You need to offer people something, whether a discount code or free content and this is your lead magnet. Your lead magnet could be a free trial, demo or toolkit. Or It may be a coupon, whitepaper, webinar, ebook or guide.

We’re going to show you how to get your lead gen form pumping the best leads into your pipeline. But first, what could go wrong with a simple form? A few things it seems.

Why your lead gen form might not be working

Form friction

Reduce the number of fields in your form. Make your copy clear and concise and always avoid jargon.

Lack of incentives

Try exclusive treats, discounts or time-limited offers to motivate users to take action.

Poor form placement

Always place your form above the fold so it’s seen instantly.

Technical issues with your form

Test your form across various platforms to make sure it’s working correctly on different devices or browsers.

Unclear value proposition on your form

Communicate what users will gain and meet those expectations immediately.

Lack of trust

Place proof points near (usually just after) forms such as testimonials, reviews, and trust certificates and badges.

Your content misses the mark

If your content fails to resonate with your audience, they aren’t going to complete a form.

Marketing psychology shows us what drives audience engagement. Today, we have a huge choice of lead-generation tools for building landing pages and forms or collecting data. Turtl is a long-form content creation platform that shows reader engagement metrics for lead-generation content.

Audience data helps marketers like us make better lead-gen content, and score and nurture leads effectively. The best lead magnets are built on reader data because these stand the best chance of attracting the highest quality leads.

Let’s look at all of the different types of forms, and who is doing them well.

Types of lead capture forms

We’ve got some great examples of creative copy and offers for every type of lead gen form. Let’s jump in.

Newsletter sign-up form

Uniqlo UK makes us want to “Join the club” and gives us a coupon for doing so. The only thing they ask for is your email address and birth date – so they can send you a treat. Nice work Uniqlo.

KOHL’S gives us 15% off for signing up and reminds us how they’re serving our best interests.

Contact forms can be fun

If you have a fun tone of voice, use it. Frida makes an ordinary contact form far more appealing.

Registration form

Event registrations, webinar sign-ups, or user accounts. These forms want your attention – and email.

SHEIN doesn’t want you to miss a reason not to register for an account. Fill out the sticky form on the right and they’ll regularly remind you of more reasons to shop with them.

Request a quote form

Ideal for service-based businesses, this form gathers the information needed to provide price estimates or quotes.

Survey, feedback or review form

Encourages users to provide opinions, insights or reviews, which can help improve and tailor your offerings (great for product-led growth), as well as gather valuable market data.

Exit-intent pop-up form

What can you do when a visitor is about to leave your website? Give them one last chance to make a connection.

PageFly knows you’re busy so offer convenience – while they collect your email.

Check out this masterclass in reasons to stay. The highlighted “get started” CTA is what OptinMonster would like you to do – and they’ll reward you with a chunky discount if you act. A secondary CTA covers more cautious inquiries. Both are backed by a sprinkling of trust points.

Checkout or order form

Gathers customer information during the online purchase process.

Contest or giveaway entry form

Encourages participation in contests or giveaways, often requesting contact information.

Social media lead ads

You’ll have seen lead ad forms in your feed. These usually auto-populate your information, making it easy to sign up or “learn more.”

Now we know what makes a great form, we need to know if our lead gen is doing the best it can do.

What’s a good form conversion rate?

A good conversion rate for lead generation forms typically falls in the range of 2% to 5%. This means that out of all the visitors who view your lead gen form, 2% to 5% should complete it by providing their information and becoming leads.

A “good” conversion rate varies depending on your industry, the quality of your traffic, and the complexity of the conversion process. Some businesses and websites may achieve higher conversion rates, particularly if they have highly targeted traffic, compelling offers, and user-friendly forms.

We advise you to benchmark your lead generation form’s conversion rate against your historical data and industry standards. And it’s super easy to work out your conversion rate, take a look.

Working out your form conversion rate

How many webpage visitors completed the form and became leads by providing their information? Then calculate the percentage.

Conversion Rate = (Number of Leads / Number of Visitors) x 100

For example, if 500 visitors came to the page with your lead generation form, and 25 of them completed the form and became leads, the conversion rate would be:

Conversion Rate = (25 / 500) x 100 = 5%

Many lead gen forms are about discounts or webinars, and many more use long-form content to attract leads – particularly in B2B. You can build long-form lead generation content in Turtl and bring higher-quality leads straight into your funnel. How? It comes down to data.

How to power form conversions for whitepapers, ebooks and digital brochures

If you want your thought leadership content, interactive ebooks, digital whitepapers, or online brochures to capture more leads, we can help.

Turtl helps you create digital documents. You get a full analytics suite, content benchmarking reports and content scoring to help you make impactful long-form content. We’re particularly good at helping marketers make lead gen, ABM and demand gen content because our analytics is based on big data (over 30 billion data points, in fact).

Every inch of Turtl is designed with user engagement in mind to drive content performance and reader data. We use data to help us build lead magnets with lead gen forms that capture and convert leads we know will most likely convert into a customer.

Let’s show you how lead gen forms work in Turtl. Putting content behind a form is called gating content. You can choose whether to gate your content or not, according to your goals.

You can gate content anywhere in Turtl

Gate one or more chapters of your content, anywhere you wish. If you choose a hard gate, your reader will need to complete their details to keep reading. We advise you to allow readers access to a couple of chapters to get them interested or tease by hiding a juicy piece of content behind the form.

Using hard or soft gates

You also have the option to allow the reader to dismiss the form without providing their details – i.e soft gating content.

Adding gates to the back page of your Turtl Doc

When you create a new Doc, the form on the back cover is enabled by default, which allows you to encourage your readers to sign up and hear more from you in the future.

But here’s the thing. You can see precisely what readers are doing in Turtl.

See exactly who signed up, and what else they did

Head to Known Readers in Turtl Analytics to see reader contact details and how each person interacted with your content – things like the number of reads, shares, and average read time. You can choose to view sign-up behavior if you integrate Turtl with your CRM.

Let’s check out Alexander. He’s a new lead who downloaded and read a lead magnet made in Turtl.

We can see what Alexander gets up to in Turtl Docs.

Alexander needs more content to read to push him along your sales funnel. Gently does it though, which part of the Doc did he like? Turtl shows you which content Alexander likes the most, what he shares, and how long he reads something for. You can place an event trigger to see anything you want about his behavior and push his activity into your CRM if you integrate Turtl. This makes it easy to score him – and send him the right content.

Using forms to capture leads is a small part of a good lead-generation strategy. What makes a big difference is how you use gated content to optimize your pipeline. If you use data wisely, you can do this from the top of the funnel and down.

Tip: Gating information you know your audience wants

What: A strategically gated lead generation form.

The gated lead generation form is located on a popular page within our Making your content count report. This page is all about content budgets – something we know interests our report’s audience. It’s a subject they genuinely care about and one that has a serious impact on what they can (and can’t) do from a sales and marketing perspective.

The hidden content

A well-written call-to-action form is also included on the back page of the report. (A final push to improve lead capture.)

Sign-up conversions so far are up 5.7% – higher than the average cited by Adoric – a conversion rate optimization platform.

And, if you’re interested, here’s the main report. It’s a good read.

Click to read The voice of the content marketer | Report (Gated Version)

Turtl is helping customers improve lead generation by providing an alternative, up-to-date format for lead generation content that’s typically published as a PDF. If you’re using formats that don’t provide analytics or data for your lead gen activity, you can try Turtl for free to see the difference we make.