Leads are a marketer’s bread and butter. If we’re not generating them, then we’re not doing our job. Everything we do as marketers — creating, optimizing, and distributing useful, relevant content — is all done with the goal of getting potential buyers to that next step and driving them to take action.

So imagine if, after all your hard work, Jane Doe, a new lead who was pulled in by your marketing efforts (yay!), arrives at your call-to-action (CTA) form, fills out her name, email, company size, etc., and then... nothing.

A Marketer’s Nightmare: When Your MAP Goes Down

The unthinkable has happened. Your marketing automation platform (MAP) has gone down and with that, your lead management. And Jane Doe’s information never made it to your database. You don’t know who she is, or how to contact her. Or that there ever was a Jane Doe.

Forget scary; that’s downright terrifying. That prospect, now frustrated by your lack of response, will likely turn to your competitor to solve their problem. Regardless, you can’t score them, nurture them, qualify them, and your sales team certainly can’t follow up.

Two Types of CTAs You Need to Know About in Emergencies

Synchronous CTAs

This imagined scenario is upsetting to think about, but it illustrates what’s possible with your standard, synchronous CTAs. Before you Google it, “synchronous CTAs” is just a fancy way of saying that the data your lead inputs into your form CTA syncs automatically and simultaneously with your MAP. Any form CTA you create with your MAP is a synchronous CTA.

And to be clear, simultaneous syncing is a good thing. The faster lead information is transferred to your database, the better.

Asynchronous CTAs

Asynchronous CTAs are what’s used when you set up CTAs through a third party. It’s also what we use here at Uberflip. Lead information collected through asynchronous CTAs will sync with your MAP in the same way it does with synchronous CTAs. However, the data collected will be stored until your MAP sends a response signalling the submission has been accepted.

When your MAP is working as it should, this all happens in less than a second. But if the unthinkable happens and your MAP goes down, this one small factor will make it possible for you to access any new lead information obtained during the outage.

Practicing Safe Lead Management

“What using asynchronous CTAs means to our customers is that in the event of an outage on the MAP side, or of a configuration issue (such as a disabled or deleted user, or change of password on the integration user), we will be able to re-queue those calls so no lead information is lost,” says Mike Brown, Product Manager at Uberflip.

So, in those rare cases where something fails on the MAP side and lead information doesn’t make it to the platform, as a safeguard it will be temporarily held in a queue until your MAP is back up and stable. At which point, the data will be sent to the MAP and then discarded.

Collecting and protecting lead information is something we can all agree on. And it’s good to know if the worst happens, there are safeguards in place. So what kind of CTAs are you using?

Want to increase your CTR? Learn the 6 elements of highly clickable CTAs.