You might think websites are less useful than before, competing with social networks and marketplaces. Yet they remain a central point in the customer journey, and most often the first.

But the website still has to be connected to everything else. Here is how to connect your website to your CRM, and the best practices that make the difference between a form that feeds your business and a form that fills a mailbox.

The team behind our flexible, automatable CRM tells you everything.

How a form connected to the CRM works

1. Creation

You define the fields, the page shown after submission, the person to whom the request will be assigned, and the processing rules that will then kick in.

The question that decides everything is the number of fields. Every extra field loses submissions, and the temptation is always to ask for everything “while you’re at it”. Ask for the minimum needed to call the person back; the rest can be collected during the conversation.

On the technical side, integration is now done through a plugin for your content management system rather than by copying code. For a WordPress site, the dedicated plugin creates the forms and connects them directly to the CRM.

2. Submission

The visitor fills in the form and sends it, then lands on the confirmation page. Two practices are essential at this stage.

An automatic acknowledgment of receipt first. It confirms that the request has been sent and announces what happens next: who will call back, and when. It is a transactional message, and therefore among the most-read of all your mailings.

Protection against automated submissions next. Without it, your CRM fills up with fake requests and your teams stop looking at them, which ends up costing you real requests.

3. Qualification and assignment

The request arrives in the CRM and waits to be validated. This step filters out the noise and keeps only real requests, before assigning them to the right person.

Two automations are worth configuring: notifying the person the request is assigned to, and keeping the requester informed of progress. The second is the most visible, and the most often neglected.

A useful benchmark: the time to the first callback matters more than the quality of the callback. A request handled the same day does not have the same conversion rate as one handled three days later, because the prospect has contacted your competitors in the meantime.

What integration brings you

• An end to re-keying and to requests lost in a shared mailbox.
• Recording the contact’s source, which then shows which pages and sources produce customers.
• Handling support requests online, with tracking the customer can consult.
• Enriching the customer view with what visitors declare themselves, data that is generally more accurate than any purchased enrichment.

The second point is the most profitable and the least implemented. Without it, your acquisition budget is allocated by intuition, as we explain in our article on marketing dashboards.

The data aspect, which is not optional

A form is a collection of personal data. Three obligations apply, and failing to meet them is one of the most visible breaches on a website.

• Inform: who processes the data, for what purpose, how long it is kept, and how to exercise one’s rights. A link to your privacy policy, next to the submit button.
• Collect only what is necessary for the stated purpose. An information request form does not need a date of birth.
• Separate the request from prospecting: responding to a request falls under performing the contract; sending a newsletter afterwards is a different processing activity, which requires separate consent and an unticked box.

This last point is the one that most often causes problems during an audit, because the habit is to put all incoming contacts into the same mailing list. The topic is covered in our article on GDPR and your CRM data.

Your questions about integrating your website with the CRM

How many fields should a contact form have?

Three to five are almost always enough. Name, email address, company and message are enough to call back; everything else can be asked in conversation.

Do you need a different form for each page?

Not necessarily, but record where it came from. Knowing which page the request was sent from is worth more than multiplying forms.

What should you do with obviously fake requests?

Filter them out at the entry point rather than afterwards. A polluted CRM stops being consulted, and that loss of interest costs real deals.

Should the CRM reply automatically?

An acknowledgment of receipt, yes, every time. An automated substantive reply, no: it is easy to spot and has the opposite effect to the one intended.

Should you keep requests that went nowhere?

Yes, with a defined retention period. The reason an inbound request was dropped is rare information, provided it is recorded when it is known.