Salesforce Web to Lead – Can You Do Better?
When it comes to SaaS, there’s no bigger name than Salesforce in the industry. It has been at the pinnacle of the MarTech world for quite a long time. With all the features, capabilities, and conveniences on offer, it’s no surprise that they’ve remained on top for so long.
One of those features is Web to Lead, which allows you to collect leads from your website and inject them into your Salesforce CRM. However, this has some limitations.
In this article, we will discuss Web to Lead, how you can set it up, the benefits you’ll gain, and most importantly, how you can work around some of its limitations.
Source: SFDC Point
What is Web to Lead in Salesforce?
Salesforce Web to Lead feature helps businesses to capture leads directly from their website. These captured leads are then automatically transferred to Salesforce’s CRM (customer relationship management) system.
The Web to Lead feature works by generating a custom HTML form that can be embedded on a website. When a visitor fills out the form with their details and submits it, the data is sent directly to Salesforce CRM, thus, creating a new lead record.
Such workflow automation offered by Salesforce eliminates the need for manual data entry within the CRM allowing businesses to save time and resources.
Feature Overview of Web to Lead
1. Customizable Form Fields
Every business has different objectives and requirements. Different designs, different fields are often required based on your strategy. Shorter forms for more leads, longer forms for more qualified leads, for example.
Businesses can create forms that are tailored to their specific needs. They can add custom form fields to capture the specific type of information they require from potential leads. The ability to customize forms is a must have feature for any webform tool.
2. Automatic Lead Creation
Manual data entry, CSV uploads, and lead creation will definitely hold you back and waste resources. Thankfully, with Salesforce Web to Lead, you don’t have to worry about any of it.
With this feature, all it takes is for a visitor to fill out a web-to-lead form on your website. As soon as he submits the form, the data is directly fed into the Salesforce CRM, and a new lead is created. Thus, your business benefits by leveraging an automated workflow.
3. Integration with Salesforce Workflows and Automation
It is safe to say that a lot of things work like magic with Salesforce. We have their workflow and automation capabilities to thank for that. You should be thrilled to know that you have access to all of these when using Salesforce Web to Lead.
The possibilities are endless. You can automatically route a lead to the appropriate sales team or add it to a specific marketing campaign. Conversely, you can set up an automated workflow that will follow up with every new lead as per instructions.
4. Tracking and Reporting
Salesforce’s tracking and reporting capabilities enable you to monitor the success of your web-to-lead forms. Based on the insights generated, you can optimize your forms or lead capture mechanism and attain the desired level of performance.
Having analytical data for your lead acquisition sources within your CRM makes for a seamless experience.
Advanced Analytics
Salesforce’s Web to Lead feature, while primarily designed for lead capture, can indirectly aid in advanced analytics in the following ways:
Data Uniformity: Since the data captured is directly fed into the Salesforce CRM, it ensures a uniform structure, which is crucial for advanced analytics. Inconsistent data can cause problems during analysis.
Real-time Data: The feature allows real-time data collection, which means that your analytics are always based on the most recent and relevant data, improving the accuracy of your predictions and insights.
Customer Journey Mapping: By capturing the initial point of contact with a lead, you can start to map the customer journey from the very beginning. This data can feed into advanced analytics to understand patterns, trends, and behaviors of your leads from the initial point of interaction.
Segmentation: The data collected can be used for segmenting customers based on various attributes like source, location, etc. This can further feed into advanced analytics, allowing for more personalized marketing efforts and improved customer experience.
Creating and Enabling Web to Lead Forms
Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating and enabling web-to-lead forms in Salesforce:
The first step in the process of creating a web-to-lead form is to navigate to the Web-to-Lead menu. From your Home menu, click on the Search Bar on the top left side and type Web to Lead.
Click on the Web-to-Lead option under the Marketing Menu. This will open the Web-to-Lead setup page.
2. Create a New Web-to-Lead Form
In the Web-to-Lead setup menu, check if you have the Web-to-Lead feature enabled. If not, Click on the Edit button and Enable it.
Once enabled, you can click on the Create Web-to-Lead Form button. This will open up the Web-toLead Form Builder menu.
3. Customize The Web-to-Lead Form
The next step requires you to customize the form as per the requirements of your lead generation campaign. You have a list of available data fields to choose from. Note that a few data fields are selected as default.
You can change these fields as per your needs. Add all the data fields for which you wish to collect information from your leads. You even have the option to add a custom data field in the mix.
4. Fill in the Other Required Fields
Some additional fields need to be filled in before you can generate the web-to-lead form. These fields include options such as the Return URL, include reCAPTCHA, Enable server failback, and Default language.
These additional options let you tailor a customer’s experience furthermore. The reCAPTCHA option helps eliminate spam entries in the web form.
5. Generate and Deploy the HTML code
Once you have customized the form, click on the “Generate” button at the bottom of the page. This will generate the HTML code for your web-to-lead form.
After generating the HTML code, copy the code and paste it into the HTML of the website page where you want the form to appear. Save the changes to the website page and test the form to ensure that it is working correctly.
That’s it! Once you have followed these steps, your web-to-lead form will be up and running.
The Drawbacks of Web to Lead Forms
Okay, it is now time to get into drawbacks and limitations. Yes, while Salesforce Web to Lead is a powerful feature, it’s not perfect. Here are a few common drawbacks to Web-to-Lead forms:
1. Limited Lead Tracking
Web-to-lead forms in Salesforce can only capture basic lead information such as name, email address, and phone number. It used to be enough in the earlier days.
However, at present, information such as lead behavior, interest, and intent have become important. Businesses can opt for a more targeted and personalized marketing approach using these insights.
Sure, you can get some of these benefits by using Salesforce’s marketing offerings but that would significantly add to your costs.
2. Incomplete Lead Data
There is always that risk that a visitor may not fill out the complete form or fill it out accurately. This could spell problems for you as it degrades the quality of your pool of leads which may need additional resources to fix.
3. Lack of freedom to use third-party form providers
Salesforce is a veteran in the marketing tech world which means a lot of its platform components are outdated in terms of UX. You may require a Salesforce expert to set up and manage everything for your business at all times.
4. Limited Integration Options
Salesforce Web to Lead is specific to the Salesforce platform. This is great news if your business already uses Salesforce.
However, this also means you’re limited to Salesforce’s native integrations. This can be a hindrance if you don’t use Salesforce extensively and have other specialized marketing tools in your tech stack.
How can Salespanel get better Lead Data to Salesforce?
First of all, Salespanel captures leads from any javascript form on your website. This could be the Web to Lead form or third-party forms (Mailchimp, Typeform, Jotform, you name it). Absolutely no integration is required! And, for every lead that is captured, Salespanel tracks their activities both before and after the acquisition and tracks the entire customer in real-time. This leads can be synced to your Salesforce CRM directly or segmented or scored first before they are sent. Salespanel natively integrates with Salesforce which makes all of these a total breeze without you getting stuck with the Salesforce’s forms or pay extra for premium marketing features (scoring, etc.)
This process takes place quickly which means your sales team can promptly follow up with leads which drastically improves the chances for a conversion. Moreover, all of this collected data is of tremendous help for accurate marketing attribution.
Contact us to learn more!
Conclusion
Salesforce’s Web to Lead feature serves as a formidable tool for businesses looking to streamline their lead generation process, offering customizable form fields, automatic lead creation, integration with Salesforce workflows, and tracking and reporting capabilities. The leads captured through these forms are seamlessly transferred to your CRM. However, it’s essential to recognize its limitations. If you want to use third-party forms, live chat, helpdesk, etc. without any hesitation and want to retain tracking capabilities, a tool like Salespanel can help.
Sell more, understand your customers’ journey for free!
Sales and Marketing teams spend millions of dollars to bring visitors to your website. But do you track your customer’s journey? Do you know who buys and why?
Around 8% of your website traffic will sign up on your lead forms. What happens to the other 92% of your traffic? Can you identify your visiting accounts? Can you engage and retarget your qualified visitors even if they are not identified?
