Optimizing a business website for better lead generation is absolutely crucial if you want to grow your business online and have a positive return on your investment for the website.
Many businesses just set up a website, throw some generic content on it, and put on a button labeled something like “Contact Us” and expect leads to just flow in. But in reality, this is not how things really work.
Getting leads online, especially via a website is really a complicated process. There are a lot of moving parts involved that you should pay attention to and get certain things exactly right to turn your website into a lead generation machine.
This is where lead generation optimization strategies come into play.
Here in this article, we will look at how you can get started with optimizing your business website with effective lead-generation strategies and all the other things in the middle that you should know about.
With that said, let’s move on to the first section of this article.
Understanding How Lead Generation Works
The process of lead generation is really simple. First, a potential customer gets an interest in a product or service that you offer. After that interest has sparked, that potential customer search and compare that product or service online between a range of sellers. Then, that potential customer picks a set of sellers that they feel confident in and inquires them about the product or service.
This is usually how a generic lead generation process works. Your primary goal here should be to get that potential customer to your website and guide them through the website effectively to convert them into a lead. (Although we will not cover how you can get potential customers to your website in this article, we will cover how you can convert website visitors to leads in the upcoming sections)
Also, take notice of the very first thing we mentioned in the lead gen process, “interest in the potential customer in the product or service you offer”. This is where your lead generation strategy should be focused around.
Conducting Market Research
Conducting market research is absolutely crucial for any business website. This is because market research allows you to identify the behaviors of your target market as well as any other important information and data on your product or service.
Knowing this valuable information will allow you to structure your website accordingly and increase your conversion rates.
For example, let’s say that you sell Bluetooth EarPods via your website. With good market research, you are able to identify how your target market engages and any concerns that they might have with the nature of the products you offer which you can address on your website. Here, with effective market research, you will know exactly what information to provide your potential customers and encourage them to become a lead.
Note: If you want to know how to conduct market research, read this article here.
Optimizing your website for better Lead Generation.
Now that you know how lead generation works and the power of market research, we can move on to the fun stuff.
1. Design Dedicated Landing Pages
This is a lead generation strategy that we see a lot of success in but only a very few business websites do implement. A landing page is a dedicated web page on your website specifically designed to convert website visitors to leads. There is no other goal of a landing page but to generate leads or in technical terms “convert”.
A landing page usually has only the most revenant information about a product or service with a very clear call to action (we will touch on this next). This is because we don’t want to distract a potential customer who lands on that page with unwanted information, we only want to provide them with all the relevant information and convert them to a lead as fast as possible.
Also, it is worth mentioning that landing pages are not someplace where website visitors will land on naturally/organically. You must carry out active marketing campaigns such as PPC or social media campaigns to drive traffic to these landing pages.
Here are some tips for designing an effective landing page;
- Make sure to convey the same message of your ads that got the click to visit the landing page. If not, that potential customer will bounce as the landing page is not relevant enough.
- Ensure you have a clear call to action. Make that CTA pop out so that the visitors know what action to take.
- Give some sort of an offer to encourage visitors to convert to a lead even faster. A limited-time offer with a good discount for the product or service works best here.
- Provide as many trust factors such as reviews, testimonials, and customer/client portfolios as possible. This will hype up the product or service some more.
- Use the initial market research to identify the likes and dislikes of your target market and incorporate some of the elements and information that your target market likes to keep them engaged.
- Keep track of your landing page performance at all times and fine-tune as you go along to ensure the landing page is performing at its full potential.
- Make sure the landing page is responsive on all devices and all elements are clearly visible without any overlapping as most of the traffic will be on mobile.
2. Use Effective And Clean Call To Action (CTAs)
Call To Action, as the name suggests is an element on your website that asks a website visitor to take action and become a lead. This can be in the form of a button, inquiry form, or a link on the website. For example, a CTA button can be something like “contact us”, that asks the website visitor to contact your business and become a lead.
A CTA is a very important element of any business website and most webmasters think that placing a CTA randomly on a page will be effective. Bust in reality, it is not. A CTA must be carefully placed in some strategic places on your website for the best effect.
For example, let’s say that you offer consulting services to clients. On your website, at the very top, you display a CTA button labeled “Get Consultation”. This is actually not very effective as the website visitors don’t really know about you or trust you just yet to become a lead. Therefore, the best strategy here will be to add that CTA button right after you have introduced yourself with all your qualifications or right after you present that website visitors with some trust factors such as positive reviews.
Here are some more tips for placing CTAs on your website;
- Make sure your CTAs hold a strong label such as “Call Us Now”, “Let’s Grow Your Business”, “Download For Free”, Etc. This will grab the attention of the potential customer and get them to convert into a lead.
- Make sure to include a generic CTA like a button with a phone number or the text “Call Us” on top navigation so that website visitors have a method to become a lead from anywhere on the website.
- Make sure to make your CTAs pop out from the rest of the elements on the website to grab the attention of the website visitor.
- Have only one to two types of CTAs per page. Do not offer more than two CTAs such as a “Call Now” button, a lead sign-up form, and a “book meeting” to confuse the website visitors on what action to take.
- Make sure to test out several CTAs (not all at once but one by one) and compare the results to identify what kind of CTA works best for you and your target market.
- Make sure to display a CTA on sections of the website that represent the trust such as reviews and testimonials.
3. Have A Good Overall UX UI Design
It does not matter if you have the best CTAs placed and you have done all the market research possible, if you don’t have a website with good UX UI design, you will not be able to convert website visitors into leads.
UX refers to the User Experience and UI refers to the User Interface of your overall website. If your website does not have a good UI or if your website does not provide a good UX to the website visitors, they will bounce from your website without even taking a simple action.
For example, imagine you visited a website to buy a product online and it loads very slowly, elements are overlapping, the navigation is very complicated, there are too many popups disturbing you, etc. Would you still buy that product from that site? No, you would not. Instead, you would just bounce and go to a different website to buy the product.
This is why we mentioned that without a good UX UI design on your website, your website visitors will have a hard time navigating the website and it does not matter how good you do on all the other things with respect to increasing lead generation as website visitors will bounce as soon as they feel the website is not up to good standards.
Here are some tips to improve your website’s overall UX and UI design;
- Make sure that your website loads fast. Nobody likes a slow website and internet users nowadays have zero patience for slow-loading websites. Compress your images, unload useless Java scripts and CSS, use a lightweight theme, and use a good website hosting service to get a good website loading speed. In fact, Inspirenix Web Design (a leading web design company in Sri Lanka) stated that nowadays, over 95% of clients request them to make their website super-fast. This shows you how important website load time has become over recent years.
- Don’t use too many pop-ups. Have a minimum of 2 pop-ups, one after 5-10 seconds after a user landed on a page and another one as an exit pop-up. This will not annoy the website visitor as much.
- Make sure the mobile version of the website is structured properly. See if there are any elements overlapping or if some elements are wider than the screen. If so, fix them immediately.
- Have a simple navigation. Use only the main links in your main top navigation without making it very complicated. Use dropdowns in necessary and ensure all navigation elements are properly categorized and organized.
- Have a proper content architecture. Group all related content together and present the information on the website in a logical flow.
- Provide only the information your target audience wished to see and avoid jargon. Also, offer all the information in a manner the target market understands. Make sure to use your market research data here as well.
4. Use Exit Popups
An exit popup is another great element on your website that you can implement to get a website visitor to convert into a lead at the very last second of their time on the site. As the same suggests an exit pop-up is some sort of CTA that is displayed to the website visitor right when they are about to exit your website.
For example, let’s say that you sell shoes online. You can have an exit popup of a form to get the website visitor’s email address by asking them to provide their email address to get emails when there are discounts on your products.
Not to mention, studies have shown that exit pop-ups have a much higher conversion rate than any other kind of pop-up on a website.
With that said, here are some tips to follow when implementing an exit pop-up on your website;
- Make the pop-up CTA with an offer the website visitor can’t refuse. This way, the chances of that visitor converting into a lead increase drastically.
- Make an offer that makes sense to the website visitor. This means making an offer that is relevant to the stage on the sales funnel that the website visitor is on. For example, your exit popup offers must vary from the website visitors reading your blogs to the website visitors browsing your products.
- Don’t make the exit popup hard to close or skip. You must still focus on the UX of the website, therefore make sure to display the pop-up with a clear close button in case the website visitor is not interested in your final offer.
- Offer a time limit on your offer. This will create a sense of urgency in the mind of your website visitor and will have a more persuasive factor in converting into a lead.
- Make the exit pop-up attractive. Don’t just put on a block of text on the pop-up, make sure to add some images such as an image related to the offer, and have a good visual aesthetic to it to make the website visitors want to engage with the offer.
5. Implement A Live Chat On The Website
A live chat is another great element that you can implement on your website to boost your lead generation. Let’s say that there is a potential customer that needs some information urgently. With a live chat, that potential customer can inquire about your business quickly and get in contact with you in a matter of seconds.
Not to mention, as you are able to chat one on one with the potential customer, you are able to provide them with all the information they desire and persuade them into becoming a lead better than any other automized system can ever do.
Whether you have a website built with WordPress or HTML, you are able to add a live chat to your website for free.
Here are some tips for using a live chat on your website;
- Make sure to have a live chat that had mobile notification features. This will allow you to quickly attend to a potential lead wherever and whenever they need you.
- If you are appointing someone else to handle your live chats, make sure to appoint someone with good sales skills and all-around knowledge about your business.
- Make the live chat pop up a bit more with a popup message such as “How can we help you today?”. This will you help grab the attention of the potential lead effectively. Also, these pop-up messages are provided as a free function in most live chats.
- Another very important thing to remember here is to make your live chat responses very fast. Website visitors use live chat to get quick responses, therefore, you must cater to that need. If you are often busy with other work, get a live chat operator to conduct the live chats on your behalf.
Final thoughts
There you have it, 5 effective strategies that you can implement to increase the lead generation of your business website. All the above lead generation strategies we discussed above have been tested and proven by industry-leading professionals. Therefore, we encourage you to use these strategies as quickly as possible and make your website a lead-generating machine.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments section below. We will be sure to reply to them when possible.
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