CiviLead - Gather Leads into CiviCRM!

Give potential donors and customers an easy way to request information that gets logged into CiviCRM! CiviCRM plus Joomla is a fantastic platform for your business or non-profit. Joomla powers your Website. CiviCRM organizes your Contacts, events, and even powers your mailing list. The combination is quite powerful for a range of businesses.

CorFun has had a great deal of experienced using the Joomla/CiviCRM combination for a variety of non-profit and for-profit organizations. While CiviCRM is a powerful tool, it did have one weakness when compared to other Joomla/CRM combinations. If you are trying to get a visitor to your site to sign up for a newsletter or request more information (become a self-generated lead) then core CiviCRM routes the visitor to a page on which to fill in the information.

This is can be a clunky, two-step process. Worse, when the potential customer or donor lands on the CiviCRM page to sign up, a long list of optional information (snail mail address, phone number, etc.) can be staring him or her in the face. If the person just wanted a quick email with more information, your asking for address, phone number, etc. can cause second thoughts. If the potential customer or donor fails to fill out the information, then you have lost contact forever.

CiviLead from CorFun is a component and module which combine to streamline the process of getting “leads” and eNewsletter subscribers into your CiviCRM system. You can use the CiviLead Module to encourage contact from any page of your Joomla-powered site.

With CiviLead, you can reduce the usage of your “Contact Us” page for folks who want specific information.  With CiviLead, you just use CiviCRM for those "contact" purposes by putting a contact module right there on a page advertising a service, an event, a volunteer opportunity, a product, etc.!

CiviLead can generate an internal email that notifies one of your resources that someone would like more information. That information is captured in your CiviCRM install, so instead of getting valuable contact information in an email from a Web form, capture that information in CiviCRM where you can best use it!

CiviLead can also generate a thank-you email to the new Lead and can even include an attachment automatically that you specify. Use different iterations of CiviLead for different products, events, newsletters, services, and more!

Here are some of the important features of CiviLead:

• Put a CiviLead module on any page of your Joomla site with a simple form for visitors to request more information about your organization or something specific like an event or product. (In CRM terms, people who fill out the form become “self-generated” leads.) See our Uses tab for a discussion of how to deploy CiviLead to promote your organization.
• Site visitors filling out the form are added to CiviCRM to any Contact Group you specify. Use different iterations of CiviLead on different pages to populate different groups. Simply fill in the CiviCRM group number that Leads filling out a specific form in a specific module iteration should be added to as shown below:

• Put a CiviLead module on any page of your Joomla site to use for registration for one or more newsletters. These two functions can be combined, as your “Lead” contact group(s) in CiviCRM can also be used for eNewsletters! The same CiviCRM Group can be used in the active sales process and to send email blasts and/or scheduled newsletters.
• Optionally route to a custom thank-you page which can ask for more information such as address and phone number. This function allows you to keep the initial information requested in the module to a bare minimum, but allows you to bring the user to a page where those who are willing can supply you with more contact information. Or optionally route to a custom thank you page either directly after the module information has been filled in, or after the additional information page has been filled in. Simply specify the "redirect" link that users should be taken to after they have filled in the information as shown below:

Route Users to any page you desire after they complete the form!

• CiviLead can generate a custom email to the new “Lead” thanking them for contacting your organization and providing more information about the next steps in the new relationship. The email can even contain an attachment! This allows you to have people sign up to receive an informational PDF, PowerPoint, or any other documentation. You get their contact information into your CiviCRM, and they automatically get the information advertised without any manual work. The image below shows part of a sample email with an attachment. This verbiage can be unique per instance of the CiviLead Module.

• CiviLead can optionally generate an internal email to alert a resource within your organization that a new “Lead” has registered. No need to run a report or take any manual steps. When someone wants information about what you are offering, you will know about it immediately. Contact resource to notify when a “Lead” registers is configurable at the module level so can be different for each module instance. The image below shows a sample internal email.

• Emails can be configured differently for different iterations of this module. See below:

Automatically send attachments to site visitors that contact you!

• Optionally use a configurable question-based captcha to prevent spam registrations.

• Configure the field literals shown to the end user. CiviLead can support any language quickly and easily, and since the most important literals are set at the module level, even support more than one language on the site Website!

CiviLead greatly extends the ability of your organization to encourage and log contacts from your site's visitors. These are just a few examples of how CiviLead can be used on your Joomla-powered Website.

1. More Information About Your Organization

Put an instance of the CiviLead module on multiple pages of your Website encouraging visitors to get more information about your Website. The information in the module is minimal to encourage visitors to fill out the form on impulse. You can put custom text above the module to further encourage contact, and you can even promise visitors a bonus file with desirable information if they contact you. What kind of file? Powerpoint, PDF, an audio track, a video track - what ever kind you can think of that will attach to an email! One of our customers had great success promising a market report if potential clients provided a contact email address in the form. They got thousands of people to fill out the CiviLead module to request the report. Each new "Lead" got their email attachment automatically and their contact information was securely stored in CiviCRM to be used for further contact.

Best of all - if they provide you with a bogus email address they will never get their attachment! So there incentive is to provide a real email address that you can use to further your relationship. You get valid contact info, visitors to your site get the information they are looking for. It's a win for everyone!

2. More Information About a Product, Service, or Event

Each instance of the CiviLead Module can have its own

• Custom Introtext
• CiviCRM Contact Group registration
• Custom external email
• Custom Internal email
• Custom attachment
• Custom "redirect" or "thank you" page
• Literals in any language you desire

That flexibility lets you use CiviLead modules independently for products, events, services, donation campaigns, promotions, or anything else with a page on your Joomla-powered site. Visitors to your site can request information about anything specific, and that information request gets logged appropriately in CiviCRM to facilitate future contact!

3. Redirect to a "Hidden Page(s)"

Have some information or a set of informative pages that you would like to show people - but only if they provide their contact name and email address? One way to do this is to encourage them to register for your site and then redirect them to the page on login. But not all Joomla-powered sites really want to have a registered user base. Often, you just want to get contact information in exchange for showing the user some information of interest to them. You can do that with CiviLead by putting the information in an attachment and emailing it to the user (automatically). You can also do it by putting the information on one or more pages and "redirecting" the users to those pages when they provide you with contact information. That encourages them to provide you with contact information, but doesn't require them to register with your site! A win for everyone.

These are just some examples.... CorFun has deployed CiviLead on Joomla sites running CiviCRM in some very creative ways. If you are serious about converting visitors to your site into customers, donors, and/or supporters - then CiviLead is a must-have Joomla component!

CiviNews has many of the same features as CiviLead and is primarily for eNewsletter registrations for CiviCRM. The major difference between the two systems is that CiviNews does not support external or internal email notifications. If you are looking for a fast, simple, effective way to support eNewsletter sign up only, then CiviNews is an affordable option that we highly recommend. However, if you would like to not only support eNewsletter sign up, but also have the powerful internal and external email capabilities, then we suggest CiviLead. To find out more about CiviNews, please click here.