HubSpot forms are the main entry point for your leads into your database and play a decisive role in your marketing strategy. The purpose of a form is to collect as much information as possible about your visitor by offering him the most pleasant and natural experience possible.
HubSpot offers a number of features in terms of form creation but also has some limitations.
In this article we will understand all the tools made available by HubSpot for creating and editing forms and see together the different techniques for setting up optimized and smart forms on HubSpot.
Summary
Before diving into the specifics of HubSpot forms, it's important to quickly review form design best practices to understand the real value of the features provided by HubSpot.
Filling out a form is not a free act, it is an engaging action that a visitor performs while waiting for a defined value.
The reflection of a visitor when faced with a form is as follows: “Is the promise of this form “worth” the information that I am asked to access it?”
If you ask for three methods of contact, the annual salary, the personal address and the list of the last three professional experiences of a visitor against his subscription to your newsletter (however qualitative), the commitment requested is indeed too important for the value brought to this visitor. Your submission rate will be badly affected.
However, collecting information on the problems encountered by a prospect in exchange for a free consultation oriented on the resolution of these, is not only necessary to deliver the expected promise but corresponds to a “fair exchange”.
This question of added value must be asked with each form creation and with each creation of “lead magnets” (piece of content to offer against the submission of a form).
Then ask yourself these two questions:
Keeping this logic, the more information a lead is willing to provide you with, the greater their engagement with your company and your services, the more likely the lead is to convert into a customer.
The type and number of properties of a lead, coupled with the way to collect this information can therefore be very good criteria for “lead scoring”.
The more information we collect about our leads, the better…
However, not all information has the same value and as seen above, displaying forms with 200 questions is far from being an optimal strategy.
It is therefore crucial to classify our properties into two categories:
All the properties necessary for the smooth running of your lead qualification process, sales journey and related automations.
These properties make it possible to measure the commitment of a lead and to obtain information aimed at guiding the commercial discussions and simplifying the sale.
Qualifying properties are always to be prioritized in your forms. The facilitation properties are to be implemented according to the value offered by the submission of your form or by methods made possible by the proper use of the HubSpot form tool that we will detail below.
Now that we've reviewed some best practices related to forms, let's discover the possibilities of HubSpot in terms of form creation.
When creating a form on HubSpot (Marketing tab -> Lead Capture -> Form), you will be facing a first choice: the type of form:
These different options can be grouped into two categories, the qualification forms (Red dot) and the “Pop-up” forms (Blue dot).
These are HubSpot's "classic" forms and can be either integrated into a web page (Embedded Form) or displayed independently on a browser (Standalone Page).
They benefit from all the form features that HubSpot offers and are most often used for high value conversions.
These are the types of forms we will focus on in this article.
The only difference between these different “Pop-up” forms is their placement on the relevant web pages.
They appear according to the behavior of the visitor (after X% of page scrolling, X seconds of reading, intention to leave the page etc.)
Most often, these forms are used either for low conversions (newsletter, blog etc.), or to redirect the visitor to landing pages or qualification forms.
They also present fewer editing possibilities (similar to ChatFlows and Meeting links), such as the limitation in terms of object property fields you can place on it. Indeed, Pop-up forms only allow you to display Contact fields. You can still work around it by using a copy Workflow.
In addition to offering the classic features of a form editor with a "drag and drop" system such as renaming, prefilling and the filling obligation, HubSpot allows us to go further to guarantee a good organization of our database and ease of collecting information.
On HubSpot, the different objects (contacts, companies, tickets) are intrinsically linked. Forms allow us to collect properties of several objects on the same form. For example, we may request information about a contact and the business associated with that contact.
This allows us to build a complex and organized database for each lead.
Another great feature in form building offered by HubSpot is the possibility to hide properties within a form.
By pre-filling the value of this field and making it hidden, you can populate properties that can serve as a trigger for a particular qualification workflow, for example.
In this example, this form is placed on a sales page for a specific service. If a lead completes this form, we can consider them interested in the “HubSpot Specialist” service, automatically populating the “Service Needed” property which triggers a workflow to determine if the lead is qualified to purchase this specific service.
HubSpot also offers basic possibilities in terms of customizing forms with dependent fields. You can display a field based on a previous answer.
For example, if you sell products that are not recommended for pregnant women, you need to know whether the incoming lead is pregnant or not in order to qualify him. However, this question is not relevant for a male lead and will impact his user experience.
So you want to display the question “Are you pregnant?” only if the lead has indicated to be a woman.
To do this, edit your field and navigate to the “Logic” tab
In order to facilitate this kind of usage, it is important to minimize your use of “single line text” properties.
What makes HubSpot's form editor such a powerful tool are "progressive fields."
A good use of these allows you to collect as much information as you want from an engaged lead without having to impose a form of 200 properties on him.
What are HubSpot progressive fields?
It is about adapting the questions of a form according to the information already collected from a lead, making them particularly useful during Nurturing campaigns. You can find my 6 best practices for an optimized Nurturing.
Progressive fields work as follows:
When creating your form, you will define fields to be replaced if their value is known.
At the same time, you will add fields to the waiting list at the bottom of your form editor.
Thus, each time your lead accesses the form, the properties defined as “to be replaced” already known will give way to these pending properties.
In our example, if we collect the “Street Address” information from a lead, this means that the latter has completed at least three forms demonstrating a certain engagement on his part and additional information to facilitate the sale.
HubSpot forms have the advantage of being a native feature and fully integrated into your ecosystem (thus facilitating the collection of information, the analysis and the implementation of your lead capture), but have certain limitations:
These limitations can be circumvented either by going through third-party applications specialized in editing forms, or by configuring a ChatFlow intended for lead generation which will offer advanced automation and a much more conversational information capture.
If you want to deepen your HubSpot skills and find all the workflows created and presented by HS Simple, do not hesitate to ask your free access to the workflow box. A private web page listing all the workflows requested by the community with an explanatory video and a simple action plan in the form of a "to-do list".