The moment you stop capturing leads, your business stops making money. After all, businesses that generate more leads get 133% more revenue growth than those that do not.

This article is for you if you want to increase your revenue and have answers to the following questions:

What is lead capture, and how does it work?
What methods should you use to generate more potential customers?
And last but not least, how to create a lead capture strategy that converts them into paying customers?

Keep reading!

What is Lead Capture?

Lead capture is the act of collecting information from potential customers who show interest in your product or service. Businesses mostly do lead capture to nurture the leads with personalized content and slowly convert them into paying customers.

However, to offer this personalization, they must collect the lead’s name, email address, phone number, product interests, geographical location, business type, etc. Once they have this data, they can contact the person and remind them to take action on a product or service they showed interest in.

But there's a catch: you can’t gather this information from your potential customers without giving them something in return. So, give incentives like discounts, exclusive deals, free product samples, and content.

How to Capture Leads?

1. Lead Capture Forms

Lead capture forms are simple forms that you design and place in key locations on your website. On these forms, you can ask potential clients to leave their names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information.

You can place these forms in certain portions of your website, such as:

Homepage
Contact or About Us Pages
Sidebars and
Blog posts

For example, agencies and sales teams use meeting scheduling software to create appointment booking pages. If you're looking for tools to help generate leads more effectively, check out our list of the best lead generation software.

Then, after selecting a time and date for the appointment, the potential customer will see a lead capture form where they can enter their name and email address. You may also collect additional information, like the company name, size, and industry. If you're choosing a tool to create these forms, check out our guide to the top lead capture software built specifically for high conversions.

2. Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is something you offer for free in exchange for the person's information. It can be a coupon, a template, an e-book, a white paper, a webinar, a contest, a video, or any other type of resource.

For instance, you can offer an e-book that teaches a process or a checklist showing the important steps to take to achieve something in your niche.

That's what HubSpot did in their article teaching how to create a marketing plan. After explaining what a good plan should include, they offered a free checklist that listed additional elements they hadn't mentioned in the article.

After clicking the link, users are asked to enter their email address before they can access the checklist.

They added a few more lead magnets to the article, such as a competitive analysis template or a marketing budget template.

Like Russell Brunson said in his book Dotcom Secrets, “The lead magnets attract your dream customers to you like a magnet. When I create lead magnets, I try to create things they will love, while at the same time, will repel the types of people I don't want to work with.”

In the example above, HubSpot wants to attract marketers by offering marketing templates. After getting the template, HubSpot will send additional emails with more tips and eventually nurture these leads into paying customers.

Apply the same strategy if you sell professional services or sell a SaaS.

3. Landing Pages

A landing page is the first point of contact a potential customer has with your website. It has a high potential to keep a visitor on your website or drive them away. To make the most of your landing page when capturing leads, it should be free of distractions, such as navigation links, which often divert visitors' attention.

Consider our website's landing page, which urges visitors to purchase our efficient scheduling software. Our message is clear and direct.

All the elements of the landing page show why visitors should purchase our product, with a strong call to action. There is also a visible button that takes them to the available offers when they click it.

After clicking the ‘Start for Free’ button, meetergo will direct the visitor to a signup page where they can create an account and start using the free version before purchasing the product.

4. Gated Content

Another useful way to capture leads is through gated content. With this method, visitors can download or view content only after they have given their contact information.

For this method to work well, you need to make good content available to them—content that addresses their pain points. If visitors go through the hassle of providing their details, they will be more willing to make a purchase, and their interest will help you attract more qualified leads.

Take HubSpot’s academy, for example. It offers a huge collection of instructional materials, free software tools, certifications, and courses without charge. But before visitors can access these resources, they need to provide their contact information.

As soon as your visitor is ready to sign up for free courses, HubSpot requires them to provide their email address before they get access to the content.

HubSpot will then use that contact information to remind visitors about relevant content, products, and services.

5. Social Media Lead Ads

Social media is everywhere today, and billions of people have social media accounts. Clearly, this means that using social media lead ads is a great idea for capturing leads. With this method, you create advertisements that will help you immediately gather leads on social media sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.

Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn offer specific ad formats that allow you to capture leads directly within the platform. Let’s take LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms as an example; this form allows you to collect more leads from your ad on LinkedIn with pre-filled lead forms.

You can use this for Message Ads and Sponsored Content.

To start gathering leads from LinkedIn, click the ‘Try Lead Gen Forms’ button.

LinkedIn will display a few questions for you to answer. After that, you can set up your new account and start gathering leads via ads. During the account creation process, you’ll provide an account name, additional details, customize your LinkedIn page, and set up your ad campaign.

After setting up your account, you can start capturing leads through LinkedIn. Potential customers will see your ads on posts. Once they click on any of your ads, LinkedIn will redirect them to your page.

6. Chatbots & Live Chat

Businesses use live chat, chatbots, and live chat tools to capture leads by allowing users to enter queries, receive responses, and then share their information during a live chat session. There is no need for a form.

A critical example of this proven method is our live chatbot at meetergo.

First, the chatbot welcomes users with a kind greeting as soon as they arrive on the website, such as "How can we help you?"

They do not necessarily have to fill out a form. Instead, the chatbot will request their name, email address, preferences, and the service they're interested in.

This approach works well, and I like it because it feels more natural. Moreover, our chatbot is active at all hours, allowing us to be helpful to our potential customers even outside our official working hours.

Time zones are not a problem because our chatbot is available 24/7. After providing the necessary information and assistance, the chatbot can also recommend helpful articles.

Common Offline Lead Capture Methods

Events & Trade Shows

Truth be told, there are times when offline lead capture methods are more efficient than some of the online methods I mentioned. Events, such as conferences and trade shows, are good examples.

At these gatherings, you can introduce your products, have discussions, and give your potential clients a personalized experience on how your products and services can solve their problems. They can also ask questions and get more natural responses.

Providing this experience is important. After all, research indicates that 63% of consumers say they’d be willing to share more information with a company that offers a great experience.

Let’s say you sell an AI marketing agent that automates crucial marketing tasks, like writing LinkedIn posts or converting written content into video. A marketing and sales event like HubSpot Inbound, which hosted 12,000 people in 2024, is a good place to promote your software.

Once you have shown the value of your products and services to potential clients, gather their personal information using the following methods:

Paper sign-up sheets
Badge scanning that takes them to a demo booking page
Clipboard surveys
Free demos or product trials
QR code scanning

In-store Signups

Also, if you have a physical location for your business, you can use in-store signups to capture leads. Unfortunately, this method can be hardly effective depending on how careful and coordinated your strategy is. For a better outcome, it is clever to add incentives like:

Rewards
giveaways
Discount
Early access

For instance, if users come in early to sign up and get 30% off their next few purchases, chances are that you’ll receive a lot of early sign-ups in a short time.

Again, if customers register for your tech updates via email and receive a 2% discount on every purchase for the whole year, the number of registrations may rise over time.

Business Cards

Lastly, we can’t discuss traditional offline approaches without mentioning business cards. With this method, you can meet with potential customers, chat with them, discuss your business, product, or service, and exchange business cards.

You can exchange business cards during events such as:

Business lunches or dinners
Reception areas
Client meetings
Retail locations

Now, people view this as an old-fashioned way of capturing leads, but it’s not. Individuals open up more during interpersonal conversations, and this can be the right time to exchange contacts and conduct follow-ups later.

After exchanging contact information, you can back them up digitally in order not to lose them.

For example, at a startup networking event, you, as the founder, could meet possible partners and exchange business cards for your upcoming product launch. That move is how you get your foot in the door of securing a big potential client.

How to Create a Lead Capture Strategy

1. Identify Your Target Audience

For effective lead capture, you have to specifically identify the people you want to convert to paying customers. You can start by reviewing your current customer data and identifying the problems that made them use your product.

For example, you might notice that 60% of your customers use your AI agent software to automate outbound sales, while the remaining 40% include content writing, social media posting, email marketing, and more. In this case, start by targeting more sales teams first.

After you have completed this thorough research, use those insights to create a lead capture strategy that will help you reach potential customer and obtain their contact information.

For example, thousands of people visit our website to read articles monthly. We can identify what they need by tracking their reading habits. If many read articles about meeting scheduling software, it means they want software for scheduling meetings with their clients.

We can use these insights to create a lead capture strategy that will make it easy for these potential customers to leave their contact information without hesitation.

Regardless of the lead capture method and tools you choose, if you ignore this important aspect, you might have many leads but won’t be able to capture them.

2. Choose the Right Lead Magnet Offer

After identifying your target audience, the next step is to choose the right lead magnet offer. This is not too complex. Base your approach on your audience's needs and choose the most suitable lead magnet offer.

As I mentioned earlier about readers on our website, after identifying that most of our customers read articles on meeting scheduling, we can offer them a free PDF of a meeting scheduling guide after they provide their contact information.

You can opt to use any of the following lead magnets:

Free tools
Checklists
Brief manuals
Templates

As long as you are offering a valuable resource for free, it’ll be much easier to obtain their contact information.

One important thing is to make sure that your offer’s description is not deceptive. The offer should be exactly as you describe it. Also, avoid adding many resources that provide no real value to your audience.

According to Emily, a content manager at Sender.net, adding multiple offers on your landing page can reduce conversions by 266%. Essentially, it means you may be able to capture leads this way, but you won’t be able to convert them.

Use Multi-Channel Approaches

Furthermore, you should never depend on a single-channel approach to capture leads. You will not find all the people who fit your audience profile on a single platform. In addition to your website, extend your reach by adding sponsored ads, social media ads, YouTube videos, email marketing, and SEO.

On social media platforms like LinkedIn, you can share educational and informational posts and add links to your landing pages and lead magnets.

If you do this, there is a higher possibility that people who engage with your post will click on the link to visit your landing page and download your free resources. In turn, they will leave their contact information, which you can use for follow-up calls or emails that convert them into paying customers.

3. Leverage Automation & CRM Tools

While I’ll advise you to use a multi-channel approach in creating your lead capture strategy, I’m fully aware that it can be difficult or even impossible to manually track all potential leads.

That is where automation and CRM tools come in.

You can use these tools to create email sequences that you can send to people who interact with the lead resources and leave their contact information. The automated system can keep track of their interests and send them personalized emails and resources.

Moreover, you can use CRM tools to stay in touch with them and potentially convert them into paying customers at the right time.

4. Track and Optimize Performance

After employing all these strategies, you must track their performance. You can track the number of signups you receive in a day, week, or month after visitors view your landing page or download your free resource.

It is as easy as it gets. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track your performance. The analytics will prompt you on what to improve, change, or replace.

Best Lead Capture Software

1. meetergo

meetergo is a top-notch scheduling software with a Meeting Types feature that allows you to create single-host or team meetings by specifying the title, description, duration, link, and video conferencing platform. Once you create your meeting type, clients can directly book meetings with you by providing their contact information.

Thanks to the Contacts feature, you can view your client’s name, email address, company, appointment history, and the next time they will meet you. This helps you keep track of potential customers and make follow-ups.

Also, the Routing Forms feature helps you create forms with a name, a chosen appointment type, a funnel, and an embed you can insert on your website. With these forms, you can automatically assign bookings to the right team member based on step-by-step rules and conditions you set.

Consider how you can use our routing forms to design advanced funnels for qualifying and channel bookings. With this, you create forms that automatically assign bookings to the right team member or provide them with the right resource based on rules you set when you design the form.

Start by creating a new routing form. To do this, click the ‘Create’ button and give your form a name. Then, select the funnel type. In my case, I selected a multi-step form with dynamic routing.

Next, give the form a description that your customers will see.

You can add a form to request your clients' contact information.

For the routing forms to work perfectly, you have to add routes through the routing logic function. That way, it can send people to the correct destination

The routes you create will run in order based on the conditions you provide. If no condition is met, you can create a custom message to display to your clients.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is next on our list of best lead capture software. With its Landing page function, you can create a beautiful, conversion-optimized landing page by including images, building and embedding a HubSpot form with AI, or starting from scratch.

The Lead Scoring feature helps you to track your leads' digital body language based on forms they have filled out, emails they have opened, and pages they have viewed. Additionally, Hubspot’s Contact feature sports a dashboard that displays the client’s name, primary company, last activity date, lead status, and the date you added them.

Using the Forms functionality, you can design multi-step forms through dragging and dropping question fields such as name, email, phone number, and more. But that’s not all; you can personalize your form with conditional logic and show, hide, or skip questions based on your visitor’s answers.

3. Leadpages

Leadpages comes with unique landing page templates that allow you to design a landing page, collect contact details, and add incentives such as free guides and PDFs. Potential customers can download these items once they have provided their contact information.

One of my favourite features of Leadpages is its Website builder, which lets you insert elements, files, embeds, and support buttons into the template you choose for your website.

Also, with Leadpage’s social link bio, you can create a shareable link on social media that directs users to your website, sales page, or any landing page you add to the link.

Not to mention its Conversion tools feature, which comes with pop-ups and alert bars. These help you create small notification-like windows for capturing leads by adding a headline, a form, and a call-to-action button.

4. Intercom

Intercom offers the Fin AI Agent, which enables you to build your brand’s AI agent by providing training content, guidance, and tasks before testing and deploying it to respond to customer queries.

In addition, the Inbox shows you all messages from clients and teammates together with details such as user data, conversation attributes, user notes, user tags, and links.

Moreover, Intercom’s Contact feature dashboard helps you view your customers’ user profiles, contact information, and actions, as well as their last seen, first seen dates, sign-up dates, and web sessions.

Last but not least, using the Outbound feature, you can create personalized follow-up messages or choose from easy-to-use templates for welcome messages, reminders, newsletter sign-ups, and discount offers.

4. Fillout

Fillout is another lead capture tool that helps users create forms by selecting a template, choosing a layout, naming it, changing the theme, and publishing it to start capturing leads.

On the other hand, thanks to its Integration feature, you can embed forms in Notion, trigger follow-up emails or actions, and connect third-party apps such as Attio, Salesforce, and Pipedrive.

Moreover, you can create interactive forms and workflows based on AI, notifications, scheduling, and conversion kit templates. These forms can also trigger an AI action, assign a task, or send an email.

Best Practices for High-Conversion Lead Capture

1. Keep Forms Short and Relevant

Shorter forms usually lead to higher conversion rates while requiring less work from users. Just ask for the necessary information. With each extra field, the chance of form abandonment increases. Prioritize obtaining the most important information, such as your name and email address.

Don’t rush to capture all their information at once. First, ask for the most important ones. After establishing trust with them, you can gather additional information through other media.

2. Offer Real Value in Exchange for Contact Details

People rarely give up their contact details without getting something in return. An excellent lead magnet offers something of value, like a free trial, a unique discount, a downloadable PDF, or a useful checklist.

The offer needs to solve at least one of your users' present pain points. People are more inclined to fill out the form and keep interacting with the brand when the exchange feels reasonable.

3. Optimize for Mobile Users

Nowadays, many people visit websites using mobile devices. Users will leave a form if it appears cluttered or doesn't load correctly on their smaller displays. Forms should load quickly, be responsive, and be simple to fill out.

Make sure the submit button is easy to tap and avoid using small text fields. Regardless of the device, a mobile-first design makes lead capture easy.

4. Use A/B testing to improve conversion rates

Using A/B testing, you can compare different iterations of your form to determine which one works best. You can test field labels, colors, call-to-action buttons, headlines, and even pictures. Over time, regular testing helps you know the most effective combinations for capturing more leads.

Continuous testing maintains the lead capture approach current and efficient because what converts well today for your business might not work tomorrow.

Key Takeaway

Throughout the article, we've discussed the importance of adopting the best lead capture practices, methods, and tools. Tools like meetergo, HubSpot, Leadpages, and others can help you design forms to gather potential customers' contact details.

Also, it is important to ensure that the free resources you use to attract potential customers are valuable and relevant to them.

Start adopting the best methods now to capture as many leads as possible and increase your chances of converting them to paying and loyal customers.

FAQ

Why is lead capture important?

Businesses can use the data they obtain from lead capture to keep in contact with potential customers and remind them to take action by purchasing the product or service they showed interest in.

What lead information should you capture?

The most important lead information to capture includes their names, email addresses, phone numbers, product interests, geographical location, and business type.

What is the difference between lead capture and lead generation?

Lead generation is the first step where you attract potential customers by using social media, advertisements, blog posts, videos, and more. Then, lead capture is the next step, where you use forms to collect their contact details (such as name, email address, and company name).

What types of businesses need to capture leads?

SaaS firms, e-commerce brands, service providers, agencies, and consultants need to capture leads and turn them into paying customers.

How many fields should my lead capture form have?

A typical lead capture form has 3-5 fields to not overwhelm the person filling it out. If you want to collect more information (like 10 or more), use a multi-step or multi-page form where the person clicks the "next" button to add more details.

Where are the best places to put lead capture forms on your website?

The best places to put lead capture forms are on high-traffic pages like the homepage, blog posts with business potential, landing pages, exit-intent popups, and at the end of content.

What is Lead Capture? (Methods, Tools, Examples, etc.)