ZOHO CRM – the best web based customer relationship management (CRM) service has a great tool to make it easy for any website to capture leads with a web form. This ZOHO web to lead form is easy to hack and make beautiful for your website.

Why have a web to lead form?

Simple – Your website should be working hard to generate leads for you and focusing on inbound marketing techniques is the best way to capture new leads.

Features of ZOHO CRM Web to Lead Form

• ZOHO CRM free edition allows you to have one web to lead form – this is not a problem we’ll customise the form for your business.
• The professional edition allows you to create autoresponder emails (emails sent automatically when a lead is added).
• On a downside, you can design your own form but you must keep the your field names consistent with ZOHO or the Form will be lost when the user clicks on submit. So remember to use First Name and Last Name (Capitalisation on the first letter) as you build your form.
• When creating a new lead the minimum fields you must have is Last Name and Email.

How to create a web to lead form in ZOHO

• Go to the Setup menu
• Under Leads, choose Web to Lead form

• Click Create new form

• Fill in the basic details (ie the website page you want to show after the lead is added)
• Select First Name, Last Name, Email, Company, Description (description gives you a large text area that your new lead can write anything making it perfect for a Contact Us form).

• Select Lead Assignment and choose you or whoever will be assigned the new leads
• Press Generate Code

• Select the code and copy and paste it to word or your favourite text editor.
• Select Finish then Save

You have now created a form ready to be added into your website. Just email this code to your webmaster and ask them to add this as the new contact form on your website.

Suggested Improvements to the Standard Web to Lead Form

This is approximately what your new web to lead form looks like .. so make sure you give it some ‘spunk’ with these ideas:

• Record email address for newsletters – Create a custom field – called newsletter signup
• Track the source of the lead in Zoho – Add a hidden field called Lead Source and set the value to ‘ContactUs-Lead’, and add this to the list called Lead Source in Zoho.
• Remove the Reset button – its another way for some potential lead to be lost.
• Form validation – there is no validation or special script to check that the Last Name or Email Address has been completed