Your company's website should be a lead generating tool. A common misconception is that placing a few "Contact Us" links on your website will serve as an adequate CTA. Instead, marketers should use a more strategic approach.
Here are our top 5 tips that convert your website visitors into leads:
1. Have a great looking, well thought out website.
Your website is often times how your company makes a first impression. On top of having visually pleasing design, your website your look trustworthy, be up to date, use responsive design, be easy to use, and free from distraction.
People typically visit a website multiple times prior to making the decision to purchase. Your website should be laid out in a way that guides your visitors down an the journey to conversion. To do this, create buyer personas for your ideal customers. Then create content on your website that addresses your buyer personas in each phase of their buyer's journey.
2. Have an established lead generation process.
Once you have established who your ideal customers are and what content will move them through their buyer's journey, it is time to establish a lead generation process. What qualifies as a lead? How will they get to your website? What information do you need from a lead and how will you obtain it? Like your website content, your lead generation process should be a well thought out and strategic. If you need tips on establishing your lead generation process, check out this guide.
A great way to test where your site it currently is to try a tool like Marketing Grader. This tool evaluates your lead generation sources (like landing pages and CTAs), and then provides feedback on ways to improve your existing content.
3. Analyze and test your CTAs regularly.
Sometimes you put the right content out there but leads are not converting. Continual evaluation of what CTAs work and what CTAs need improvement is critical to understanding what converts leads. When friendbuy conducted an A/B test on a CTA, they found a 211% improvement in clickthroughs on the the new verbiage. Something as simple as testing the wording, the layout of a landing page, or the images can have impact.
Results
- Baseline (original) CTR: 1.44%
- Variant 1 CTR: 2.47% (71% improvement over baseline)
- Variant 2 CTR: 4.49% (82% improvement over variant 1, and 211% improvement over baseline)
Variant 1 Button: “Test it out.”
Variant 2 Button: “See demo.”
Image via Hubspot
4. Have a clear value proposition.
In order for a user to become a lead, they must submit some sort of information. The information the forms on your website require should reflect the value of what the user is receiving in return. For example, if a user wants to sign up for email notifications for new blog posts, asking for a phone number would not be appropriate.
5. Incorporate the ability to nurture leads.
After a visitor has converted to a lead, you need to take steps to nurture them into customers so you do not have to wait for them to come back to your website on their own volition. Work flows are a good way to follow up and move leads through the sales funnel.
For example, you can send triggered emails when someone downloads content, clicks on links in your emails, visit certain pages on your website. Acording to Hubspot, when you combine the power of marketing personalization with behavioral triggered emails you can deliver the right marketing messages to the right people, at the right times.
Fine-tuning your website is a process but these elements will give you a good start. We can't say this enough- test, test, test! Doing so will help you fine-tune your efforts so that you can easily convert your website visitors into leads!
