Introduction
Internet and Web-based technologies helps corporate web sites to reach wide range of audience around the globe. Web sites becoming a center point for most of your company-wide business activities, including announcement of web events (Webinars, Podcasts, etc.,), self-service to the customers, public support service through bulletin boards, feedback forms for gathering new ideas, Tell a friend forms to introduce products/services to new people and so on.
These services are built around web forms; either data stored in database or directly communicated to the concerned people as an email who take care of the Sales & Marketing activities.
As business expands, it is difficult to manage all these separate data islands and integrating with the corporate Sales & Marketing activities. One of the solutions for this kind of scenario is, host Web forms on your web site at various customer touch-points, capture visitors' contact information, and store in your CRM system so that all departments (Sales, Marketing, and Support) can access the data and use according to their roles.
Zoho CRM offers a fully customizable Web-to-Lead Form for all Zoho CRM Editions, which helps you effectively utilize the CRM service and generate more qualified leads for your organization.
Using Zoho CRM Web-to-Leads functionality, you can:
- Generate Web-forms
- Customize Web forms as per your web site look & feel
- As and when your web site visitor provides their contact information, transfer data from web site to Zoho CRM through a secured web service and create leads
- Enable lead approval process to filter leads before assigning to sales reps.
- Assign leads to sales reps automatically using workflow rules
- Once the data is assigned to the users, use the data for sales & marketing purposes
How to Capture Leads from Web site?
Using Web-to-Lead form your organization can allow web site visitors submitting their information directly so that you can create leads directly. All the leads captured through web site are first assigned to the Administrator or as per your business process, which can be reassigned to the corresponding sales reps.
Important Points
- Anyone visiting your Web site can submit any type of information. Hence you may need to implement additional captcha for your web form.
- All the leads are first assigned to the User selected in Web-to-Lead settings page. The Lead Administrator can change the lead ownership to other users.
- To send automate replies to visitors select the required e-mail template from the Web-to-Lead settings.
- The generated Web-to-Lead form contains only Web form related tags. You have to customize the generated Lead form further to suite your web site requirements.
- Test the complete workflow of Web-to-Lead form before publishing in your web site.
 Note: In a typical B2B business process, Last Name and Company Name fields are mandatory in lead. If your web site visitors do not enter these fields, lead with company name as "Not Available" is created. |
To create Web-to-Lead form
- Click the Setup link.
- In the Settings Home page, under the Lead Settings section click the Web-to-Lead link.
- In the Capturing Leads from Website page, do the following:
- Enable Web-to-Lead option for your organization: Refer To configure Web-to-Lead settings section.
- Generate HTML page as per your fields in the Web-to-Lead form: Refer To generate HTML page for Web-to-Lead form section.
- The generated HTML page contains only the web form objects and minimal HTML tags. Customize the web page according to your web site layout requirements.
- Publish the Web form in your web site. Your visitors can submit their contact information, which will be routed to Leads module. All the leads captured through Web Form are assigned to the Owner selected in Web-to-Lead settings page.
To configure Web-to-Lead settings
- In the Capturing Leads from Website page click the Web-to-Lead link.
- In the Web-to-Lead Settings page do the following:
- Enable Web-to-Lead: Select the check box the enable the Web-to-Lead form.
- Return URL: Specify the URL of the page to be displayed after visitor submits the lead (For example, Thanks page for submitting the information)
- Enable Manual Leads Approval: Select the checkbox to enable approval system, so that leads will be assigned to respective sales person upon approving the lead. By default, the lead approval is disabled.
- Assign Owner: Select the Zoho CRM user to whom the case has to be assigned manually or use .
- Enable Auto Email Responder: Select the automate e-mail response template, which is used for sending an e-mail to the person submits the case.
- Notify Lead Owner: Select the check box to notify the lead owner based on Assign Owner option (manual or lead assignment rule)
- Click on the Launch Web Form Generator to start form generation process.
To generate HTML page for Web-to-Lead form
In the Generating HTML for Web-to-Lead page, do the following:
- Select Web Form Fields: Select the lead fields to be displayed in the Web Form.
- Return URL: Specify the return URL after submitting the information in your web site (Ex: Thank you message)
- Confirm Password: Specify your password (User who creates the Web-to-Lead form) to authenticate your Account from the Zoho CRM on-demand service.
| Warning: If you change your password after publishing the Web-to-Lead form, please ensure that updating the following information in Web-to-Lead form. |
To customize Web-to-lead form
After generating the Web form, customize layout as per your Web site requirements. For customization, you may use HTML editor. For any clarifications on form generation, please contact us at: support@zohocrm.com.
|
Example:
<!-- Begin: Do not edit the section -->
<form action="http://zohocrm.com/crm/WebtoLeadServlet?encoding=UTF-8" method="POST">
<input type='hidden' name='orgId' value='1'/>
<input type='hidden' name='xnQsjsdp' value=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/>
<input type='hidden' name='xmPqMMnsd' value=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX/>
<input type='hidden' name='actionType' value=Q2FzZXM=/>
<input type='hidden' name='returnURL' value='http://www.zohocrm.com' />
<!-- End: Do not edit the section -->
Otherwise leads submitted through Website will not be captured in Leads module, due to authentication failure. |
Approving Leads Captured through Web site
(Access Privilege: Web-to-Lead Permission)
By default, leads captured through Website are assigned to one of the Lead Administrator who can update the leads with additional information and assign to the corresponding Sales Person in your organization. It will allow your sales persons focus mainly on high priority leads (lead contain correct contact information, and interest on your offering).
To approve leads from Website
- Click the Setup link.
- In the Settings Home page, under the Lead Settings section click the Approve Web Leads link.
- In the Web-to-Lead Approval page, under Web-to-Lead list, leads are displayed. View the lead details, assign to specific user, and click the Approve button. Afterwards lead owner can follow-up the lead.
The Web-to-Lead html generated by the system contains a 'Do Not Edit' section - within this is the 'returnURL' value. My question is: can we change this without compromising the submission process? This is because we would like to embed the form in a flash and/or Java script page that may require different behavior after the form is completed rather than simply redirecting to a URL.
Also, how about mandatory vs. optional fields in the form? Can this be modified without compromising the POST functionality? Thanks
Is it possible to add additional fields to the form?
Is is possible to change the layout of the email notification. I can't seem to find a place to do that.
Hi,
Yes. You may add the additional fields that you want in the Leads module. You may add them from Setup --> Lead Settings --> Fields List.
Once the fields are added, you may generate the Web Form Generator from Setup --> Lead Settings --> Web To Lead link.
Thanks,
Adam.
Steve_ami,
Yes. You may change the layout of the email notification from Setup --> Templates --> Email Template and create a new template with the layout that you want and provide the newly created template in the Auto Email Responder.
Thanks,
Adam.
Hi mrbrutus,
You can embed the Generated HTML Form in a Flash Page, if you can ensure the form submission happens and the Generated Form has a return URL.
The return URL can be any Website URL. If you want to modify the URL or fields, you need to regenerate the WebLead Form and then re-host it.
Kindly revert, if it is not clear anywhere.
Thanks & Regards
NS Perumal
Cannot select an email from the Folder under Step 3, Enable Auto Email Responder. The folders are listed, but I cannot select a folder or see an email template to select.
Hi Tom03264,
The email templates will reflect under folder if you have created them in that particular folder. In the Web-to-lead, you may click on the drop-down box and select the email template that you have created for the Auto responder. If you still have any difficulties, send a mail to support@zohocrm.com with your contact details to help you with it.
Thanks,
Adam.
The auto email responder does not correctly show any checkbox selections made by the person filling out the form. I have custom fields which are checkboxes indicating which events they intent to attend, yet in the confirmation email all checkbox fields return a value of "false" even though they have checked it.
Thank you,
George
Hi George,
We checked in our test accounts and its working fine. You may check whether the checkboxes are checked or unchecked by default and if you still face any issues, try creating a new checkbox field and try that in the web-to option. If you still face any issues, send a mail to support@zohocrm.com with the web-to details to help you with it.
Thanks,
Adam.
Thanks for the prompt reply! I will try your suggestions and let you know if I have any problems.
George
How do I change the font, color and layout of my form? Do I need to use a HTML editor?
Awesome program by the way.
Hello,
After generating the web form in your CRM account, customize the HTML code as per your website look & feel. You can use any text editor if you have hands-on experience with HTML coding. Otherwise you may need to use DremWeaver or FrontPage software.
Thanks,
Gopal
Why are these leads going to the ADMINISTRATOR not the LEAD OWNER? I want the LEAD OWNER to get a copy of all leads via email - whats up?
Hi,
We will definitely consider your request and try to add it at the earliest to Zoho CRM.
Why can't you HTTP post? Why can't you save field maps on import?
Here is a Process if you want to post specific web to lead forms as well as general web to lead forms. The specific is done by hiding the lead source field.
http://writer.zoho.com/public/adam_stone/ZOHO-CRM-Web-to-Lead
Dear Adam Stone,
Thank you for your document contribution to our Wiki.
Please do continue posting your valuable suggestions and comments.
Regards,
Gopal
I would like to assign leads on a rotating basis. I have two reps and I want each consecutive lead to go to the next person in line. How do I do this in the lead assignment section? As far as I know it only assigns by hard rules to one person, without allowing for distribution to different people.
Hi Tim McCormack,
You may create a hidden field in the Web site form which will have the numbers 1 & 2 alternatively for each submit by the customer. Now, you create the lead assignment rule based on the number that you get, which can be assigned to the person in rotation basis.
Example:
First customer enters the information in the Web-To-Lead form that you have in your Web site and at that time, the hidden field have to be set 1 and once the customer submits the hidden field should be changed to 2. This will help you in assigning the leads in rotation to your users.
Thanks,
Adam.
We are a potential new customer to Zoho. I am wondering if there is any way to use existing forms already on our web site? We need the data to also be stored in our SQL server database as well.
Hi,
Yes, you can do that customization, but not with your existing forms in the website. You have to generate a web-lead HTML from Zoho CRM and modify that to store data in Zoho CRM as well as in your SQL database.
For more details, kindly send us a mail to support@zohocrm.com. We will let you know the modifications to be done.
Regards,
Mahesh,
(Zoho CRM Team).
Is it possible to create multiple forms, for example, if we want to collect leads for 5 different types of leads, How can we create 5 different forms and then collect leads separately. I tried to do it by generating different forms but it was sending all leads to just one entry.
please answer this as soon as possible. We have 6 paid registered users of the CRM package.
Regards
AJ
Hi A J,
You will be able to generate multiple web to forms from the CRM system and post it in the Web pages where you want to collect the information from. If you want to identify the leads from separate Web pages, you may create an pick list with different values for the Web pages and make the field hidden in the Web page. This will help you to get the idea from which form you got the lead from.
Thanks,
Adam.
Cant we have multiple auto responder mails... i work with multiple products, and want the auto responder mail to be different for each....
this would help a GREAT deal.
Hi raunak@learningsystems.in,
Multiple auto-responders is currently not available. We have plans to implement the same in Zoho CRM. Once the feature is done, we will keep posted the update.
Thanks,
Adam.
I implemented Web to Lead and it is working fine. I'm getting the email notifications that the web form has been filled out and submitted. However, the leads are not showing up under the "Leads" tab in ZohoCRM.... Why not? Help.
Hi Adriaan,
You might have enabled the Approval of leads. Please check in Setup --> Lead Settings --> Approve Leads for the leads that came from your Web site. If you still face any issue, send a mail to support (at) zohocrm (dot) com to analyze and help you with a solution asap.
Thanks,
Adam.
Thanks, Adam. That worked. Would it be possible to automatically add a "Lead Source" to approved leads so it would indicate they'd come from the web site?
Opps. I found the answer. Thanks!
Hi, Is it possible to customize the web-to-lead notification email that is sent it by the noreply@zohocrm.com account?
Thanks,
Alberto
Hi Alberto,
Currently we have not provided the customization of the notification emails that are automated from Zoho CRM. We have plans to include that settings in our future updates. Once its done, we will keep posted the update.
Thanks,
Adam.
Hello. I find the web-to-Lead system excelent. except for one thing..... i have generate 2 different web-to-lead forms.. one for one type of interest,,, and second for second different,... they look different, the landing page is different, and also, the "auto-responder " emial, template, should be different.......................... this last thing doesn´t work.......... when i created the second web-form, the autoresponder email, foe the first web-form changed..................... is it not possible to configure "in the HTML form" which template will be send?? like the landing page???? Thanks a lot
Hi frueda30,
Currently configuring multiple auto-responders is not available. We are working on it and once implemented, we will keep posted the update.
Thanks,
Adam.
Based on a users interaction with our website, if they choose to make a purchase, we will generate a set of files containing information about the product they wish to purchase, Is there a way our website and server can transmit these files and have them be connected to a lead's profile on Zoho? Is there any webservices API that Zoho is compatible with besides these basic form submissions?
Hi seph@archimedescloth.com,
You may fetch or push or update the records with Zoho CRM using the API's that we have provided.
Here is the link to know more about Zoho CRM API's:
http://zohocrm.wiki.zoho.com/Zoho-CRM-API.html
Thanks,
Adam.
How do I best set up a "call-to lead" format? We're a real estate co, get phone calls from signs more than leads from our website ---
thanks, a
Dear Zoho CRM User,
We have the web to lead form but not a call to lead feature in Zoho CRM. Whenever you get you have to enter the lead information manually. The feature you are mentioning is a nice one to have. We will consider this feature and try to implement this ASAP.
Regards,
Parker Scott.
That feature would be great - I will watch for it, as we are structurally set up as a business to get leads via phone calls after people drive by a property and see our sign.
thanks --
I'd like to get some location information of the leads in my web to lead form to see what's the geographic distribution. There are two ways I can think of off hand:
1- get IP address from ZOHO form submission & hope zoho has a ip geolocation function soon
2- manually hack up and insert other form elements, co-mingle the forms and do post processing to connect my form to the ZOHO form, then use ZOHO api to insert correct location info into the associated record into a custom field or previously blank location/address field.
The first (1) sounds way easier. Is there a way to get (a) the IP address of the submitter, (b) the location IP and/or latitude/logitude of the submitter?
Thx.
Hi dealguru,
You may get the help from your Web master team to collect the geo-graphic location of the customer you want to track using a script. With the help of the IP address, the code will help you to get the location of the customer.
We will also try to implement the feature/api to Zoho CRM asap.
Thanks,
Adam.
Is there a way to link a web generated lead to a specific campaign? Aka - I want to have multiple web generation pages and the leads generated from each page would be associated with a different campaign?
I would like to get my lead automatically converted as an account. Is there a way to do that?
Dear Zoho CRM User,
Currently we dont have an option to automatically convert a lead into an account. We will consider this in our roadmap.
Regards,
Parker Scott
Is there a way to link a web generated lead to a specific campaign? Aka - I want to have multiple web generation pages and the leads generated from each page would be associated with a different campaign?
Currently, it is not possible to associate a campaign to a lead generated through web form. We will definitely provide this support in our future updates. Kindly bear with us.
Regards,
Mahesh,
(Zoho CRM Team).
I would like to implement a Captcha on my form. There are many options out there, but I wanted to know if you recommend anything in particular, or if you have any other advice regarding this issue.
Thanks!