Landing pages are pretty common. They offer a product or service, and typically contain some kind of lead capture form. Once you’ve captured your leads, you can qualify them to make sure they are a good fit for your product or service, and then try to close the sale. Here’s how we implemented that funnel for KegHop, our office draught beer service.

We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel for our landing page, so we looked around and found a nice HTML theme that we could customize to our needs. We picked up one from UIdeck, knocked it around and made it into something we liked well enough. The theme is free for personal use, but to use it commercially cost us $9. Very reasonable.

Once we had the page created, we needed to host it somewhere. Because the page contains a form, we’d usually have to build out some kind of back-end server to handle the form submit. This seemed like overkill. There are numerous for-endpoints-as-a-service services, but they are all really expensive and have plans starting at $5 per month for like 10 forms. We have only the one form, and a low-traffic one at that. There must be a better option.

We considered knocking something up on AWS Lambda, and a couple other similarly overblown solutions, before we found Netlify, which offered to host our static page and handle for form submission for free, so we decided to give that a whirl. And wow are we happy we did.

Netlify is awesome. Their free plan is more than generous enough to host our low-traffic page, and while I’m certain we’ll use their service more and upgrade when necessary, we were able to deploy our page in seconds, point it to the custom domain we wanted to use for the landing page and start accepting form submissions, all in a matter of minutes. A truly superb service.

Form submissions to Netlify are great, but it’s not a CRM. It does, however, have a Zapier integration that you can invoke. Once you invite your Zapier account to use the Netlify integration, you can then start triggering zaps when your form is submitted. But where to send our form submissions?

We use Bluetick.io for doing cold email outreach. It’s proven to be a useful sales tool for us, and I was keen to see if it might work for this. Bluetick is based around the concept of email sequences, so we created a sequence for new KegHop leads with just one email in it to begin with. In previous iterations of our landing page, we had tried to qualify leads as part of the form page. Asking things like the approximate headcount in the office seemed like a good way to separate the wheat from the chaff, but also significantly increased the barrier to submitting the form without really giving much context for the questions we were asking. Moving these questions into the email gave us a chance to provide that context, and because Bluetick hooks into my personal email account, do so in a much more human way.

Once we’d done the Zapier invitation dance with the Bluetick integration, we were able to add new leads submitted via our landing page directly to the new leads sequence in Bluetick. In time, we plan to build out this sequence to nudge people to respond if they don’t do so right away (hey, people are busy), and also educate leads a little more about who we are and what we do.

So far we’ve had a handful of leads complete this flow, and we’ve managed to close one sale as a result. Because dispensing beer in the office requires an initial outlay to purchase the equipment, that’s a pretty high-value sale. However, what the clickbait title of this article does not cover is the lifetime value (LTV) of this new customer. KegHop customers are difficult to acquire, but very “sticky” once acquired. Therefore, it’s actually highly likely that the value of that sale will end up being significantly higher in the long run.

I’m really pleased with the solution we’ve arrived at for this landing page. I hope that jotting all this down gives you a few ideas about how you might structure your sales funnels as well. Do check out Netlify, Zapier and Bluetick. They are great tools and sticking them together in this way was a pretty trivial exercise that is already yielding great results for us.