DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Posts Tagged ‘SugarCRM’

If you want to invite your website visitors to take action, then chances are you are considering using a web based form. There are a number of added advantages to using a webform, that may not have already crossed your mind. For starters, spammers crawl the internet looking for  email addresses published on the site. They not only use it to spam your inbox but quite possibly sell your email address to make sure you ger even more!

It’s obviously better to use a web form to reduce the amount of spam. A webform also allows your visitors to quickly contact you from their browser, without having to sign into their email or start a new application.

Perhaps, most importantly though, a webform is the first stage in your site visitors journey through an engagement with you. To put it another way a webform can be used to put your customer data to work where you want it. If you design the form correctly you will have all the right information to get off on the right footing.

I’m going to introduce you to 3 different methods of creating webforms, all of them are low tech. Your choice will depend on what you want ultimately to do with the information once you have it. If your a programmer, you are probably used to spending half a day or more designing your own form and you may not like the idea of people doing it themselves in a fraction of the time.

Email Marketing Engine

Let’s start with Aweber. If you’re unfamiliar with Aweber it’s a low cost reasonably sophisticated email marketing tools with follow up capability. Like many email marketing engines, it has a form builder. The form builder in Aweber will allow you to build forms with full control over the fields, background and so on and will even allow light box effects and pop up forms like the one on this blog. Building a form is as simple as stepping through a wizard, which results in a snippet of code that you give to your webmaster or put on the site yourself. Easy. Because it has a follow up capability, you can use the form wizard to create a registration form for some give away content. This can be a simple but effective way to build a list around your topic area. You will also recognise this technique used in my giveaway area. The follow up email is a series of emails sent in a sequence that you configure and control. This means that if particularly useful technique also.

Web form to SugarCRM

The increasingly popular Customer Relationship Management solution has a form builder build into it from the community edition upwards. This is appropriate where you want your sales and marketing team to service leads from the web an bring them straight into your CRM system. The advantage of this kind of approach is that that you can qualify the lead and then assign the lead to a sales person on a round robin basis. The lead can be tracked and reported with the rest of your pipeline and you can also see by lead source where the lead originated from and how your website is performing.

Web forms for Joomla!

This is an extension for the popular Content Management System, Joomla! This is one of the simplest ways to build forms into your website with the added advantage of CAPTCHA. (those annoying code that you have to fill in to verify you’re not a robot) RS forms will allow you to work on your form from your Joomla admin consol. RS forms will simply send a notification to a specified email account with details of the enquiry. This is sufficient if you have a low level of enquiries but can become cumbersome if you then have to copy and paste large amounts of these to your other systems during the day.

These three methods are so low in cost and so easy to do, it’s hard to see why some web developers still insist on doing things the old fashioned way in code. If you’d like to know more about any of these methods, please don’t hesitate to contact me.