Chapter 2
2 minutes
How Clearbit forms work
With Clearbit form optimization and real-time enrichment, you can have a quick, short form — even just a one-field form — while getting all the data you need on incoming leads.
Here’s how a Clearbit form works: when a lead enters their work email address, Clearbit Enrichment loads relevant data points, like their job role, title, industry, and company size, into your marketing automation platform or system of record.
That gives you the option to autofill fields for leads to validate information, or our usual recommendation — hide fields unless Clearbit can’t find the relevant data point. So if our background enrichment process doesn’t find a match, your form dynamically expands so that you can still collect the information you need.
Clearbit form shortening works with any of our Clearbit Enrichment for marketing automation integrations — HubSpot, Pardot, and Marketo — and is easy to set up. (Or you can use our Enrichment API.)
Dynamic form scenarios
Scenario 1: I enter my work email address into a form. In the background, Clearbit automatically pulls up my information and finds the data the form requires. This all happens in realtime, so that I don’t deal with any lag. I’ll get to hit submit immediately, and the business still gets key firmographic and role information about me.
Scenario 2: My evil twin Zanet enters her email address as a solo founder of a cottage cheese company into the form. Clearbit doesn’t find a match. So the form expands right when she finishes typing, so that she has to enter her details.
Scenario 3: Again — based on an email address entered, Clearbit will look up in real-time and expand the form to only ask for the fields we can’t find. In Scenario 2, because Clearbit didn’t have data on my evil twin, the entire form with all the fields appeared. Here’s one more example. Let’s say Zanet diabolically joins Clearbit as a freelancer. She has a Clearbit email address but isn’t a full-time employee.
When she enters her email address, we recognize what company she works at, so firmographic data like company name and city are known — and the form only asks for name and job title.
Clearbit’s dynamic forms are a win-win-win, because:
- You get to optimize conversions. Our customers have seen conversion rates go up by 3-6% for every field they remove.
- Your leads get a smooth, friction-free user experience, thanks to our enrichment working in real-time, even for sites that get hundreds of thousands of form fills every month.
- You don’t have to sacrifice data for qualification and routing. In fact, you get more accurate information consistently into your database. Because this data is automatically appended rather than typed, there are fewer user input errors and mess from fake responses that you have to clean up later.
