Salesforce's Marketing Power- Increase your lead conversion by contacting web visitors within minutes of completing a form

I found one of the most valuable tools salesforce has to offer is the ease of creating a data entry form for capturing web visitor information. SF email templates allow you to notify staff of a new lead, create a task for a specific staff member to followup, create a customized msg to the prospective student, and call the student within minutes of the student completing the form.

Generating the html code for the web to lead form can be done in minutes, where the work comes in is editing this code. However, once you have created one form you can use it as a template and simply copy the code and make the minor adjustments such as updating the campaign id.

You also need to establish an assignment rule for these new leads. You can assign all new leads affiliated with your record type to one individual who will receive an email notification OR perhaps you want to you would like to assign a lead based on the campaign or program of interest. If you would like a group of co-workers to receive an email notification of the incoming lead then create a user queue to share the workload. It is a best practice to establish a generic email alias (with all queue users as recipients) to use as the queue email. This will ensure all staff receives a message when a new lead has been added.

An autoresponse sent to the prospective student is an optional feature but can easily be setup. Create an email template to convey a customized msg to the prospect that is automatically emailed upon creation. You can also establish multiple templates if you wish to send a specific message based on the data entered. For example, you may want to send program information based on the program of interest selected on the form.

Some of My Success Stories With Web to Lead Forms
I created a general inquiry campaign to capture new web to leads that complete a form requesting general information. One of these forms captured over 120 new leads within the past 8 months with one already converting to a student. Another program recently had two Open House events & advertised these events in the local paper directing them to the website. Within a few weeks over 70 leads were created :)

Then of course there is Google Adwords an easy an affordable way to advertise your website programs on the Google Search Engines. Web to leads can be used in conjunction with this long tail marketing technique in order to measure your Return on Investment (ROI). These forms & tracking code allow you to capture the number of converted leads from each Google Adword Campaign.

So generate your code...
edit your picklist values... set your record type, and campaing id value etc
determine which staff member(s) will receive the email notification
setup an email autoresponse to the prospect (optional)
be sure any necessary tracking code (Google Analytics/Adwords) are added to the page
and please come back and comment with success stories of your own :)