Leads

Not all customers are ready to buy straight away. Especially in B2B scenarios, having an efficient way to capture and process leads can form an integral part of your online and offline sales process.

With Pakk, you use forms to capture leads and bring them into the system. Here's how it works.

Form Page

Forms are a website-level entity, just like posts or pages - in fact, in many ways, they are just like a page in that they live at a particular URL and display customisable text to the user. Most of the same controls that pages have are available on forms: header customisation with colours and images, title and subtitle, SEO fields and body text. So, when creating a form, you are essentially creating an information page first and foremost. What should you include on this page?

• a clear description of the advantage of registering

• what will happen next, after registering

• a catchy call-to-action

Form Type

Forms offer a predefined set of fields and post-submission flows based on their type. Here are the form types currently available:

• Wholesale Lead: creates a new customer record, marks as a 'lead', marks as 'wholesale'

• Retail Lead: creates a new customer record, marks as a 'lead'

Form Configuration

As well as the basic configuration, which is similar to that of a page, forms offer a number of additional setup options:

• enable subscription: will show a checkbox allowing the lead to opt into future publicity. The text that is displayed next to this checkbox is customisable too, so be clear about why they might like to check the box and what you'll send them

• thank you text: the message that is shown to users after they submit the form

• email: a fully customisable email message that can be activated or disactivated, that is sent to users after registering. Use this as a first stage in the customer onboarding process.

Displaying Your Form

Once you've created and configured a form, it's time to display it somewhere. The usual web enabled and websites fields are available to choose which webstores you want the form to apply to, so set those first. At this point, the form will be available at /form/{slug} (or the translated equivalent), so can be linked to from all the usual places: header menu, footer menu, homepage blogs, posts, pages...

What Next?

Well, that's up to you. Pakk doesn't pretend to be a fully featured CRM, but the forms feature gives you the building blocks of a lead generation system that is totally integrated with the rest of your business and can help you turn leads into customers. In fact, in Pakk, leads really are customer records, they just have a different status because they have never placed an order. Once a lead places an order, they will no longer show as a lead. Here's how you might complete your lead pipeline:

• set up the auto-email that is sent once the form is submitted to include useful onboarding information and a clear description of what will happen next

• use the 'leads' list view in the 'customer' menu to keep a tab on leads that have registered and not converted

• design an internal process to follow up with leads after a certain amount of time

• use the in-built colour coding system to track leads through different stages of the pipeline

• mark trade leads as 'wholesale' so they can be tracked separately

• apply custom pricing schemes to leads that you want to have discounted prices