HOW TO: LEAD GENERATION

Web-to-Lead in Salesforce

Attracting visitors to your website is a critical part of digital marketing. Once they’re on your site, don’t just let them visit once and leave. You can make the most of your web traffic by turning visitors into new leads for your marketing and sales teams to work. That’s where forms come into play.

Directing visitors to a form on your website where they enter information about themselves and their interest in your offerings is an easy and powerful way to turn them into leads. A well-designed form can capture key information about visitors, including demographics and specifics about their interest in your products and services. This marketing and sales technique is called web-to-lead.

Web-to-lead: The process of using a website form to capture visitor information and store that information as a new lead in Salesforce.

Salesforce lets you easily create web-to-lead forms that capture information about visitors to your website. The information is automatically stored in new lead records in your Salesforce install, and the lead can then be scored, qualified, and routed to sales reps. From there, you can redirect visitors to other pages on your site, send automated email follow-ups, and start them on customer journeys.

We’ve gathered up some great resources so you can learn more about web-to-lead in Salesforce. Some of these resources also touch upon important related topics, including data management and handling email from within Salesforce.

Web-to-Lead Training in Trailhead

Trailhead: Direct Your Reps to the Best Leads
Learn to automatically route quality leads to your sales reps by setting up lead scoring to work with web-to-lead. Salesforce’s automated lead scoring can take incoming leads from web-to-lead and score them based on factors including demographics (company size or industry) or actions the person has taken (visited your website, downloaded an e-book, or filled out a form). Build an automated pipeline of quality leads for your sales teams.

Trailhead: Convert and Assign Leads
This step-by-step guide to setting up criteria-based lead assignment rules in Salesforce is great for assigning new leads captured using web-to-Lead. Leads created via web-to-lead are, by default, owned by the administrator who set up the intake form. Leverage the power of automation by setting up Salesforce to assign leads to the right owners based on criteria, such as where the lead is located, which industry they’re involved in, or the type of products they’re interested in.

Trailhead: Send Email Through Salesforce
Let your users send email from Gmail and Office 365 through Salesforce for easier communication with contacts captured via web-to-lead. Leveraging email through Salesforce can reduce context switching, which helps reps stay focused on their leads and deals without toggling to a different application.

Trailhead: Automate Onboarding with Sales Cloud PRM
Easily build a custom page highlighting your partner programs with clicks, not code. Learn to embed a web-to-lead form that captures information from interested partners. Get familiar with Sales Cloud PRM, a turnkey PRM app to make it fast and easy for companies to provide partners with everything they need to sell--all in one place.

Salesforce Documentation on Web-to-Lead

Official Documentation: Guidelines for Setting Up Web-to-Lead
Get Salesforce ready to gather information from your company’s website and automatically generate up to 500 new leads a day. Follow these easy steps to prep your Salesforce instance to handle special lead information, automated email follow-ups with new leads, automated assignment of new leads, and more.

Official Documentation: Generate Leads from Your Website for Your Sales Teams
When you set up web-to-lead, Salesforce captures prospects who provide contact information. You can also redirect prospects to other web pages that are critical to campaign success. Follow these step-by-step instructions to create a web-to-lead form, with spam filtering, in Sales Cloud.

Official Documentation: Integrate Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Form Handlers with Web-to-Lead Forms
Step-by-step instructions show you how to use Marketing Cloud Account Engagement form handlers with Salesforce web-to-Lead forms for campaign and source tracking with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s micro-level web analytics. Built on Salesforce CRM, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement helps users increase sales revenue and marketing effectiveness through marketing automation.

Trailblazer Community

Q&A: How Do I Get Started with Web-to-Lead?
Learn how to build a website form to capture contact information into your lead records. Includes details for implementing an email template for auto response to new leads, using CSS and HTML to customize the look and feel of your form.

Knowledge Article: Update Web-to-Lead Endpoint URLs to Improve Performance
Step-by-step instructions insure your website is updated for the best web-to-lead performance. Includes details for web-to-lead form HTML code generation and testing prior to deployment. Also applicable to web-to-case functionality.

More Awesome Resources

Salesforce Developers:Prepare to Implement Web-to-Lead
Prepare your Salesforce install to add web-to-Lead functionality. Includes basic step-by-step instructions for enabling web-to-lead and generating the form for an HTML code, as well as links to more detailed examples and implementation guides.
 

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Web-to-Lead in Salesforce