Learn More About Lead Capture Software
What is Lead Capture Software?
Lead capture software helps businesses grow their customer databases by collecting essential data and contact information on prospective buyers. This software automates customer acquisition based on real customer data, provides new sales opportunities, and increases productivity. Typically, lead capture software uses landing pages, web forms, and website pop-ups to collect leads from visitor data. The main objective of this software is to target visitors that interact with your website and convert them into buyers by collecting the necessary data to maximize a business's marketing campaign efforts.
In addition to discovering new business opportunities by expanding a business's customer database, an essential feature of lead capture systems is its ability to integrate with sales and marketing software solutions such as marketing automation tools, email marketing software, or CRM platforms like Salesforce. These integrations allow the transfer of lead data between the company’s lead capture tools and sales or marketing software, which is integral when converting these opportunities into actual sales. Lead capture software provides a platform for B2B marketers to increase lead conversions as well as lead quality. It enables marketers to improve conversion rates and identify new customers. Marketers can use many techniques to capture leads like surveys, search engine marketing, and digital marketing campaigns, making it a dynamic software for businesses.
What are the Common Features of Lead Capture Software?
Lead capture software has some core features that can help users increase conversion rates, obtain quality leads, and generate new leads to nurture.
Lead database: Lead capture software helps create lead details from various sources and store the data in a centrally organized database. It assists in importing and exporting the accessible lead data to and from various formats like spreadsheets, plain text, etc.
Lead reporting: This software helps companies create lead lists to meet business requirements and track how marketing and sales efforts perform with lead reports. Lead reports show information about the status and source of leads and give insight into lead conversion rates.
Lead forms: Lead forms are typically hosted on lead capture pages. It is a feature on a business’s website that allows users to collect information from their visitors, thus making it easier for companies to contact interested buyers. These forms are usually created for specific uses like an email newsletter signup or e-book downloads.
Integration: Integrating qualified leads into sales workflows is an important step towards measuring power-driven data decisions. Integrating lead capture with sales and marketing solutions is important as it helps to transfer leads between them. Integration with other systems helps nurture leads along the sales pipeline and turns prospective buyers into customers, thus making this software a valuable resource to the company.
Chatbots: Lead capture chatbots aren’t only used as customer service channels but are also a great feature that can be added to a business’s website to collect visitor data 24/7. These chatbots are effective because they engage with customers in a conversational way as opposed to static forms, improving the customer experience.
Export or import:
Export or import options allow businesses to easily export lead data to formats like plain text, spreadsheets, etc., and import lead capture data into CRM software, email target lists, etc.
Identification:
Identification features allow businesses to distinguish qualified leads through website traffic. This feature identifies who is visiting their website and tracks the pages they visit and the time spent on each page.
Mobile:
Mobile-friendly lead capture capabilities are essential to maximizing data acquisition and conversion rates as many users access websites or marketing campaigns via their devices. It’s important for a business’s lead capture capabilities to also tailor to the mobile visitors. This typically starts with UX forms, landing pages, pop-ups, opt-in features, etc., for a user-friendly customer experience.
Personalization:
Personalization allows businesses to customize their lead capture tools with varying colors, timely call to action (CTA), custom form lengths, etc. This functionality helps increase conversion rates and generate more leads.
Reporting:
The reporting aspect of lead capture systems provides businesses with basic reporting tools and analysis of user engagement, entry and exit statistics, visitor journey, referral information, etc. Typically, this software offers customizable reporting features to capture the necessary website visitor data.
What are the Benefits of Lead Capture Software?
Expand customer database: Building a customer and prospective lead data database is an essential element of B2B lead capture software that helps generate new sales opportunities. Businesses can capture prospective customers' contact information in various ways, from social media marketing campaigns, website pop-ups, and CTAs. This data is important to understand each customer's potential and future visits.
Brand awareness and visibility: An essential aspect of lead capture software is its ability to collect data from visitors who are already interacting with your brand. This gives businesses the perfect opportunity to learn more about those visitors, customize their marketing efforts, and share information and content that leads care about.
Quality lead data: Not only do lead capture solutions increase the number of your leads, but also the quality. This software often obtains accurate data straight from the visitor helping businesses identify and target warm leads while they are interacting with your business. They also help companies identify the source of leads to better understand marketing strategies and effective marketing channels. Therefore, quality lead data is essential for companies to grow and expand as marketing efforts will be maximized to increase the conversion of targeted prospective customers.
Who Uses Lead Capture Software?
Sales representatives: Sales teams use lead capture tools to obtain new leads and prospective customers to contact. Instead of solely relying on cold calling, sales teams are provided with contact information of leads who have shown an interest in a business. This allows sales teams to focus more on closing deals with interested leads.
Marketing teams: Marketing teams can use lead capture software to optimize lead quality while focusing on lead conversion. It allows marketers to create customized landing pages, forms, and conversational pop-ups, increasing pay-per-click (PPC) conversion rates. It also helps these teams target and personalize their marketing campaigns based on the data acquired about visiting leads and conversion rates.
Freelancers and entrepreneurs: Lead capture software is used by freelancers and entrepreneurs to grow their audience, engage with potential customers, and acquire new clients. Lead capture solutions help monitor and manage areas like client interaction, sales analytics, and lead conversion. These tools make engaging with leads and contacts easier, helping them build a fast and professional connection with their candidates. This enhanced B2B engagement results in increased brand awareness and new business opportunities.
Software Related to Lead Capture Software
Related solutions that can be used together with lead capture include:
Lead intelligence software: Lead intelligence software helps companies make better decisions by providing valuable information about potential customers during the lead generation process. While lead intelligence software enables companies to validate verified lead data, lead capture software allows users to capture leads and identify new customers using sources like email and websites.
Lead mining software: Lead mining software helps companies increase new business opportunities by finding new leads in existing data or improving the quality of existing customer data. Conversely, lead capture platforms provide options to export and import lead data to and from various formats like spreadsheets, plain text, etc. Both software integrates with sales and marketing tools to provide better results in terms of sales.
Lead scoring software: Lead scoring software is used by companies to focus on lead opportunities that are more likely to convert into sales. This also enables the sales team to focus on and approach high-potential leads and customers. Marketing and sales use lead scoring software alongside lead capture to deliver optimal results as companies need to capture leads first before scoring them.
Sales intelligence software: Sales intelligence software is used by companies to improve sales processes. Sales intelligence software provides information about prospects, which can be combined with business data generated by companies. In contrast, lead capture systems create a list of potential customers based on information gathered about them.
Challenges with Lead Capture Software
Lead capture software solutions can come with their own set of challenges.
Managing warm leads: A warm lead refers to someone who has already shown interest in the company’s product or service either by following up through the company's website or by signing up for the email newsletter. Managing warm leads can be an issue because even though the need is identified from the prospect, it is difficult to understand the prospect’s will to spend and the decision to implement the new system. Using the right lead generation tools makes it easier to understand the right and useful information that the customers demand. Identifying visitors and converting warm leads into paying customers also becomes less challenging. Thus, managing warm leads also ensures high-quality leads.
Lead nurturing: Lead nurturing refers to the actions taken to understand leads and develop a relationship with them at each stage of the sales process to convert them into buyers. A common challenge is determining where the prospective customer is in their buying journey and the optimal length of time needed to run campaigns to turn them into buyers. Companies spend a lot of time and marketing efforts to nurture and convert leads, but that does not guarantee a sale. Instead of focusing on timing, it’s best practice for businesses to reinforce their campaign efforts on addressing prospective pain points and questions to increase conversion rates.
How to Buy Lead Capture Software
Requirements Gathering (RFI/RFP) for Lead Capture Software
Lead capture solutions are a necessary component of every business as it helps companies build their prospective customer database, expand their reach, and drive sales. As the market is filled with varying lead generation tools, purchasing the correct software that will capture sales leads effectively and efficiently based on your business structure and objectives is essential.
When considering purchasing any lead generation tool, buyers should first determine if lead capture technology is what they need, as there are many varying lead generation software on the market, from lead intelligence software, lead scoring software, lead mining software, etc. Buyers must identify their business pain points to determine the appropriate solution to solve their objectives. This will facilitate choosing the correct type of lead generation software.
Once a company clearly understands the problem and determines that lead capture software is the solution they need, they should align on what a successful lead capture campaign would look like. Gathering new contacts in your database may suffice if the focus is to grow brand awareness. However, if the aim is to convert those leads into immediate buyers, then a solution might be needed that offers additional features such as customer profiling, customer journey mapping, conversion rates, and marketing analytics and ROI.
One of the major questions companies should ask themselves is “where are my buyers” and “what would an ideal first touch point look like.” Lead capture platforms are most effectively integrated when they are capturing data at the right time and correct way. This may be immediately on the company’s landing page, a pop-up while the visitor is perusing a website, or even an email sent during the day. Making a list of software based on how a business would like to interact with its prospective customers is a perfect starting point.
Depending on the scope of the deployment, it might be helpful to produce a request for information (RFI), a one-page list with a few bullet points describing what is needed from a lead capture solution.
Compare Lead Capture Software Products
Create a long list
When creating a list of potential lead capture products, buyers should know how they would like to market to their leads. Lead capture software can vary in features from call tracking to advanced analytics; therefore, making a broad list based on a business's marketing structure and intended customer data is important.
Create a short list
Once a buyer has developed a list of products that meet their marketing needs, narrowing this down to three to five products will be ideal. Determining essential features and the most cost-effective product will help truncate the list.
Conduct demos
Lead capture product demos are an essential aspect of the buying process as it provides the buyer with a complete understanding of the product’s capabilities as well as how the software can integrate with the platforms a business already uses. Demos are the perfect opportunity to see how the short list of products stack against each other.
Selection of Lead Capture Software
Choose a selection team
As marketing and sales can use lead capture software, both teams should be included in the conversation. Since lead capture technology can be priced based on the number of users, including both teams will best determine the software that fits your business and financial needs.
Negotiation
Negotiation is an integral part when buying lead capture software, especially for businesses at the enterprise level. Since this pricing is typically based on the size and scale of your business, there is a lot more room for negotiation. For smaller to mid-level companies, there is an opportunity to negotiate for free trials, but some caveats may include limited features and leads.
Final decision
When making the final purchasing decision, the marketing and sales teams should have the most input while keeping the company-wide objectives in mind. Both teams would use the software the most for sales and marketing campaign efforts, so it’s safe to say that the final decision is theirs.
Lead Capture Software Trends
Artificial intelligence (AI)
AI is a growing trend among different lead generation software products. AI-powered tools extract leads from marketing and sales data. They help generate and convert leads easily using bots. AI-powered bots help businesses by using conversations between a company and its customers, thus making the buying process hassle free with automation products. Bots are better and faster than humans as they cater to customer support and help make a customer’s buying journey easy.
AI software can reduce cost and increase revenue by helping lead capture products gain leads without paying much as the leads are converted into sales. Lead capture products with AI can help small businesses and large corporations by supporting the sales and distribution process and making buying and selling leads less challenging. The new leads generated using AI can help companies save money and become more profitable.
