The art of lead capture is all about compelling landing pages integrated behind-the-scenes with an efficient, reliable way to enter and track leads in your CRM system.

Landing Pages
Great landing pages make all the difference in whether you'll get the lead. After someone clicks on your search marketing ad, search result, or request for product information link, you have a split-second to win him or her over. Usually, three factors influence this decision: 1) is there a compelling offer, 2) are the message and offer relevant to this prospect, and 3) are you asking for too much?

Compelling offer. If the prospect is truly interested, the offer doesn't have to be extraordinary in order to be compelling. Here at salesforce, our best-performing offers are generally webinars, whitepapers, demos, discounted event registration, and a free trial of our product. For your business, it may be pricing information, data sheet, free sample or consultation, or something industry-specific.

Relevance. Most of us run complex businesses -- multiple geographies and languages, multiple products, multiple marketing channels. As tempting as it may be to drive all interest to a single or few number of landing pages, you will greatly improve your conversion if you offer targeted messaging and offers that are relevant to the prospect. If the prospect clicked on a link requesting product information, does the landing page shown focus on benefits and offers for that product? If the prospect clicked on a Google ad, do your landing page message and offer tie back to the ad? Do you show the landing page in the right language based on IP address and the clicked-on ad? Have you researched what types of offers are most successful for each particular market?

Don't ask for too much. Your landing page could have a terrific offer and perfect messaging but still lose the prospect if you annoy them with too many questions, especially if they don't seem critical for the offer at hand. Some great practices pioneered by the user experience zealots at Google are to make some fields optional, spread fields across multiple pages, and ask for the right info at the right time. Your marketing practice may be to require company size and mailing address for all leads -- but that may seem irrelevant, annoying, and intrusive to someone who just wants a data sheet. The "quid pro quo" social contract applies to online forms too -- give a little, get a little. Want more, give more. For instance, if a prospect is interested in your whitepaper, show them the abstract and comments from others who have read it before asking for an email address.

Here are a few of my favorite landing page solutions on the AppExchange. But remember -- at the end of the day, the most important thing isn't how your page looks but rather your offer, message relevance, and not to ask for too much.

• PluraPage.      Popular service for marketers to generate customized, personalized landing      pages and microsites without technical assistance.
• PageVester.      Create free landing pages with Google Page Creator™ and connect to the      Salesforce Web-to-Lead form in the back end.
• iCentera.      Portals for Mortals™ -- easy-to-use tool for creating landing pages and      websites.
• Web CMS. Web content management system for marketers to build and maintain landing pages and websites.

The AppExchange also offers several solutions dedicated to event registration pages --eg, OnPoint Direct Response, ActevaRSVP.

Lead Capture Technology
The landing page solutions above all integrate seamlessly with the Salesforce application's built-in web-to-lead functionality (that is, once the prospect clicks "submit", the lead will appear in your Salesforce org and get routed according to any assignment rules or other workflow you have specified).  If you have requirements requiring special functionality above and beyond this, however, you may want to look into one of these solutions:

• Web2Anything. Just like Salesforce allows you to route data captured from your website into leads and cases, Web2Anything provides this functionality for any Salesforce object, all without any coding. Example use cases include a custom Survey object, a Literature Request, a Candidate object for your recruiting app or an Opportunity.
• LeadByFone. Speech-enabled, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) solution that enables you to deploy and manage the real-time capture of caller name and address information directly into your Salesforce org.

Bonus Marketing Tip of the Day
Happy customers are a marketer's best friend. Every great product (as yours is!) has customer fanatics. Use them everywhere. Video testimonials, case studies, quotes, analyst and press references, prospect calls -- you'd be surprised what customers are willing to say and do for the products they love.

Check out these customer reference management solutions on AppExchange -- Boulder Logic Reference Manager, ReferenceStor, Reference-OnDemand with Campaign Integration.!