime you’re going to communicate one-on-one with somebody, one of the first initial steps people will take almost certainly is an email that goes out, right? Maybe if you’re really proactive and more power to you, if this is the case, you pick up the phone as soon as that contact form submission hits you. In fact, there’s reason to believe that a seven-minute window after that contact form submission is the best possible time to get in touch with them. 

So, if you’re not in the habit of just picking up the phone and calling somebody when they submit your contact form, I would consider changing the priority level of doing something like that. But if an email is going to go out, then it stands to reason that we could still create some type of automated email to go out for the sake of a contact record. Certainly though, there are pros and cons to everything, so maybe you could speak a little bit to why or why not somebody would want to use an automated email that gets sent out when somebody submits a contact form.

Taylorr: Yeah, well, honestly, it just boils down to acknowledgement, right? So, I think this works with any of the four forms we’ve listed. So, if you can think about somebody just subscribing, hey, first name, thanks so much for subscribing, here’s what you can expect. We’ll be sending out emails every so often, in the meantime, here are some cool resources, stay tuned. Something like that. Or if you have a lead magnet, hey, first name, here’s a lead magnet you wanted, let me know what you think, piece. Phrase that differently. A contact form, right? Like, Hey. 

Let’s take Austin’s pristine example, I’m going to call you, right? You can say, hey, first name, just wanted to let you know, got your contact form. I’ll be calling you here generally within the next 10 minutes. If I don’t, it’s usually because I’m away and I’ll be responding as soon as I possibly can. And so, even if you intend on calling them, not letting them linger after a form has been submitted and just acknowledging it can be really helpful. And same with a purchase. I don’t know about you guys, but when I go shop online and it’s not from places I trust because it’s the only place in the world that has what I’m looking for and I don’t get a purchase confirmation email within 30 seconds, I’m kind of questioning whether or not I chose the right place to buy from. And that is the last thing you want after somebody buys from you. 

And so, acknowledging their purchase, here’s your invoice, here’s how you access whatever you bought, we’ll be shipping or we’ll be adding you to our course. These types of things that kind of keep people in the loop absolutely necessary to acknowledge the action they just take. So, based on that, I don’t believe there’s a single scenario where an autoresponder shouldn’t be in place, even if it’s to let them know that the more personal actions are going to be happening soon; a phone call or a meeting or what have you.

Austin: Yeah. I totally agree. One of the reasons that we hear people want to not use a scheduling tool instead of an actual contact form is because it feels less personal. And I agree with that to some degree, right? We’re pushing people into technology; though, I think that it’s becoming the industry standard and not that many people in reality actually care about that. But an autoresponder is an interesting opportunity to give somebody that option where if you don’t already just push them toward your booking link, you can say, Hey, I jump on this as fast as I can. You’ll be hearing from me in the next 10 minutes. If you don’t, it’s because I’m not around. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. 

And/or, if you want to just skip that step and just schedule some time with me, here’s my link to do that. And that way it’s not that you’re just forcing them to take the transactional action right away, but you’re just presenting that as an option to save everybody some time if somebody so chooses. That way, you still kind of get the best of both worlds where they feel like it’s very personalized, but you’re still allowing automation to help you if that feels comfortable to the person on the other end.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Austin: Some of the creative thinking here can merge the worlds together, I think, if you’re smart about it.

Taylorr: For sure. Well, I want to go down the path of the booking link conversation, just a little bit here, because I don’t think we talk about this enough, but I think that’s the biggest objection we get is it’s not as personal, right Let’s say somebody emails you, you say, here, book a link to my calendar. Yeah, that’s not personal, right? Or it doesn’t feel as personal. But, let’s think about the value that a link has for both of you. That person doesn’t have to then ask you, oh, what times are you available? Rather than you assuming that they’re going to send you times and then you don’t have to play the calendar battleship game and then send off an invite, right?

If you think about your clients, it’s a lot better for them to just book a meeting on a calendar that shows you the conflict, because as far as your customer journey goes, you’re eliminating steps. So, while it may not feel as personal to you, it’s valuable to the client because, again, if we go down the respect path here, you’re respecting their time and you want to make this as quick as possible for them. And so, if you have a scenario where somebody wants to schedule a meeting with you and you feel like it’s impersonal, while it’s probably just because of phrasing. And so, one thing that has worked really well for us is just giving people the option. 

So, let’s assume a contact form doesn’t get submitted, somebody just directly emails you, you get a referral from somebody, right? Another gate comes through. Well, basically, after you kind of respond back to their initial questions or whatever, the call to action can be as simple as, hey, here’s a handy link to my calendar, if you want to schedule a time or if you’re down for an old school game of calendar battleship, let me know and I’m happy to do that. And so, to Austin’s point, you’re giving people the options so you’re meeting them wherever they’re at. 

And that’s the whole point of optimizing your customer journey is it doesn’t really matter what path they take, it’s not a black and white scenario; you only use meeting links, you only do things manually. You’re just meeting the client where they’re at and that naturally will just progress the relationship faster than if you kind of have a box that you put everything in.

Austin: Yeah, definitely. Well, I think this really comes down to being easy to work with at the end of the day.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: And it’s so funny because everybody assumes, and again, I’ll choose this from the context of the speaking lens because this is what we hear the most often; it applies to every other revenue stream as well. But the thing that gets you booked is being the best speaker. And that’s not false, definitely you need a good product to be referable like that helps tremendously. But if you go ask a meeting planner, most of the time they’ll tell you that they’re less interested in the content being amazing, because it kind of should just be assumed. But the people that are the most referable are the ones that are easiest to work with. 

And David Newman talked about this in a previous session where you’re treating people like clients through the sales process. That same principle applies here, but from an ease of working with somebody perspective. Because from the very first instance they hear about you or see about you, they’re taking in information and using that to develop an opinion about you. And so, you taking into account how you can make it as easy as possible for somebody to work with you or try to begin that relationship to work with you means that you’re setting the tone throughout the rest of the customer journey that you’re easy to work with. 

And so, from front to back, you’re awesome; you don’t want to just be awesome after somebody becomes a client, you want to be awesome during the entire time. And the way to do that is to remove as much friction as possible throughout each step of that customer journey. So, if you want to make more money, be easier to work with, that’s a good rule of thumb.

Taylorr: Yeah. For sure. It’s honestly the core premise of this conversation; somebody submits a form, you acknowledge them properly, you put them in the right bucket, you nurture them on an ongoing basis, either one-to-many or one-to-one. You’re setting the precedent that you value the relationship. Whereas many forms like a subscriber form, it just shows them, thanks you’ve been added to the list. And then no one sends out their emails on a regular basis, and so that person is just left hanging. 

And so, if we find those spots where we can be as easy as possible to work with, even as simple as a website form, you’re just setting that expectation and then that is already a differentiator into so many other people who they’re submitting. Let’s play a scenario for a second. I’m an event planner, I’m looking for a leadership speaker, right? Maybe I don’t have bureau connections or I have a team working on the background on that, but I’m curious about doing my own research and maybe hand selecting some people. Chances are I’m going to go to five different websites, I’m going to submit five different contact forms, I’m just copying and pasting all of the event information, right? Because there are a few people I’m interested in potentially talking with.

 So, you can pretty much assume if one person is submitting your contact form, you’re not the only one that they might be interested in. So, those other four people who don’t acknowledge afterward, who don’t pick up the phone immediately when a form got submitted, those other four people are completely off the table in that person’s mind when you said, hey, Susan, thank you so much for submitting the form. I’ll call you within the next 10 minutes, if you don’t hear from me, I’m doing other things, I’ll be in touch soon. Then you pick up the phone and you call that person; immediately that’s a differentiator. It has nothing to do with your content, it just shows you that you have your stuff together. And that’s quite honestly the whole point of business systems. So, I’ll get off my soapbox, but I really want to reinforce that idea.

Austin: That’s it, that’s the show.