This week we released an update to GoSquared Forms so you can now create entirely custom forms, with any fields you like, in your own brand colours – all through drag, drop and click.
Why do we think this is important? Well, the relationship you have with your customers is hugely influenced by the way that relationship begins. We know the importance of onboarding, but what about the steps before a customer starts to figure out your product?
These moments of introduction overlooked by most businesses who settle for a quick and dirty ‘join form’ and boring sign-up confirmation emails.
If you fall into this category…don’t worry! Just keep reading 😉
The status quo (and how to change it up)
So, about those generic join forms. You grab hold of your customers email address, first name, last name, maybe a phone number or job title…and then send them a ‘subscription successful!’ style email. Maybe you’ve personalised it using their first name, maybe not.
What if you could get so much more information than they entered into that form? Without asking them any more questions or adding extra friction in the form of more boxes to tick and fill.
We’re talking about two things here: enriched data, and behavioural data. All that good stuff that your customer is telling you, but that you aren’t listening to. Let’s start with some quick definitions.
Enriched data: additional publicly available data that you can add to your basic customer information.
Behavioural data: the exact, personal, journey that your customer took through your site from start to finish.
Why are they important? Simply, the more you can learn about who your customers are, how they interact with your product, and what they want – the longer you can retain happy customers.
Take every opportunity to learn about your customers
Knowing your customers is the foundation of your customer engagement strategy. Shouting into the void of your database with generic phrases looks and feels old fashioned, but more importantly is far less effective than a targeted and segmented strategy.
Knowing this, we built our Forms to automatically enrich the profile of every single lead with information found online, and their personal experiential history with your site and product. From the moment they click submit you get all of this information and can make smarter decisions about what to say to them and when to say it.
Let’s say your product could be used by both sales and marketing managers – you’ve got pages dedicated to the use cases of each and a sign up form on both of those pages. Those sign up forms ask exactly the same questions, but once they’re submitted your leads are funnelled into two separate funnels depending on which page they submitted the form.
You can tailor these email sequences to the use case you know that lead is interested in. Making your communications more personal, and more effective.
To really lean into the growth mindset – get interviewing your customers!
Balancing and enriching your digital data with qualitative storytelling direct from your customers gives you more clarity around the language to use, the problems to solve, and which use cases to highlight.
Customise the earliest experiences
Once you know who your customers are you can create an experience-led relationship with them that respects and includes their personal experience with your product.
The possibilities for customisation really are endless once you start paying attention to all this information that your visitors and customers are leaving on your website.
You could automatically direct leads from a company with more than 100 employees into a high-touch sales funnel. You might send a slower, more educational, sequence of conversion emails to leads who first found you via your blog. Or you might route leads of a certain industry type or job role into a more (or less!) technical onboarding sequence to save your customer success team time in hand-holding everyone through set up.
What you decide to do with your data will depend on the customer journey you are asking your leads to step into. How complex it is, how many variations and choices they will face, and how long it typically takes visitors to become customers.
Mapping out your customer journey is a great way to begin.
