Lead Generation on the Web

Backend Processing

Congratulations! The visitor has clicked submit, and you've got an incoming lead. Hopefully, the first of many to come. But what do you do now? What catches the form's precious information and sends it along to you (or your sales department)?

As with anything that involves backend processing, the only answer (everyone, now!): it depends. The simplest, most straightforward approach is to take each piece of data from the form and forward it to an email address. Then the person who gets the email can do something useful with the information, such as send out a response with an attached special report or whatever it is you're offering.

A half-step above this would be to send the form's information to an email address with an auto responder function such that each person gets her special report automatically.

Of course, this kind of approach is "good 'nuff" in only a small percentage of cases. For those of you with more sophisticated requirements, you'll want a form handler that does a number of things:

• Process all form fields, removing potentially bad things like HTML and other code and excessively long strings (usually an attempt at hacking the server).

• Strip out any attempts by bots trying to inject email addresses for spamming purposes.

• Implement some kind of lead scoring based on responses to the form. In other words, if the visitor was a CEO with a high budget and an immediate need, score the lead higher than a student with zero bucks. (See the appendix for a starter ...