Forms, gating & lead capture

Forms and gating are how you turn anonymous readers into known leads. You put a form on your site, a visitor fills it in, and that submission becomes a contact in your CRM - tagged with where it came from, so you know which page or which gated article earned the lead. Gating takes it a step further: you hide the second half of a post behind an email, so the content itself does the asking.

This guide covers both: forms as a lead-capture tool, and gating as a lead magnet. There's a short note for developers at the end.

Forms

A form is something you define once and reuse - a contact form, a newsletter sign-up, a "request a demo" box, or the form that unlocks a gated article. You give it a name, decide which fields it asks for, and place it on your site.

Choosing your fields

Each form has a set of fields. For every field you pick a type, a label, and whether it's required. The available types are:

When someone submits, Steeren checks each field against what you asked for. A required field left empty, or an email that isn't a valid address, is rejected before anything is saved - and the visitor sees which field needs fixing.

[!TIP] Always include an email field on any form you want to feed your CRM. Email is what links a submission to a contact. A form with no email still captures the submission, but it won't create a CRM lead.

After a visitor submits

You decide what happens the moment someone hits "submit":

• Show a thank-you message inline, right where the form was.
• Send them to another page - a confirmation page, a download, wherever you like.

Pick whichever fits the form. A newsletter box might just say "You're in." A demo request might send them to a scheduling page.

Where submissions go

Every submission is saved the instant it arrives. From there:

• It shows up in your list of submissions, newest first, so you can review leads as they come in.
• If it includes an email, it's also mirrored into your CRM as a contact. The visitor's name is split into first and last name, and any company they entered is matched to a company record (or created if it's new) and linked.
• Each lead records its source - which form it came from, or, for a gated article, which post the visitor unlocked. So in your CRM you can see whether a lead arrived through your contact form or by unlocking your pricing guide.

[!NOTE] A submission is never lost. Steeren saves the submission first, then mirrors it to your CRM. If the CRM step ever hiccups, the submission is still safely recorded - you can find it in your submissions list and follow up. The visitor always sees a clean "thank you," never an error.

Reviewing what comes in

You can browse submissions per form, and pull a summary over any date range to see how many leads each form and each gated post produced. It's the same place you'd look to compare how your forms are converting.

Content gating

Gating hides part of a published post behind a form. The reader gets the opening - enough to want more - and then a form asking for their email before the rest unlocks. It turns articles you already have into lead magnets: a guide, a deep-dive, a checklist. The content does the convincing; the gate collects the lead.

Turning gating on

To gate a post, switch gating on for it. The first time you do this, Steeren sets up a simple lead-capture form for you (name, email, company, message) and reuses it for every post you gate after that. You can swap in a different form later if you want a different ask.

You also choose how much to show before the gate - the cutoff is measured in paragraphs:

• Show the first 2 paragraphs, then gate (a sensible default).
• Show more to give a longer taste.
• Show none - just the excerpt - for a hard gate.

To stop gating a post, switch it back off. Your existing leads stay exactly where they are; turning gating off only stops new readers from hitting the gate.

[!TIP] Two or three paragraphs is usually the sweet spot - enough to prove the article is worth it, not so much that the reader stops needing the rest. If conversions are low, show less; if people aren't filling in the form at all, show a bit more first.

What the reader sees

A reader who hasn't unlocked the post sees the teaser - the paragraphs you chose to show - followed by the gate form. When they submit their email, the full article appears. The next time they come back, it stays unlocked: once someone has given you their email, you don't make them do it again. There's no expiry - an unlocked reader stays unlocked.

[!NOTE] Gating only changes what the public sees. In your dashboard you always see the full post, and any change to the gate takes effect immediately for readers.

Attribution

When a reader unlocks an article, the lead that lands in your CRM is tagged with that article, not just "the gate form." So if the same form gates three different guides, you can still tell which guide each lead came in through. One form can gate as many posts as you like; the attribution sorts itself out per post.

Known limits

A few things worth knowing up front:

• Unlock is tied to email. A reader who clears their cookies will be asked to enter their email again. That re-creates the same lead rather than losing anything, but it's worth knowing if you're wondering why a known reader saw the gate again.
• No built-in conversion rate yet. You can count submissions per gated post in your submissions summary, but Steeren doesn't yet show a "X% of readers who saw the gate unlocked it" figure.
• No unlock expiry. This is by design - once a reader has unlocked a post, it stays unlocked for them.

For developers

If you're building a custom front end rather than using a managed Steeren site, you don't talk to forms directly from the browser. Submissions go through a small relay on your own origin (which forwards them to Steeren's public API), so that the request stays same-origin and your site is identified correctly. In practice your server-side code calls the SDK's submitForm(slug, body) from @nukipa/site-sdk, and a gated post comes back from the public read flagged as gated, with the gate form's fields, so you can render the form and the teaser in one pass. <PostBody> from @nukipa/post-renderer-react (or @nukipa/post-renderer-vue) handles rendering the body either way.

To make unlock persist on a custom site, store the reader's email after they submit the gate form (a cookie is fine) and forward it on every subsequent post fetch - Steeren matches it and serves the full body. See the integration guide for the exact setup.

FAQ

Do I need a separate form to gate a post? No. The first time you gate a post, Steeren creates a shared lead-capture form for you and reuses it everywhere. You only need to think about forms if you want a custom set of fields on the gate.

Can one form gate several posts? Yes - the default gate form is reused across every gated post, and each lead is still attributed to the specific article the reader unlocked.

A form said "thank you" but I don't see a CRM contact. A contact is only created when the submission includes an email. If the email was missing, the submission is still saved - check your submissions list and follow up from there.

How much of my post should I show before the gate? Start with the default of two paragraphs and adjust. Show less if too many readers leave without submitting; show a little more if too few engage with the form at all.

Does gating change what I see in the dashboard? No. You always see the full post. Gating only affects what anonymous readers see on your live site.