HoudiniESQ has the ability to capture Lead and Contact information from web forms. The following tutorial demonstrates how to take advantage of this little known feature in HoudiniESQ.

For this feature to work you will need 3 things.

1. A web form that your clients can fill out.

2. A Email address for the web form to send the collected data to

3. The HoudiniESQ Lead Widget (located at the top of the Main Menu, see image below)

The Lead Widget in HoudiniESQ is a powerful tool that allows you to import Lead data and Contact from an Email. By setting up a web page with a web form you can collect data from your clients, have the web form send the email to a email address where HoudiniESQ will extract the information and present it in its Lead Widget where it can be converted into a HoudiniESQ Contact record.

The first step is to configure a publicly-accessible web page with a web form to send an email to a email address. We don't suggest that you use your firm's email account but instead suggest that you create a Gmail account simply for this purpose e.g. myFirmWebLead@gmail.com. You must add this Email account to HoudiniESQ as a active email account. The email account name must also be named "weblead."

For more information, consult the section on email. It is also recommended that you have the web form send the email as plain text.

There are two requirements your web form must follow when sending the email to this address. 

 

1. The email subject line must contain one of the following: inquiry, web-lead, or web lead e.g. "Emerson Simon & Quincy Web-Lead"

2. Each value in the web form that is placed into the email must be separated by a colon in what is called token value pairs for example, Phone: (919) 238-7024

3. The body MUST contain the following fields: "Lead Source", "Name" and "Email". The values of the fields MUST NOT CONTAIN AN APOSTROPHE (').

 

Your email may contain as many field values pairs as you wish: these will be inserted into the Memo section of the Contact record if HoudiniESQ can not map them to specific HoudiniESQ fields. 

Here is a sample email as it would appear in Outlook once your web form has been submitted by your potential client. Please note; we do not suggest that you setup this account in Outlook since HoudiniESQ will only read unread emails. If you open the received emails with Outlook Houdini will not read those emails. The Outlook image below is just to show what the email may look like.

 

Once you have added the email account to HoudiniESQ you will be able to see these web leads in HoudiniESQ by accessing the Web Leads Widget located at the top of the Main Menu in HoudiniESQ as depicted in the image below.

This will display the Lead Widget on the current workspace. The Lead Widget will automatically list any new Leads that have been received along with several icons:

The Icons along the right side of the widget perform the following actions:

1. Refresh: Clicking this icon will refresh the Lead Widget display.

2. Email Selected: future use Email the selected Contact/Lead using the Email that has been imported as a Recipient. 

3. Phone Selected: future use Creates a new billable Event as a Phone Call to the listed Contact with the Timer running. 

4. Delete Selected: future use Delete the selected Contact/Lead.

To convert the Lead to a HoudiniESQ Contact record simply double-click the lead in the Widget. The image below depicts what a potential Lead may look like in HoudiniESQ. YOu will notice that the Phone, NUmber Email etc are already filled in for you as is the prospects name.

HoudiniESQ will automatically fill in the First and Last Name, Phone Number and Email Address ONLY if they were included as fields (token value pairs separated by a colon e.g. <token> : <value> ) in the Body of the email. 

In addition, all information in the Body will be imported into the Memo field of the Contact form for easy insertion into appropriate custom fields. For more information on editing Contacts, you can review the section on contacts..

Once you have finished editing the Lead information as a Contact, click the [save] button.