The beauty of having a personal website is that you can integrate many different online tools to help you promote your business and grow your audience.
You can use tools like Wufoo to collect lead information from potential client, downloadable ebook providers like ConvertKit to automate email marketing and content campaigns, and social media giants like Twitter and Facebook to reach and engage your audience.
If you’re looking for a simple tool to create online forms, collect leads, and send out email campaigns, Wufoo is the platform for you. It’s a free tool, which makes it unbelievably accessible for any business.
What Is Wufoo?
Wufoo is an app suite that connects your email, social media, and website tools in one place to create smart forms, automate email marketing, and track performance.
As a business owner, marketer, or enthusiast, you can use Wufoo to launch your own product or service and begin collecting leads right away.
What sets Wufoo apart from other similar tools is the fact that it connects your email and database marketing tools in one place. This allows you to automate marketing processes and gain real-time feedback on campaigns’ performance. You can also integrate Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and many other reputable email marketing tools to get the most out of your campaigns.
Some of the features of Wufoo include:
- A/B testing for web forms
- Lead tracking
- Email marketing
- Content creation
- Sales & marketing automation
- Social media integration
- Coupons & discounts
- Online ordering & sales
- Pricing plans
The Basics Of Setting Up A Wufoo Account
Simply head over to the Wufoo website and click the Get Started button to create a new account.
On the next page, you’ll see a form with questions about your company, products, website, and more. You can either use the default answers or enter information about your business or organization.
After you fill out the form, you’ll see a button that says Next.
Just below the button, you’ll see a gray bar with the link Share your lead magnet.
Click the link and you’ll be taken to a page which will let you choose between a Facebook or Twitter button to share your lead magnet.
If you’ve chosen Twitter, you can either enter your username or use the auto-filled box to type your message. After you’ve tweeted your lead magnet, you’ll see the number of people that saw your tweet and clicked on the link.
Facebook’s lead magnet setting is very similar except you’ll see a link to your website instead of a tweet. You can also click the blue button to the right of the gray bar to be taken to the Facebook Connect dialog box.
On the next page, you’ll see a dialog box with your website’s URL. Just above the URL box, you’ll see the green checkmark icon for Facebook and Twitter.
Click the green checkmark icon next to Twitter to go back to the Tweet you just posted. On the Facebook side, you’ll see similar information and an option to enter more details about your business. Once you’ve entered all the information you want to share on Facebook, click the button to the right to continue to the next step.
Step 2: Creating Your First Form With Wufoo
After you’ve set up your Twitter and Facebook accounts, it’s time to start collecting leads. On the Wufoo dashboard, click the + symbol in the top right corner to see your forms. You can have up to 25 forms in your dashboard.
From the forms menu, click the yellow icon to see lead generation tips. You’ll see four steps to follow to create a form:
- Step 2: Select the topic you’ll use to attract visitors to your site
- Step 3: Design your form to fit the topic
- Step 4: Create a landing page and add your form
- Step 5: Test your lead generation attempt and track results
Let’s start by selecting a topic for our lead generation form. The beauty of this topic is that it is a narrow enough to be specific, yet broad enough to appeal to a lot of people. Let’s assume that your topic is pets. This could be anything from pet health and fitness to dog grooming and training to cat care and behavior. Now that you have your topic chosen, let’s move to the next step.
Step 3: Design The Form To Fit Your Topic
Once you’ve selected a topic for your lead generation form, you’ll see a small preview of what your form will look like. The preview will be white unless you select a different color option from the pull-down menu.
For our pets topic, let’s dive into the details and design a form that will appeal to pet owners specifically.
Since most people reading this article are likely pet owners, we’ll use this existing knowledge to our advantage. Our goal is to create a form that will encourage potential pet owners to enter their contact info specifically for a pet related product or service.
We’ll start by looking at the most common questions potential pet owners might ask about pets.
In our example, let’s say that one of our goals is to grow our readership on Facebook. We’ve already set up a Facebook page for our pets’ blog, Petiquette, so we’ll use this existing account to develop our lead generation form. To do this, we’ll need to start by collecting the necessary information from our Facebook page:
- Name: Jane Smith
- Email: jane@smith.com
- Password: 123456
Now that we have our form data from Facebook, it’s time to move to the next step.
Step 4: Create A Landing Page And Add Your Form
Like we did with our Twitter and Facebook accounts, we’ll need to have a landing page to display our leads. Since we already have a blog for our pets and are using that blog’s URL as our lead magnet, we can simply head over to our blog’s homepage and click the Create A Landing Page button.
Once you’ve clicked this button, you’ll see a form that will look very similar to the one we designed in the previous step. All we need to do is add our lead magnet and enter the necessary information for our lead generation attempt.
For our example, let’s say that we’ve decided to use Wufoo for our lead generation attempt and have entered all the information from our Facebook account. Next, we’ll need to add a few more details about our business and products. To do this, we’ll need to scroll to the bottom of the form and click the yellow button which expands the form to show more details.
Now that we have our lead magnet and a form that meets our needs, it’s time to test our lead generation technique. To do this, we’ll need to click on the green button labeled Try It Now.
Step 5: Test Your Lead Generation Technique And Track Results
Once you’ve tested your lead generation technique and found that it’s performing well, it’s time to get serious about tracking results. Clicking the green button takes you back to the forms menu where you’ll see all your collected leads. From here, you can either open a new lead tab where you see your lead magnet or you can click the + symbol in the top right corner to add a new lead.
If you choose the second option, you’ll see a small dialog box at the top of the page which will let you know you’ve created a new lead. Just below the box, you’ll see the date the lead was created and the name of the person who the lead belongs to. Click the pencil icon to edit the lead or circle icon to delete it.
On the next page, you’ll see a table displaying all the leads collected from your lead magnet. Just above the table, you’ll see three columns. The first column is labeled Name, the second column is labeled Email and the third column is labeled Website.