How Gravity Forms Can Help Your Agency Grow in 2023
By Matt Medeiros
Published March 29, 2023
I started a WordPress agency in 2008 and Gravity Forms was the first commercial plugin I purchased for my business. While I understood the fundamentals of HTML/CSS/PHP, I was by no means, a WordPress developer.
One of the reasons why so many of us gravitate towards WordPress is because of the extensive plugin ecosystem it provides. With thousands of plugins available, non-developers (and even developers!) can create complex websites without spending costly development hours.
While the plugin ecosystem on WordPress.org is great, I didn’t want to rely on the free support system for critical services that our customers relied on. Gravity Forms provided support when we were stuck, plus, continuous development of add-ons to extend our offerings.
Let’s explore how Gravity Forms can take you from a beginner agency owner to offering more than just designing websites.
Move to solutions, not basic website services
Even though the consumer web was already in full swing a decade ago, lots of small business owners were just getting started with the web. A recent global pandemic put small business owners without a website back into a similar spotlight. Just when you think a basic website building service isn’t needed, the market shows you the demand.
There will always be a consistent stream of new business builders that need to be paired up with a solid web presence. And while some might only need a basic contact form, any veteran agency owner will tell you, you need to go beyond the basics to grow your web services business.
A customer might take your simple contact form for granted, but it’s just the seed to re-positioning your offering as a complete solution.
A contact entry and email notification is the start to new business, new opportunity, that can impact the bottom line for your customer. If you’ve spent any time consulting for small businesses, you know how valuable that email message can be.
Start with the contact form, and then lead them to a full-stack marketing & sales platform inside their WordPress website. As the specialist in the relationship, providing a path to solve customer pain points is better for everyone involved.
Move from basic contact forms, to complete platforms
As my agency grew, leveraging email add-ons became the natural next step into adding more value for our customers.
If we broke our websites down into measurable functions:
1. Add a basic contact form.
2. Add a form to allow for newsletter signup.
3. Create a newsletter opt-in checkbox on the contact page.
You can see we’re starting to connect the dots for our customers. Simple technology features that add a lot more value to their experience. It allowed us to move the conversation from building a portfolio website, to a website that “worked” for the customer.
The conversation shifts to proper Call To Action items, copywriting, newsletter training, and a measurable success metric for their investment. Our projects wouldn’t end on the launch of the website, but would transform into long-term consultation on content and marketing. Hourly consultations turned into monthly retainers and quarterly reviews.
The opportunities are endless. Our agency enhanced the experience by deepening the integrations that were a snap with Gravity Forms.
Contact forms merged with newsletter signups, which turned into our lead magnets. The most rudimentary lead magnet funnels meant that you needed to follow up with potential customers and setup automated workflows.
Not only can the customer receive a contact message and gain a newsletter subscriber, but now that same person can be a lead in your Hubspot CRM tool. These are the building blocks to increasing the consulting side of your business and strengthening your relationship with customers.
Your Agency + Gravity Forms
Fast forward a decade later, Gravity Forms is even more instrumental in helping new WordPress agency owners scale their offerings with the demands of clients:
- The recent acquisition of Gravity Flow can enhance Gravity Forms to become a full-fledged business automation tool. Build simple vacation approval requests to complex enterprise workflows with audit trails.
- Stripe and other payment add-ons can efficiently build out donation forms for non-profits or simple e-commerce sites for brands.
- The new Orbital theme approach ensures that your agency is ready for all of the Gutenberg + Full Site Editing enhancements coming to WordPress.
- Explore Form Templates introduced in version 2.7 to quickly build use cases for your clients’ needs.
- Extend your Gravity Forms abilities by seeing what our Certified Developers are building in our 3rd-party add-on marketplace.
I’m a firm believer that WordPress agencies will see a resurgence in 2023 – 2024. So many of us became freelancers or started boutique agencies in 2008 during similar economic worries, but also during strong growth phases of WordPress.
WordPress will remain a solid investment for the most affordable, flexible, and community supported CMS available to service providers.
The upper-end market will continue to see vendor lock-in and increased prices from Adobe Experience Manager and Microsoft’s Sitecore. While the smaller hosted CMS markets of Shopify and Webflow are already seeing increased fees with a splintering community of developers.
More than a decade later Gravity Forms remains the most trusted and cost-effective tool for expanding your agency’s opportunity. For more use cases on how Gravity Forms might help, check out our YouTube channel and our add-ons page for more examples.
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