How to Ask More Details & Educate After a Web Form Submission
Let's talk about a few ways you can continue to engage a person after they submit a form on your website, as we covered why you should in a previous newsletter.
After a form is submitted, there are generally three patterns that are familiar to people:
Show a "thank you" message
Redirect to a different website
Receive an email (or SMS) notification
The first one is nice, but it doesn't help you learn more about the person and their motivations for engaging with your organization.
With the others, we have more options available to us, especially as it relates to learning more and educating them.
Here are three ways to address how we can learn more and educate the person before they switch contexts away:
Present a second form
Redirect to an experience site
Send a personalized and meaningful email
Present a second form
This lets you ask follow up questions to learn more about them and their interest in your organization. Plus, depending on what types of questions you're asking, it can be fun and engaging for the person (e.g. a quiz), while also collecting demographic and psychographic details.
There are also ways to use this second form as the basis for scoring, as their answers to certain types of questions can influence their total score.
Why not ask all of these questions in the form that they just submitted?
Simple: it increases the amount of effort required, which results in lower engagement.
Redirect to an experience site
The content on this site is immersive with the goal of answering common questions they might have, and presenting use cases or impact stories.
If your website is connected to your marketing platform, you get the benefit of knowing not only where they visited prior to submitting the form, but also what they did after submitting the form.
These details are not only helpful to determine what sort of messaging should be sent, but also provide context when your organization reaches out to the person to qualify them.
Send a personalized and meaningful email
The information provided on your form can be sufficient for providing a meaningful email sent by your marketing or automation platform.
Three dimensions you can explore are:
Prior engagement by this person, which might be based on the email or mobile number provided, thus enabling you to serve different content to them than a first-time submitter
Context about the form where they provided you details, as the same set of questions (e.g. name, email, phone number) has different meaning if it was on one page versus another of your site
How they got to your site based on UTM parameters that are passed when a person clicks on an ad or link in an email
There are also ways to boost the effectiveness and personalization by integrating a data enrichment provider and generative AI into the process.
Here’s how you can chain all of these together.
TLDR: Use another form, an experience site, and customized emails to learn more and educate the person that submitted a form on your website.
