20 Brilliant Ideas to Create High-converting Lead Capture Forms

It’s unfortunate but not all your visitors will convert immediately. Sure, they will browse and check some products — but a huge portion will not buy the first time. To not let your traffic go to waste, a lead capture form will help you ensure that you’re reeling them in before they bounce away.

A lead capture form is a perfect lead generation strategy to collect necessary contact information such as name or email address from your future prospects. Once captured, you can then start establishing a relationship to turn them into paying and loyal customers.

But, lead generation is easier said than done. You’ll see most websites doing a mediocre job in displaying lead capture forms — they’re uninviting and not compelling enough to drive visitors into subscribing.  Well, you are in luck! We’ve made life much easier for you. We’ve collected 20 ideas to help you create high-converting lead capture forms and get you to increase your leads in no time.

1. Create a compelling lead magnet

You’ll see many lead capture forms just asking for the visitors’ email address without really anything to offer. An effective lead capture form should start by asking what’s in it for the visitors to disclose their private information to you.

A lead magnet is any type of captivating offer that you can trade to visitors in exchange for their information like name, email address, phone number, etc. Popular lead magnets are downloadable contents like ebooks and whitepapers.

But, there are many creative and unique ways to offer lead magnets. For example, eCommerce sites can use free product samples as lead magnets. This way, you’re also able to promote your products at the same time.

Birchbox, for example, offers free beauty blender for every successful subscription.

Aside from free samples, you can also use exciting offers like price discounts or coupon codes as a lead magnet. It’s a clever strategy to not only capture your visitors as leads but you’re also driving them to make a purchase too.

Alternatively, Birchbox draws its visitors’ attention with a 15% discount on their next purchase as a lead magnet.

2. Gamify your lead capture form

Your sole purpose why you have a lead capture form is to get necessary customer details but it doesn’t have to be plain and boring. Why not tie up gamification into your form?

Gamification is the practice of putting game elements into a process. By gamifying, you’re already transforming something mundane into a fun and exciting manner – one that you can apply into your lead capture forms to bring more life into them.

For example, you can create a gamified popup of your freebies and discounts to reward every successful subscription. For example, Myth of Eastern created a spin-to-win game of its lead magnets like price discounts.

You can steal this gamified lead capture form using the “Win Wheel” feature of SiteKit to engage your visitors into an exciting spin-to-win game, offering freebies and discounts as lead magnets.

3. Strong and get-to-the-point CTA

Your call-to-action (CTA) button is one of the most crucial elements of your lead capture form. It tells exactly what the visitors need to do next. An unclear or confusing CTA button will definitely impact your conversion negatively.

You want your visitors to know the next step when they see your lead capture form without even reading the entire copy. They should know what clicking the button entirely means. Use phrases that are easy to understand and comprehend. Be catchy but don’t go overboard so it won’t become too ambiguous.

You might be tempted to just use “Submit” as your CTA but please revise this as soon as possible. People have seen them too often. Use different action words and combine them with what you are providing. For example, if you have a free gift, then write “I want this free gift!” in your CTA. It’s simple but straight-to-the-point.

NA-KD offers a 10% off for a successful email sign-up. To make it clear and attractive, the CTA button is written as “Get my 10% off”.

4. Add a compelling image to the form

We all know that humans are visual beings. This is why adding images will make your lead capture form more compelling. It will immediately make your form more attention-grabbing than just displaying plain texts.

You can display a hero shot beside the lead capture form — a hero shot is generally an image of your product in action or in use. It is recommended to include actual people (not stock photos) in your hero shot as it gives more credibility and authenticity to your brand. This assures your prospective leads than you’re not just some bogus website.

A fashion brand, Revolve, uses a hero shot just right beside its lead capture form to grab its visitors attention to subscribe and at the same time showcase its dress and fashion accessories.

5. Give the form more life with videos

An alternative to images is videos. While an image is already a good attention-grabbing element, you can do more with videos. An image is static so it won’t give you much flexibility to tell your story.

A brief video, on the other hand, will give you the ability to immerse your visitors into a journey. It doesn’t have to be too long though. A 5-second video is enough to keep your visitors stay on your site and drive them to hit the subscribe button. But, you can also opt to showcase your tutorial videos beside your lead capture form.

For example, Athlean-X embedded a video on its email lead capture form. This helped in explaining more about the benefits of its products and why the visitors need to sign up.

6. Try animation for extra power

If your budget is limited and will restrict you to add videos into your lead capture form but you still want that extra grabbing design, then using animation will undoubtedly be a lifesaver and budget hero.

Animated features in texts and other design elements will let you convey your message a little more. However, make sure that your animation is complementary to your brand. Maybe add some blinking sparkles or glitter if you are a makeup store. Remember, it should make sense to what you are as a brand and what you are trying to sell.

For instance, Copyhackers used animation on its call to action button to direct the attention of its visitors right to the CTA link.

7. Include a countdown timer

Do you think your visitors will just sign up right away? Remember, they are not in a hurry so even if you give them a whopping discount, they’ll think they could just return to your site again and subscribe to get that discount anytime.

This is why intensifying your visitors’ urgency to click the sign-up form will help you combat their procrastinating nature. This is why it is important to restrict your deals and discounts with a limited time to drive urgency. If your visitors see that there’s not enough time to enjoy your limited offers, then this affects their action to convert as soon as possible.

Adding a countdown timer to your lead capture form will definitely do the trick. The ticking clock is a reminder of the limited time your visitors have to avail your special offer. There are plenty of countdown timer apps at your disposal. Choose the one that you can easily integrate with your lead capture form.

Above is a great example from Backstage on how you can integrate a countdown timer into your lead capture form to increase your visitors’ urgency to convert.

8. Use FOMO to your form

We all heard of FOMO (fear of missing out), the psychological phenomenon that explains people’s desire to do what other people are doing. People don’t want to feel left out so they become anxious.

You can use FOMO psychology to increase your visitors’ urgency to sign up to your lead capture form as well. For example, take a highly popular product and use it as a lead magnet to attract your visitors to subscribe. You can say that there are only limited stocks for this freebie or you can say that “Free <insert popular product> for first 100 subscribers only!” This automatically stirs their attention to subscribe because of the fear of missing out on the freebie.

Somethin’ Sweet effectively used the FOMO psychology with its “First 50 users only!” subheadline to catch the attention of its visitors and immediately redeem their freebies.

9. Tie up with a hot flash sale

A flash sale is a sales promotion that only runs for a short period of time, usually just for specific hours. Sometimes, even the quantity of the deals in a flash sale is limited but often the discounts are significantly larger compared to run-of-the-mill promotions.

The fact that a flash sale only has a limited time and quantity makes it really appealing for potential buyers. In fact, online stores that hosted flash sales were able to generate twice as fast growth in revenue versus those that did not use flash sales at all.

What you can do is to tie up your flash sale with your lead capture form. Say, visitors subscribing to your email will have early access to your flash sale. Remember, we’ve talked about urgency and FOMO earlier. Flash sales also incorporate these two strategies effectively.

For example, Shoes.com added a mystery flash sale element into its email opt-in form

10. Clearly add your privacy policy

New visitors won’t trust your site completely, especially if you are an up-and-coming site. In fact, 92% of consumers worry about their data privacy online. So, make sure that you address their doubts and worries by clearly laying out your privacy policy.

Your privacy policy must explain how you ensure that you value your visitors’ private information, how you will use the gathered data in the future, and how you will protect these data. It also needs to show how your visitors can access, rectify, and delete them should they wish to do so in the future.

For example, Urban Decay explicitly displays a link to its privacy policy for subscribing customers.

11. Build credibility with social proofs

You can also establish trust and credibility into your lead capture form by displaying social proof. Social proof is anything that tells doubting visitors that other people have already purchased from your site or used a product before. It’s a testament of real people who have experience with your brand before. This easily puts trust into your site.

There are many ways you can add social proof to your site. For example, just a list of your previous customers will already provide a guarantee for potential buyers. You add a headline such as “10,000 customers have happily signed up for exclusive access” into your lead capture form to build more authenticity and credibility to it.

A perfect example of a lead capture form taking advantage of the power of social proof is this form from Swipe. It showcased its current total number of subscribers to encourage new visitors to sign up as well.

You can also add customer testimonials or a line form for your feedback survey into your lead capture forms. Instead of just writing copies on your own, testimonials and feedback humanize your copies. This makes your lead capture form sound more genuine because the words are coming from real people.

12. Speed up filling out forms with autocomplete type

For a lot of visitors, filling out lead capture forms can be considered a tedious task. They don’t want to fill out online forms repeatedly, especially for most common information like name, email address, and location. Sometimes, this causes them to give up and bounce away entirely.

This is why an “autocomplete type”, also known as intelligent/pre-filled forms, feature in your lead capture form is a smart solution. The autocomplete type submission already gets the data you’ve already harnessed on your prospects so the next time they sign up, the lead capture form will automatically be pre-filled.

Here’s an autocomplete type feature from Google to help you make form-filling a lot faster and more convenient for your visitors:

13. Offer a social sign-up

We’ve told you just earlier that visitors consider filling out forms as a tedious endeavor. This makes them unwilling to complete the registration. While an autocomplete type form is already a good strategy to create a high-converting lead capture form, offering an alternative sign-up option from their own social media account is also great to consider.

An alternative social media sign-up like Google or Facebook account will significantly help your visitors to sign-up by literally just a click away. This will help you address their reluctance to sign up a form because they won’t have to do that anymore. Here’s an example:

Source: getopensocial.com

14. Partner up wishlist or favorite items

There are visitors who actually take their time and research for products first before they purchase. This is why offering them a “Wishlist” or “Favorite” button will enable them to save their products and access them when they are ready to buy.

But, of course, this is when you can incorporate your lead generation strategy. For your visitors to retrieve their wish list or favorite items, they need to sign up first. This way, you are not just providing convenience to your visitors but you are also capturing them as leads at the same time.

Old Navy does not waste its traffic with its “Access your Favorites anywhere” lead capture strategy to get new visitors to sign up in order for them to obtain their favorite items.

15. Incorporate it into your live chat

A live chat is an incredible and super fast way for your visitors to reach you. They won’t have to pick up the phone and dial your number just to ask their concerns. But, aside from being a great communication vehicle, you can also make your live chat a subtle way of lead generation strategy.

You can easily incorporate your lead capture form into your live chat by simply asking for them to sign up their email address prior to speaking to a customer representative. Tell them that the sign up will allow them to save the conversation and enable you to get back to you in case there will be technical issues along the way.

In case your live chat is offline, they can still leave a message to you by entering their contact details so you can respond to their queries when you return online. This is what Copper had in mind with its lead generation strategy below:

16. Multiply subscriptions using a referral program

You already know that it is really hard to convince visitors to sign up. So when you do have visitors who are ready to sign up, make sure that you are maximizing that opportunity. Why not incentivize them to invite their loved ones or acquaintances to sign up too?

A referral program will help you expand your reach by taking advantage of your about-to-sign-up customers. For example, you can entice them by both rewarding them and the people they are referring with a discount or coupon code.

Sperry has a high-converting lead capture form called “It Pays to Share”. It effectively uses a referral program to capture more email addresses.

17. Sell the benefits of subscribing

While a lot will focus more on writing a very compelling headline, they tend to forget about telling people why subscribing will benefit them. You also need to sell the main benefits and advantages of bothering to sign up to complement your headline.

When you write the benefits, ask yourself what will make your potential leads truly sign up without the incentives and urgency tactics. Going to the main reason why will give you more quality leads.

For example, Talever explains why buying from them will benefit email subscribers.

18. Utilize exit intent technology

A huge number of your traffic will bounce away. Once they leave your site, you don’t have the means to encourage them to visit your site again. So, don’t wait for them to just bounce away. An exit intent technology will help you detect visitors who are about to leave your site without subscribing.

Once it detects a bouncing visitor, an exit-intent popup form will appear. You can incorporate a lead magnet to your exit-intent form together to entice them to sign up first before leaving. So even if they leave your site, you already have their details to drive them to your site again.

Elf Cosmetics has a great example of exit intent technology in place to capture abandoning visitors with a free gift.

19. Throw a contest

A contest is also a good promotional strategy to add to your lead capture form. It doesn’t just bring more life and fun into your lead generation, but it is also a great way to add a viral aspect into it. Throwing a contest will get people to start talking about your brand. The more people talking about you, the greater you can reach new audiences.

For example, you can add a contest rule instructing people to share it on social media before they sign up. This way you are maximizing your prospective leads by taking advantage of their social media followers.

For instance, Casper has a sweepstake contest to entice its visitors to fill out the lead capture form.

20. Link it to your loyalty program

While a loyalty program is a great retention strategy, it’s also a way to get more leads. Usually, a loyalty program is packed with rewards and freebies for frequent buyers and loyalty customers. In a sense, the loyalty program is your lead magnet because it acts as an incentive to drive people to sign up.

This means that you can definitely tie up your lead capture form and your loyalty program so that your lead generation will become more compelling and effective. For example, GlamourBox’s loyalty program called GlamSquad Rewards is tied up with its lead capture form to get people to subscribe and become loyal customers.

Capturing more leads

While customers come and go, a compelling lead capture form will make sure that you are not putting your traffic into waste. It’s a great lead generation strategy to put into practice because even though your visitors will leave your site, you have their important details so you can reach out to them and get them back to your site again.

To make a highly converting lead capture form, look for enticing ways to grab your visitors’ attention, such as offering lead magnets, incentivizing them, or increasing their urgency to subscribe with a countdown timer. You can also gamify your lead capture form using the spin-to-win feature from SiteKit to create a more fresh, fun, and exciting form!

But, more than anything else, ask yourself what will truly benefit your visitors from subscribing to your site. To learn more, make sure to follow our 20 ideas and get inspired by real industry practices to get you to capture more leads as soon as possible!