How to setup SMS OTP Phone Verification?

When you use LeadCapture.io’s phone verification feature, you’re not just enabling point-of-capture phone verification directly in your forms—you’re also tapping into our highly advanced technology. Our system dynamically identifies the best number to send from based on geographic location, maximizing deliverability. You’ll also benefit from capturing unverified leads, abuse protection, throttling, deep analytics, logs, compliance support, and more—all straight out of the box. Plus, our dedicated team actively monitors SMS deliverability and performance to ensure optimal results.

In this guide we'll cover:

What is SMS Phone Verification
How it works in your LeadCapture Forms
Benefits of Using Phone Verification
Understanding Conversion Rate Impacts and How to Capture Unverified Leads
How to Setup Phone Verification In Your LeadCapture Forms
Step 1: Requesting Access
Step 2: Purchasing Credits
Step 3: Enabling Phone Verification At the Form Level
Step 4: Updating Your Phone Field
Step 5: Testing
Step 6: Capturing Phone Verification Status in Your CRM

Let's dive into it!

What is SMS OTP Phone Verification?

SMS OTP Phone Verification is a lead verification feature within LeadCapture.io that when enabled, allows you to validate phone numbers in real time right in your form. This means that you can prevent your prospect from submitting fake phone numbers, while ensuring that any leads that you (or your client) follows-up with has a real, validated phone number.

One of the many things that separates the LeadCapture.io OTP phone verification feature apart from other tools is that we allow you to also capture unverified leads as well as push a verification status into your CRM so follow-up separately with verified or unverified leads.

You can also see a verification status with all of your leads as they're captured:

Short on time? What this video walk through:

How does OTP Phone Verification Work?

OTP stands for One-Time Passcode. Here's how it works:

Prospect enters their phone number in your lead capture
If the phone verification is enabled, then LeadCapture.io generates an authentication token in the form of a one-time four-digit PIN code. Our system sends the code to the prospect's phone number.
The prospect enters the pin-code that was sent to their phone right into the form and clicks 'Next'
If our system verifies the pin code, then the prospect can move forward with the rest of the form.
1. If you opt to capture unverified leads, then the lead will still be sent to you if the prospect does not complete the form. But it will not be tagged as verified.
Finally, after the lead is submitted, the phone number will be tagged either as verified or unverified so you can use this information within your CRM.

If the prospect inputs the incorrect PIN or no PIN at all, then the prospect will not be able to move forward with submitting your your. It's also worth noting that if at anytime, the prospect needs to re-enter the PIN, then they can easily go back and have a new PIN code sent.

Important Note: At the moment, OTP Phone Verification works for phone numbers only. In the near future, we have plans to roll out verification across other channels as well, such as email, flash call and push.

What are the benefits of using OTP Phone Verification?

There are a number of benefits to using OTP Phone Verification in your lead capture. Here are just a few:

1) Prevent Incorrect or Fake Phone Numbers: Nothing is worse than getting a hot new lead, only to call them up moments later and find out that someone submitted the wrong phone number. This can be one of the most frustrating parts of online lead generation for almost every type of business.

2) Prevents Fake Leads: SMS OTP Phone Verification helps you capture the correct lead data and screen out leads that have no interest in actually purchasing your product and/or using your services. This is a great way to ensure that you're getting real leads with the highest intent.

3) Mitigates Bot Attacks: Cybercriminals use automated bots to create fake accounts for all sorts of crazy reasons ranging from spreading viruses to list bombing. This is one of the reasons why Invisible ReCaptcha has become so widely used in forms. We even offer ReCaptcha as a feature right in LeadCapture.io. By requiring every lead to submit a real phone number that must be verified, it's one more barrier of defense that you can stand up between your business and the malicious actors our there.

Can My Lead Form Conversion Rate Drop When Using Phone Verification?

As you're reading this you might be thinking... "wait, I'm adding more friction to my form, won't my conversion rates go down?"

The answer is that it depends whether or not you're allowing unverified leads to still submit your form.

1) If you're allowing unverified leads: If you're accepting unverified leads, then this shouldn't impact your conversion rates since your form still has the ability to send unverified phone numbers through upon form submission.

2) If you're blocking unverified phone leads: Then yes implementing OTP Phone Verification into your lead capture forms very well could bring your conversion rates down. However, the trade-off here is that your lead quality will go up and you will be getting the very best, high intent leads.

As a rule of thumb, we always prioritize lead quality over conversion rates. It's great getting a ton of leads rolling in, but what's even better is having the confidence that you (or your clients) can call up those leads without any doubt about the quality of the phone number and the intent.

How Setup SMS OTP Phone Verification

Step 1: Request Access

To begin using OTP Phone Verification you will need to request access. This is a feature that we will need to enable at your account level due to compliance reasons.

Here's where to access the Phone Verification feature:

Login to your LeadCapture.io account and go to the Lead Delivery Tab. When in Lead Delivery, go to the Lead Verification section in the left hand side and click on the arrow to expand

How to Request Access

To request access, click on the red 'Request Access' button. Or go here: https:/leadcapture.io/phone-verify-activate/

When you request access, we will review your request and activate the feature within 1 business day.

After the feature is turned-on at the account level by us, the screen will change and look like the image below:

The main difference at this point is that once the Phone Verification feature is turned-on for your account, you'll see a toggle switch that will allow you to turn Phone Verification on or off at the form level.

Step 3: Purchase Phone Verification Credits

After phone verification is enabled on your account, you'll have the ability to access our self-serve credit purchase portal. This is where you can buy all of your phone verification and SMS notification credits.

Here are some key things to note about purchasing credits:

Adding credits will automatically top-up your account. If you have 10 credits remaining and you purchase 100 more then you'll have 110 credits.
Each credit is equal to one OTP pin code request. For example, if five leads request 5 opt pin codes then that's 5 credits.
Credits do next expire until they'll used. So you can purchase as many credits at you'd like and not have to worry about the credits expiring.
- There is an option to make a recurring purchase, which is beneficial in situations where your lead volume is very consistent and you do not want to worry about having to remember to purchase more credits. Simply reach out to support@leadcapture.io to get put on a monthly auto bill plan.
You can track your credit usage in the left had nav bar and on your LeadCapture.io Dashboard page
When your credit limit reaches 0, your lead capture forms will continue to submit, but without lead verification enabled. The system is smart enough to know when to automatically turn off lead verification. Then, after you add more credits, the OTP feature will automatically be re-enabled.

Pricing for OTP Phone Verification:

The price for OTP phone verification varies by country and the destination of your leads. This variation is due to different geographic regions and varying pricing by phone carriers. For example, sending OTP phone verification requests in AU is a bit more expensive for us than sending them in the US. To simplify the process, when you initially request phone verification, we'll work with you to determine the cost per credit based on the destination.

Step 3: Turn-on OTP Verification at the Form Level

To enable the Phone Verification feature for a LeadForm, simply flip the toggle to the 'ON' position and click save and you'll see that the screen now shows some additional Usage details

Upon turning the feature on at the form level, you'll see some additional Usage details which includes the following:

Allow Unverified Leads (on/off): If the switch is flipped to the off position, then the system will not capture unverified phone leads. If the switch is flipped to the on position then it will capture unverified phone leads. By default this switch will be off. When capturing unverified phone leads, the system will account for the following:
- If prospect reaches the "enter PIN step" and idles on the step, never completing it.
- If prospect closes the browser completely or changes tabs, never completing the OTP Pin step
- If prospect uses the back button in the browser, never completing the OTP Pin step
- If prospect fails to enter the correct PIN code and never successfully completes the OTP PIN Step

*Important note: When sending leads that are unverified leads, the system will wait ten minutes before capturing and sending the lead.

Credits Used this Month: This is how many credits this specific form has used that you're in. So if the month is May and your form has used 10 credits for just this LeadForm, then the number of credits used will equal 10.

Total Monthly Verification Credits: This is how many credits is assigned to your entire account, across all LeadForms.

Credits Remaining: This detail reflects how many credits are remaining at the account level, after subtracting all credits used across all forms that have OTP Phone Verification Enabled.
- For example: Imagine that you have 100 monthly credits across your entire account and you're using the Phone Verification across three lead capture: The first form uses 10 credits, the second form uses 50 credits, and the third form uses 20 credits. In total you've used 80 credits (10 + 50 + 20), which means that you have 20 credits remaining on your account.
  - As a reminder, if you go over your credit limit in a given month, then you will not be charged for additional credit usage and PIN verification will turn-off. We will simply reach out to you and let you know.

Cost Per SMS Verification: Finally, below the table you'll see how much you're paying for each SMS verification credit.

Step 4: Update your phone field

After SMS phone verification is enabled, go to the step of the form where you want to setup your phone verification field. Let's say that it's the Contact form step.
Next, we're going to need to add a Phone field to the form. click on the blue '+Add form field' button
After you click 'Add form field', give the field a name and a label (this can be anything) then set the Field Type dropdown to Phone and the Value Type dropdown to Phone.
Click the blue 'Save form field' button and you'll see the field appear. It will appear with a country code pre-fix. All countries are included and you can see them by clicking on the dropdown.
That's all there is to it! As long as phone verification is enabled at the form level, then whenever someone completes this step they will be sent to one-time passcode step before the next step in the process. If you turn the feature off, then the form will continue to work as it should, except the one-time passcode step will be skipped.

How to test that the one-time passcode feature is enabled and working

To run a quick test, simply click Preview in the upper right hand corner.

Once inside of the Preview Screen, you can preview how the form will work with the Phone Verification feature enabled. When in preview mode, an actual PIN Code will be sent to whatever phone number that you enter in the phone field. So we highly suggest using your own phone number.

Some important notes about testing in preview mode:

Preview mode will not deliver email and SMS lead notifications or post requests to your CRM, but it will send a one-time pin request.
For the reason above, we suggest using a valid phone number that you can check.
In addition, any tests that you send from preview mode will count against your credit limit since there are costs associated with delivering the SMS message.

Adjusting the language and text of your OTP step

When you activate the OTP phone verification feature within your lead form, the step will be english by default. You have full control to change the text of the step to be in whatever language you'd like it to be in. German, Spanish, French and so on. Watch this video to see how to change the text of your OTP step into any language.

Phone verification status and capturing verification status in your CRM

When a lead is submitted, we're also included that status 'Is Verified Lead' with each lead. There are two statuses:

Is Verified Lead = True: This means that the lead has verified their phone number
Is Lead Verified = False: This means that the lead has not verified their phone number

For example, here's a verified lead in Zapier:

And here's an unverified lead in Zapier

You can also see the status on the lead page with each lead so you can see right in the platform as well.

And the status is passed through on lead notifications to clients or your team.

Final notes

As a quick summary: get SMS Verification working, all you need to do is request access to the feature, purchase credits. enable the feature at the form level, then set the phone field to use the field and value types of 'Phone'.

Just a few simple steps, and you'll be able to easily verify phone numbers right from your lead capture.

If you run into any issues or need any help getting started, please reach out to support at support@leadcapture.io

Thank you!