Overview
SmartForms is a solution designed to help B2B focused organizations capture a wide variety of contact-level and firmographic information for leads coming in through the forms hosted your landing pages in real-time. The basic idea is that a client can visit one of your pages (eg. a Contact Us page) and fill out a fairly short form (minimum input from the user) while still providing you with all the data you need about the client and their company once the form is submitted (maximum output from LeadSpace). SmartForms allows for a quick and fluid form-fill experience for users visiting your site, which ultimately helps to drive your conversion rates and append all the data your teams will need to follow-up with clients quickly.
Found below is an example of what SmartForms might look like on a typical form (color and font are customizable). The dropdown deploying beneath the Company field allows the prospective lead to select their company based off a list LeadSpace has populated with it's top 5 potential matches. Should the user be unable to find their company on the list, they have the option of selecting "None of the Above". While the customer selecting their company from the list is always the best option, SmartForms is still able to supplementary data if no company is selected depending on the quality of data entered by the user into your other visible form fields.
How do I setup SmartForms?
Before going through how the SmartForms dropdown is populated, it's important to note how the product is setup. The setup experience is actually very simple and is detailed below.
1. A hidden field needs to be created in your Marketing Automation Platform for each SmartForms data point you would like to append. SmartForms offers a plethora of different data points that includes:
- Site, Headquarter, Domestic Headquarter and Global Headquarter company firmographic information (eg. Employee Count, Annual Revenue, Industry Information)
- Inferred Technology and Geo-location data
- Contact level data (job title, LinkedIn handle, etc.)
These hidden fields give the SmartForms data a place to populate as the user is filling out your form.
2.The hidden fields would need to be applied to a form that is listed on one of your landing pages.
3. A javascript tag would need to be added to that landing page to call the SmartForms API and begin populating data to your fields.
As long as these requirements are met, you should be all set. A big advantage of using the product is that it is able to integrate with almost any platform as long as SmartForms is able to find the fields on form load. Common integrations we support include Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, UberFlip and more!
How does SmartForms run and provide data?
You may be wondering how SmartForms actually delivers the data at this point. Below is an example of everything that would happen during a typical form fill-out with SmartForms setup on the page.
1. A new visitor to your web site (eg. John Smith) visits one of your registration pages. Once the page loads, your SmartForms javascript tag runs and makes an API call to LeadSpace.
2. Immediately after the page loads, SmartForms will do an IP address lookup for John and use this to help tailor the results shown in the company dropdown (eg. screenshot above was submitted from an Austin IP address).
3. As John continues to fill out the form, other visible field information is collected to be sent to LeadSpace. SmartForms will do a lookup on the email domain that is entered into the email address field. A legitimate business email address is a big help to our match engine, though if something like a gmail address is entered, SmartForms can still look at that data and provide the best results possible.
4. An inferred technology and contact enrichment match may also take place during the form fill-out if you have chosen to list any of these fields on your form.
5. Once the company field is interacted with SmartForms will display the best matching results based off what John provided. John can either see his company on the list and select it, or select "None of the Above" and enter their company name in manually. LeadSpace recommends that the Company field be below most of your other visible fields (First Name, Last Name, email) so that we can use this information to help give your users the best possible company match results.
6. By the time the form has been filled out, SmartForms has filled your SmartForms hidden fields with as much information as possible based on John's input and when the form is submitted, all of John's visible field data is submitted to your Marketing Automation Platform, along with the data that SmartForms has populated to your hidden fields.
Summary
SmartForms is a quick, powerful and easy to implement solution that is great for providing your Marketing and Sales teams with a large scope of reliable data for new inbound leads very quickly. Please reach out to the LeadSpace team with any additional questions you may have.