Unlock Your Site’s Potential With Automated CRM Web Forms

Don’t believe what the “gurus” tell you: lead generation is hard. It costs money, time, and a whole lot of effort.

So it stands to reason that business should do everything they can to at least make the process of actually capturing the leads they generate be much smoother and easier.

That’s where WORKetc’s web forms come in.

You can, for example, put a web form on your website that, when completed, will automatically create a new lead in WORKetc, auto-assign that lead to a member of your sales team, and assign it a specific part of your sales process.

These web forms automate the lead capture process so your sales team don’t get stuck manually entering data into the system.

Instead, they can immediately work on converting those leads into actual sales, and the sooner they close, the sooner you get paid.

Now, capturing leads may be the most obvious use for WORKetc’s custom web forms, but their sheer customizability actually lets you use them for far more than that.

Whether it’s for outside marketing, internal company use, or even hiring, you can use WORKetc web forms to perform a large variety of tasks. Here are a few examples.

Newsletter Subscribe Form

Newsletters have been around way before email came into being, but thanks to email they’ve continued to stay relevant even now.

It’s not just us old fogeys who remain viable email marketing targets, either. According to Adestra’s 2016 Consumer Adoption & Usage Study, teens and millennials actually list email as their preferred form of business communication.

Now, one of the easiest ways to build up a mailing list for your newsletter is by creating a simple newsletter subscribe form using WORKetc’s custom web forms and placing that form somewhere on your website.

All you really need for the form itself are name and email fields, although you can add other fields you want. Just remember: the simpler the subscribe form, the more likely someone will complete it.

And to help stay compliant, you may also want to add a checkbox for “Yes, please add me to your newsletter mailing list”.

You’ll definitely want contact records to be created in WORKetc for every subscriber, though, so in the Form Settings tab, make sure you have a check mark right next to the “Create New Contact Record” option.

And that’s basically it for the form creation part. You can go ahead and edit the CSS to make the form’s design fit your website’s overall look, and then embed the generated HTML code onto your website to add the form.

Next, you need to setup the mailing list. Simply go to Sales > E-Mail Lists and click create a new mailing list. In the new mailing list’s settings, navigate to the “Auto add from web forms” dropdown, choose the newsletter subscribe web form that you just created, and click add.

With the above settings, every single person who completes the newsletter subscribe web form will automatically be added to the new mailing list you created.

Third-party support form

Not every business can afford to have people fielding phone calls all day. If you outsource to a third-party support provider, however, you’ll still want them to use your own support processes and procedures.

Let’s say you’ve hired a customer support answering service to help out your in-house support agents during a particularly busy season. Now, they’re an answering service, so you don’t need them to actually provide support. You just need them to answer calls and create tickets that your support team can then address.

One option is to give the provider access to WORKetc so they can create the tickets there. For that, however, you’d need to have extra user slots just lying around. You’ll also have to spend some time teaching them how to use WORKetc’s support module along with your own support process.

There’s a way simpler solution, though: create a simplified support web form that they can use to take down customer info as well as details about their issue and then create a support ticket in WORKetc—all without actually giving them access WORKetc at all.

The form fields you use here will depend completely on your specific support process, but in general you’ll want the following:

• Nature of call
• Caller’s name (with fields for first and last name)
• Caller’s company
• Caller’s email, phone number, and country
• Message

If you want to keep track of who adds which tickets to WORKetc, you can also add a “Message taken by” field. You can also add a dropdown field for ticket priority.

Now this is the most important part: you’ll want to give whoever uses the form instructions that they can refer to anytime. To do this, you can use the “Instructions for User” field under the Field Settings tab.

For example, for the “Nature of Call” field, you might want to explain that whatever they put in there will be the subject line of the email that enters WORKetc’s support module.

You can also highlight which fields are most important. If you prefer to email those who call, for example, you can add an instruction to the caller’s email address field noting that it’s what lets you follow up with the caller, making it very important that only valid email addresses are entered into it.

Finally, it’s a good idea to add a field at the very bottom of the form that explains what happens after the third-party service takes the call. This is just a text field with a predefined value. Here’s a quick sample:

HR Hiring form

Just recently we published a new tip on WORKetc Insiders that showed how web forms can be used to make internal communications go much more smoothly by creating a work leave application web form. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do so by becoming an Insider here.

When you’re in hiring mode, you usually want to cast as wide a net as possible to find the best candidates for the job you’re filling.

So you hit up the major job listing sites and post there, send out hiring announcements on social media, and maybe even create a job openings page on your website.

You can have all applicants just shoot an email to your HR team, but why not make it easier for everybody involved to collect and track all applications by making use of a hiring web form?

The fields themselves will depend on what exactly you want to know about your applicants (aside from the standard name, address, email, and phone number, of course). Worth noting is that you can also add a file upload field to the web form in case you want them to include their CVs, resumes, or sample work.

Next, you can have WORKetc automatically send form completion emails to a specific person. This setting will be the heart of the hiring web form.

Under the Form Settings tab, you’ll find a checkbox for the option “Forward Employees Completed Forms”. Make sure that that option is checked then click on the “Settings” link right next to it.

In the window that pops up, you can choose which people to email; for the purposes of this custom web form you’ll want emails to be sent to whoever is handling your hiring process. It could be HR, it could be the CEO himself.

You can also customize the email subject in that window to make tracking all the applicants much easier.

Another thing worth noting is that when you set web forms to automatically create new contact records (which you’d want for the hiring web form so you can get in touch with promising applicants), you can also automatically apply tags to those contacts.

So for the hiring web form, you might want to create and apply a tag called “Marketing Applicant 2017” or similar depending on for which position you’re hiring. You can then use the applied tags to create a smartlist of all applicants and then just add or remove tags as you weed out the bad fits from the promising ones.

How do you use WORKetc web forms in your business? Leave a comment and let us know.