Your contact database is the most valuable thing you own in marketing. Without it you have no one to write to, and even the best campaign stays in a drawer. The good news is that collecting contacts is not some mysterious discipline. Only a handful of things decide the outcome, and you can influence all of them. In this lesson we will look at where new contacts come from and why your own website is the most reliable source.

Three factors that decide everything

How many new contacts you collect from your website depends on three things. Nothing else.

• Traffic. How many people visit the page where your form lives. If nobody comes to the page, there is nobody to sign up.
• The exchange. What you offer in return for a contact. The more valuable and specific it is, the more people will fill in their address. It can be useful content, a discount or another benefit.
• The form. How it looks, what it says and above all when and how it appears on the page. The way it appears is exactly where you can raise the number of new contacts significantly. A badly timed form, on the other hand, will reliably drive people away.

Most companies focus only on the first point and buy traffic. Yet the second and third factors cost far less and can be improved in a single afternoon. That is what we will focus on for the rest of the course.

Why your website is the main source

The people who visit your pages were already looking for you for some reason. A large share of them will not buy, send an inquiry or call during their first visit. Still, many of them would happily stay in touch with you, they just need a simple opportunity to do so. That is exactly what a form gives them.

In Quanda we call these forms active forms. When someone fills in a form on your pages, a new contact is created in Quanda. You can assign a tag to it right away, send a confirmation email to the person who filled it in, and notify yourself or a colleague that a new prospect has arrived. None of this requires programming, you set everything up in Quanda and only paste a short code snippet into your website.

You can collect contacts offline too

The online world has taught us to forget about meeting in person, yet that is often where collecting contacts works best. The biggest opportunity is a trade fair or an industry conference. You talk to people face to face, hear their real objections and quickly learn who is just collecting free pens and who is a genuine prospect.

To turn such a meeting into a usable contact in your database, you need two things. A goal set in advance, meaning how many contacts you want to collect, and a prepared way to record them. A Quanda form open on a tablet at your booth works well, because it saves the contact right where you will keep working with it. You can use the same form for seminar or webinar registrations.

What awaits you in this course

In the following lessons we will walk the whole path. First you will build an active form in Quanda step by step, from settings through content to automations. Then you will design it so it blends in with your website and decide whether it should be fixed in place or animated.

Next we will look at double opt-in and what the consent needs to contain so that you collect contacts legally. The fifth lesson belongs to lead magnets, meaning what to offer in exchange for a contact. Finally, you will add the form to your website and check that it is collecting.

All you need is a Quanda account and a website running on the secure https protocol. Each lesson ends with a short quiz so you can check that nothing important slipped past you.

Now you will build the form. In this lesson we will go through the first three pages of an active form in Quanda: settings, content and automations. Open Quanda in a second window and click along with us. We will leave design and animation for the next lesson.

Creating the form and general settings

In the top menu, in the Active forms section, choose "Create new form". You will land on the "Settings" page. The form name is only for your internal records, so keep it practical, for example "Newsletter signup, website footer". In the "language" field you choose the language of the "Powered by" text shown in the form footer.

Using the "Show form to these users" field you invite colleagues into the form. The "Admin" role sees all created forms in their account regardless of who manages them. The "Project manager" role sees the forms they created and all forms they were invited to. The "Consultant" role sees only the forms someone invited them to. If a user with the "Consultant" role is creating the form, they must invite themselves into it. Otherwise they lose access to the form after saving the page and cannot continue preparing it.

Form settings and actions after submission

In the Form settings section you choose the form width in pixels. The default value is 400 and the allowed range is 150 to 850. Here you also turn the "Powered by" text in the footer on or off, and you can block repeated submissions from the same computer, which is useful for registrations and contests.

Then you choose what happens once a person submits the form. You have three options:

• Stay on the page. The form is processed and stays in place, empty.
• Show a web page. The visitor is redirected to an address you enter.
• Show text and a button. A thank-you message of yours appears in place of the form, with a button linking wherever you need.

The last section is for inserting code into the form header. It is used mainly for tracking codes, for example the Facebook pixel. Faulty code can break the whole form, so if you are not sure, leave the field empty. Finally, click "Save and form".

Form content

Quanda prepares a basic form for you with a heading, a spacer, an email address field and a button. The only required field is the email address, everything else is up to you. You pick fields in the right-hand panel and drag them with your mouse to any position. Each section can be aligned left, center or right, so you can even place two fields side by side on one row.

The fields come in three groups. The General group contains elements for description and layout: heading, text, image, line, video, button, spacer and checkbox. The Contacts group offers practically every piece of data you keep about a contact in Quanda, including first name, last name, phone, address and your own custom fields. The Companies group is for company data. Be careful, as soon as you add the company name field, it becomes required.

One simple rule applies. Every extra field lowers the number of submissions, so ask only for what you will actually use. Do not forget the consent checkbox, which we will cover in lesson four.

Automations

Automations are actions Quanda performs on its own after someone submits the form. You add them with the "Add new condition" button, name them, choose an action and schedule how long after submission it should run.

Assigning a tag is the only required automation. Without a tag you would not be able to filter contacts from this form into a campaign later. The second action is sending an email to the new contact: a thank-you, a registration confirmation or the promised file. The third option is sending a notification to you or a colleague, including the details the person filled in. Your sales rep can then call the same day. You prepare the emails for both actions in advance in transactional emails. If a summary at the end of the day is enough for you, have a summary notification sent to the form manager instead of individual alerts.

The content of your form is done, now you will decide how it looks and how it appears on the page. This lesson has a surprisingly big impact on the result. The very same form with the very same text can bring several times more contacts depending on how it is displayed.

A design that blends in with your website

On the Design page you adjust colors, background, font size and weight and a number of other details. Every change in the right-hand menu is instantly reflected in the preview, so you always see how the form will really look.

The goal is simple. The form should feel like part of your page, not like a foreign window from somewhere else. Take the colors, font and corner rounding you use on your website and set them here too. The result can often be matched almost one to one. When visitors do not feel that something planted is being pushed on them, they fill in the form much more willingly. Once you are happy, click "Done" in the top right and move on to the Animation section.

Fixed or animated

You can get the form onto your website in two ways. A fixed form is part of the page and waits for someone to notice it. An animated form slides in on its own from the side, from the top, from the bottom, or pops up in the middle of the screen.

The choice depends on the occasion. A fixed form works well where the person arrived with a specific intent, for example on a seminar registration page or below an article with a download offer. Use an animated form where you want to reach people who came for something else, typically for newsletter signups.

The difference in results is big. Our data shows that animated forms collect up to two and a half times more contacts than fixed ones. The reason is simple. People have learned to ignore static forms, while movement demands attention on its own. And once someone notices the form and pauses over the heading, you have a chance to win them over.

Animation settings

First you enable the animation with a toggle. Then you choose whether the form should be a pop-up window, a slide-in bar or a slide-in window, and you decide where on the screen it appears. If the preset behavior does not suit you, you can adjust the offset, the animation type and its speed.

The moment of display is set separately. You have three options:

• immediately after the page loads,
• after loading with a delay you set yourself,
• after scrolling to a specific spot on the page, again with an optional delay.

In the advanced settings you then check the extras you want to use. These include automatic closing when idle, dimming the background when the form appears, or a close cross.

How to animate politely

Animation is a powerful tool, and like every powerful tool it can be overdone. A form that pops up over the whole article in the first second of a visit will annoy most people before they even finish reading the headline.

Stick to a few principles. Let the person read something first; on content pages, combining scrolling to a specific spot with a short delay works well. Always keep the close cross visible so the visitor can return to reading. On mobile, prefer a slide-in bar over a full-screen window. And turn on the block on repeated submissions so the form does not pester those who have already signed up.

The setup is not a one-time decision. Try one variant, check the submitted forms after two weeks, and adjust the display timing or animation type based on the results.

A contact you have no right to write to is useless. This lesson walks you through what you need to have in order so that you can use the addresses you collect with a clear conscience. It is not complicated, and Quanda does a large part of the work for you.

Consent as the foundation

GDPR did not ban collecting contacts, it only defined the conditions under which processing personal data is lawful. For new contacts from your website you will rely on the legal basis of "consent to the processing of personal data". To store an address and write to it, you need the person's consent.

The simplest route is a checkbox in the form. Next to it goes a short text, for example "I want to receive tips and occasional offers, and I therefore give my consent to the processing of my personal data for this purpose." The person must check the box themselves; a pre-checked box does not count as consent.

Place the full wording of the consent on your website and link to it from the short text next to the checkbox. The consent should state who it is given to, meaning your identification, which data it covers, for what purpose you will process it, for how long, how it can be withdrawn, and information about the rights the person has. Active forms in Quanda store the consent itself with the contact, along with the legal basis, the purpose of processing and its validity, so your records are all in one place.

What double opt-in is

Double opt-in is verification of the subscriber's email address. When you turn it on, Quanda first sends a verification email to the address entered in the form. It contains a link the person must click. Only then is the contact added to your database.

The benefit is twofold. It protects you against typos, because when the verification email does not arrive, the person usually notices and enters the address again correctly. And it prevents your list from filling up with deliberately made-up addresses that do not exist at all. On top of that, you have proof that the address was entered by its real owner.

How to set up double opt-in in Quanda

On the Double opt in page you first enable verification with a toggle. Then you write the subject and the text of the verification email.

Do not overdo the content. We recommend a clear, brief text with no images, for two reasons. A simple email has a higher chance of landing in the main inbox folder, and the recipient can confirm it within a few seconds without having to read anything.

The verification link is generated automatically as soon as you switch to the tab. You can insert it in two ways. The first is directly at the cursor position, where the link appears as a web address. The second option is to attach it to text you have written beforehand. In that case write the text, select it and click the "Insert verification link" button. Do not forget to delete the original automatically inserted link. The email may contain only one link, otherwise the verification will not work properly.

Checking up and a healthy database

In the form, in the Submitted forms section, you can see how many people did not complete the verification. Sort the list by the subscriber column and at the top you will see rows where the subscriber is missing. Those are exactly the people who did not make it into your contact database.

If there are many such rows, look for the cause. Most often it is a confusing verification email or delivery to spam. Another common issue is a missing note in the form telling people that a confirmation will arrive in their inbox.

A smaller database of people who confirmed their address is always better than a large database full of nonexistent addresses. Quality carries over into the deliverability of all your future campaigns.

Let us return to the second of the three factors from the first lesson: what you offer in exchange for a contact. This offer is called a lead magnet. It decides whether the visitor fills in their address or closes the form. And a simple rule applies. The more valuable and specific the thing you offer, the more contacts you collect.

What works as a lead magnet

A lead magnet is content or a tool you give in exchange for contact details. It must be unique, valuable and above all usable right away. Proven formats:

• An ebook or whitepaper. A deep dive into one topic that also shows you understand the subject.
• Templates and checklists. They have high perceived value and a low barrier to download, because people can put them to use within five minutes.
• Calculators and ROI tools. They speak in numbers, which is especially appreciated by the people who make purchasing decisions.
• Webinars and recordings. You demonstrate expertise live and capture the interest of people who are closer to a decision.
• Case studies and comparisons. Concrete results at similar companies lower the perceived risk.
• A discount or another benefit. A fast and simple route that works well in e-commerce.

In B2B, the format follows the stage of the buying journey. At the beginning, people appreciate broader educational content; closer to a decision, they need data, a calculation or a comparison. And it is better to have fewer highly relevant contacts than thousands of people who will never buy anything.

How to find a topic that works

The biggest mistake is inventing a topic at your desk. The moment you are in an "I think I know" state, you risk writing fifty pages nobody wants.

Find out instead. Run a short survey of your target audience; you can prepare the questionnaire directly in Quanda. Ask your customer support and sales teams what people ask about most often. Look into your analytics to see which articles on your website get the most readers, and develop the strongest topic in depth. Keyword research and industry discussions on social media help too. If several hot topics come out of it, send them to your existing database and let it decide.

Making it worth the download

You have only a few seconds to capture attention on the internet, so the title decides. Write several variants, have your colleagues read them and pick the one that resonates most. The title must match the content, because a punchy headline off topic causes more disappointment than good.

Structure the text well so readers can find their way around it quickly. Add tips, real-world examples and exercises so that after finishing, the reader feels they have moved forward. Do not release the piece into the world without proofreading; typos in an ebook are an unnecessary embarrassment. And do not skimp on the design, because the cover page decides whether the reader ever gets to page two.

Delivery and follow-up communication

You deliver the lead magnet with the automation from lesson two. In the form, set the condition "form was submitted" and, as the action, sending a transactional email containing the download link. At the same time assign a tag for the specific magnet, so you can later tell who downloaded what.

Watch out for one thing. Downloading an ebook does not by itself entitle you to further marketing outreach. That is why the form needs a checkbox with consent to receiving news and tips, as we showed in the previous lesson.

Follow the delivery email with a short series while the topic is still fresh. And above all, track which magnet brings in the contacts that eventually become customers. The best lead magnet is not the prettiest one, but the one that solves a real problem at the right moment.

Your form is finished in both content and design, and the automations are set up. One last step remains: getting it onto your website and verifying that it really collects. In Quanda, the "Insert code" page is there for this. Do not be afraid of it, you will not program anything, just copy and paste.

Before you start

Check two things in advance. Your website must run on the secure https protocol, otherwise the form will not start on your site.

The second thing is your contact count. The form creates new contacts and updates existing ones, so keep an eye on whether you are approaching the limit of your plan. You will find the limit via the three dots in the Settings and Plan section. The current number of contacts in your account is shown in the Contacts and Contact list section, at the bottom left of the overview page. If the system had no room for new contacts, it would switch off all active forms on your website. That is a situation you really do not want to discover a month later.

Two codes and where they belong

On the "Insert code" page you will find two codes with different purposes.

• The activation code goes into the source code in the page header, meaning between the opening and closing header tags. Without it the form does not work.
• The display code goes directly into the body of the page or article, at the spot where the form should appear. Careful, you must view the article in source code mode, not in a regular text editor.

If you use animation, you copy both codes. When the form should pop up only after scrolling to a specific spot, place the display code exactly at that spot in the source code. For a fixed form, insert the display code where the form should stand on the page.

On the same page you will also find an address where the form works as a standalone web page. It comes in handy when you do not want the form on your website but need to send someone a link to it. Typically you put it into a button in an email campaign or into a social media post.

WordPress without worries

WordPress has its own way of inserting scripts into the header, so there is a plugin for it, which you can download in the help center. The steps are short:

1. Install the plugin in your WordPress.
2. In the plugin settings, paste into the first empty row the code you find in Quanda on the "Insert code" page as the second one from the top.
3. Choose whether the form should appear on all pages. Then there is nothing more to do.
4. If you picked just one specific page, the plugin creates a so-called short code. Copy it and paste it into the body of the page where the form should appear.

Great news to finish with. From then on you change the content, look and behavior of the form directly in Quanda, and the changes appear on your website by themselves. You never have to insert the code again.

Check that it collects

Right after deployment, fill in the form yourself. Walk the whole path like a regular visitor. Did the form appear at the moment it was supposed to? Did the verification email arrive? Was a contact created with the correct tag? Did the notification reach you or your colleague?

Then watch the results in the Submitted forms section. For each record you see the date and time of submission and the subscriber, through which you can click into the contact detail in Quanda. There you verify the submitted data and the tag from the automation. The list can be filtered by submission date and by field content.

Look into this section regularly, ideally once a week. You will see not only how many contacts are coming in, but also whether something has broken. Zero submissions after a website redesign is usually the first symptom that the display code got lost during the changes.