Sugar Marketing Series: Creating a Landing Page and Lead Form

Sugar Marketing Series: Setting the Record Straight
This is another entry in a series of blog posts highlighting the many features that Mailchimp and SugarChimp bring to you and your marketing team when combined with SugarCRM.

Messaging is incredibly important for any marketing campaign. There is so much to communicate, but if you try to communicate it all at once your messaging quickly becomes convoluted and confusing. This is why landing pages, with or without lead forms, are so important. They allow you to create simple and clear messaging for each “thing” you are trying to communicate. Having ultra-focused campaigns translates over to more effective campaigns; which is what we all aim for.

As part of our ongoing Sugar Marketing Series, we cover how we created the Sugar Marketing Series landing page so you can repeat the process for your own marketing efforts.

Mailchimp is known for their super user-friendly tools. Their landing page creation process is no exception to that. Their tools, built especially for marketers, allow you to create what basically amounts to mini sites. These Mailchimp landing pages can help your business achieve various goals, such as: promoting products or events, accepting payments, creating signup opportunities for your email lists, offering free PDF downloads, or even holding contests and giveaways.

For this campaign, we wanted a very simple lead form with just an email address and a way for folks to download our Sugar Market vs. Mailchimp comparison PDF.

Let’s Get Started

First, we began by creating a new Landing page campaign. With Mailchimp, there are no limits or additional costs to the number of landing pages you create. It comes as part of the package. Our first step was to click Create Campaign and select the Landing page campaign type.

Next, we picked a name for the landing page and which Audience (what Mailchimp calls a list) any new signups or form submissions should get added to.

Now, my favorite part. Mailchimp provides some starter templates to make it easier to get going. The general templates they provide are Lead Generation, Accept Payments, Grow Your List, and Promote Products. You are not limited in using a landing page for just these. It is just a nice kick to get you moving faster.

Once selected, we were then brought to the page editor. This is where the editing magic happens. Here, you can add or remove any page elements such as image groups, payment forms, images, etc. Using the Bandmates template, we altered the background colors, uploaded some images such as logos and the comparison grid, and tweaked the content as we wanted. It took roughly half an hour in all.

We made our lead form on this page extremely simple. We only ask for an email address. However, you can edit the signup form and add any fields that you prefer and optionally mark any of those fields as required.

While editing the page, we were able to do a Preview and see how this page would look once live.

Once editing was completed, we saved the page and was brought back to the summary page. Before clicking Publish, we ran through the summary and made sure everything was as it should be.

While we decided not to add any page tracking, you could very well add your Facebook Pixel or Google Analytics tracking code to better track your Customer Journey.

Besides adding any new signups to our Audience, we wanted to add a Tag.

By clicking on the plus button, we were able to add what we thought was an appropriate tag to know why and when someone signed up for the list.

Mailchimp hosts the landing page for you and will give you a URL that you can share. If you want that URL to look like it is part of your domain, like we did, you can add a custom domain easily.

Running through the Add Your Domain process, we found that it took just a couple of steps to do. Add the domain or subdomain, Mailchimp provides a code to add to your domain’s DNS configuration, and verify. After a few minutes, we were able to change over to our custom domain (mailchimp.sugaroutfitters.com).

Once we were all done we hit Publish and were immediately greeted with this pleasant cheer.

And We Are Live!

With just a little bit of time invested, we were able to spin up a targeted, attractive landing page with a lead form. What’s even better is that those new signups will automatically get sent over to our SugarCRM instance with the behind-the-scenes workhorse that is SugarChimp. We will cover CRM List Syncing and Segmentation in our next post.

Next Up: CRM List Syncing and Segmentation

Next up in the Sugar Marketing Series: Setting the Record Straight campaign is how we use SugarChimp to keep our lists synced between Mailchimp and SugarCRM along with how we use that data in SugarCRM to segment and send more targeted campaigns in Mailchimp. Stay tuned!

Follow Our Own Marketing Journey

Sign yourself or your teammates up for this journey at the Sugar Marketing Series: Setting the Record Straight campaign landing page to see how we utilized the many features of Mailchimp and SugarCRM.

Want to Learn More?

Schedule an informational call to learn more about how Mailchimp and SugarCRM could work for you and your specific needs.