Have leads coming from your website? Do you know for sure that leads get added to your database and get the right follow up? When was the last time you tested your website forms?
Over the last few months, I’ve had 3 businesses reach out to me to say that they were missing leads from their website 🙁
Here’s the quick summary of the 3 businesses – all based in Australia and in different niches – medical, recreation and education:
- BUSINESS 1 – One business has hasn’t had leads come into their database in 8 months!!! OUCH!! That has cost them $100k’s in sales 🙁
- BUSINESS 2 – Another business – any leads that was already on their database who signed up again, weren’t receiving anything and the sales team were not notified. Also, the leads that were added were receiving the wrong emails 🙁
- BUSINESS 3 – Thankfully this business caught this in a few days when they realised no leads were coming through as a security plugin on their website was preventing the integration between the site and Keap to pass lead and customer data 🙁
In the two scenarios, I’m sorry to say, that a marketing agency setup the campaigns and unfortunately did it wrong :(. The final one the website security plugin impacted the Keap setup that we did.
Now just to flag, this article applies to everyone, no matter what email marketing system you use. If you have a database and free offers out there, you want to make sure that they work.
The point of sharing these examples though, is to flag that there are so many reasons why things don’t work.
And…
Just because something worked before, doesn’t mean it will continue to work.
Marketing campaigns have many components to them. Every component has the potential to cause issues. Including updates to plugins, integrations, forms, tags, campaigns etc. Some might be automatic, some manual, some intentional and some accidental of course. Plus, it the automation hasn’t have been setup correctly in the beginning, then of course it won’t work.
Therefore…
It’s important to regularly test your forms/sign ups.
It’s worth taking a few minutes (or someone on your team) to test, than to potentially lose a handful, hundreds, or thousands of leads (let alone the $ amount in advertising and lost sales!!).
Whether you setup the automation yourself or have worked with someone (even us), we highly recommend you always test your own sign ups.
Here’s some steps to help you make sure yours are working.
Identify Your Sign Up Forms
You may have a variety of lead magnets/offers on your website or even on third party websites. These are forms that require contacts to submit details such as email, name, phone etc in exchange for something. This could include newsletter subscriptions, event registration forms, PDF sign ups, special offer coupon sign ups, contact forms, book a call enquiry forms and the list goes on. This includes static forms, pop-up form or Call to Action/ CTA button that could appear on your website, blog, on separate landing pages or on external websites. It’s important to make sure they all work.
If you haven’t already got them documented to follow the steps below to identify all that needs to be tested first.
- Go to your website
- Go to your third party marketing websites (this could include Facebook, Instagram) if you’re taking them somewhere else that’s not on your website
- Identify all the sign up forms/offers
- List them out (in a spreadsheet is helpful, so you can easily use this list again to routinely check – it can also be helpful to list out how it’s integrated with your database if you know, that can help identify any potential issues later if an integration goes down etc)
If all of this seems overwhelming, focus on your main offer and make sure at least that is working. Delegate or make a commitment to check all your offers. You never know, your best lead may be missing you due to a broken link, dodgy integration, automation setup incorrectly or they may be receiving the wrong follow up.
[Note our focus is on testing free offers here, but you can apply the same principles when testing your paid offers too]
Now that you’ve identified your lead generation offers. Let’s move onto testing each one of them.
Testing
Testing lead generation campaigns can be as simple or complex as you need. We’re sharing below some helpful tips so feel free to take them on board if you wish. If this is all too overwhelming cover the basics, this should cover 90% of scenarios, but just know that it might not cover all, so keep that in mind.
Step 1 – Identify Your Testing Email Address/es
You typically want to test an email address that isn’t already on your database. Identify some email addresses you can use for testing. You’ll need a real email address that you can access the inbox (to confirm follow up emails). The number of email addresses that you need will depend on how many tests that you do and whether you are happy and comfortable deleting after each one to test the next one. We typically don’t recommend testing with your normal email account, particularly if you need to delete the contact to test again, this could impact other parts of your automation/setup.
Once you have a list of email addresses for testing, then move to testing.
Step 2 – Test
If you have a few offers to test, it might be worthwhile so you don’t get lost/confused, to write down which email you’re using to test each offer. Go through and test each form with a brand new contact and also check below what you should be looking for, for each test.
Please note: Based on one of the business examples above that I shared, you also want to test contacts that are already on your database and that have already signed up to the same offer, to make sure this also works if they decide to sign up again. You can re-use one of your test emails that you’ve used to test that particular offer. Be mindful that some systems may not kick off the follow up email again if you’re already in the automation or you’ve just recently signed up within the last 15 minutes (This applies to Keap users, so check out our How To Test Your Keap Max Classic Campaign if you need some help with this).
Step 3 - What To Look For When Testing?
For each test, check the following:
- Does The Database Get Updated?
- Does the contact get added to your database (if they aren’t already on the database)?
- Does the contact get updated in your database (if they are already there)
- Correct Follow Up?
- Does the contact get sent the relevant follow up emails/communications?
- BONUS CHECK – Thank You Page – does the thank you page message/page work?
Step 4 - Anything Broken? Fix It!
Of course, if anything doesn’t work, please fix it! Don’t forget to test again to make sure that it’s fixed the issue!
If you use Keap Max Classic (formerly Infusionsoft) and you’re interested in testing the initial optin/form or purchase goal, feel free to check out our article How To Test Your Keap Campaign.
Note – You may also identify some opportunities to enhance the user experience or fix some design or visual aspects of the sign-up process. Definitely make notes of those, but focus on getting the functionality of leads getting added to your database and getting the right communications fixed first.
Summary - Why Testing Is So Important
We know how much work goes into putting offers together, along with producing email marketing content, automation setup and then promoting or spending your valuable dollars to drive traffic to them. Only to find that leads don’t get added to your database or get the messages that they should. Don’t let this be you!
Please take the time to test to make sure your sign up website forms, lead generation optins and marketing funnels work.
If you’re interested in using Keap for your marketing automation, or if you use Keap and need help testing your setup, feel free to book a call to chat.
