Fill the Leaks in Your Website Lead Generation Strategy

I have some bad news for you. Right now, your website is a leaky bucket. You may feel good about your ability to bring people to your site, but you likely suffer from at least one of the following conversion issues that many sites struggle with.

No Calls-to-Action

Here’s a simple experiment. Go to your website, and take the perspective of a visitor who is unfamiliar with your site or your brand. Ask yourself the following question from each page: “What’s the next step?” In other words, what do you want a user to do from each page of your website?

Maybe you have a phone number and email at the bottom of each page on your site, but is anyone looking at it? And are they ready to contact you? Consider some of the following page types:

• Home Page – From the home page, you likely want to drive people to your product or service pages. Or maybe you want them to learn more about your company. Make sure you prioritize your goals for your home page, and emphasize the most important actions higher on the page.
• Product/Service Pages – Think about giving the users the right options here. For an e-commerce site, a purchase CTA (call-to-action) makes a lot of sense. From a B2B service page, though, the CTA may be to schedule a consultation. Be specific – list the name of the contact with a link to a contact form, and better yet include a picture.
• Contact Page - Make sure you cover the right bases. Include a contact form, but also think about including contact information for specific people or departments, location/direction information, maps, and even customer service contact details. Don’t forget about social media…

Here are a few tips when thinking about placing calls-to-action:

• Prioritize – Avoid having multiple calls-to-action with similar emphasis. It confuses users. Prioritize your calls-to-action, and make sure the most important is higher on the page, has more of a visual emphasis, and is easy to access.
• Think from the User’s Perspective – Remember, a user isn’t always ready to purchase, or even talk to a salesperson. So what else might they need? Detailed product information? Testimonials? Pricing? Make sure they can find what they’re looking for, even if it’s not a direct purchase or contact.

No Way to Gather Customer Information

Step 1: Design a responsive website that everyone can view and delivers the right content.

Step 2: Drive traffic to your nice, shiny site.

Step 3…wait, you forgot about step three? When a new car dealership opens, they don’t forget to hire sales people, do they?

You need some way to engage visitors to your site and drive them to contact you, or give you enough information to contact them. (And if you’re an e-commerce site, hopefully you’re collecting your customers’ information when they make a purchase)

Here are some ways to gather customer information:

• Email subscription – The old tried and true method. Provide valuable content on a regular basis, and send it to your email subscribers. The more valuable your content, the more people will want to give you their email address to be the first to know about it.
• Contact forms – Sounds simple, but sometimes a properly placed contact form can increase conversions from none to some.
• Gated content – Have a valuable resource that you’re giving away for free? Consider asking the customer for a few quick pieces of information (name, email, etc.) in exchange for your valuable resource.

Other unique website lead generators we’ve seen are calculators, audits, free consultations, coupons – any time you can provide incredible value to your audience, you might want to consider asking them for something in return.

No “Middle of Funnel” Content

If you visualize a funnel, customers at the top of the funnel are just learning about your company and your products or services. At the bottom of the funnel, they are close to purchasing. Perhaps the biggest area of opportunity for many websites is developing “middle of the funnel” content for visitors who are considering products or services, but need more information. These types of content include:

• Case Studies – Visitors want to see how other people/companies are using your products or services. They want to hear success stories. It’s why reviews are so integral to the success of a product on Amazon.
• Spec Sheets – This may be known by many different names (whitepapers, product sheets, sell sheets, etc), but it’s essentially more in-depth information about a product or service.
• Demos/Trials – For visitors in the consideration phase, they may not be ready to buy until they try. Offering a demo or a trial can give you a great engagement point, and give the visitor an opportunity to take your product or service for a spin.

There are plenty of other opportunities for “middle of the funnel” content – just think about what information or resources your audience needs when they’re considering your product or service.

Not sure how your website is performing? Consider Aztek’s web assessment, which is the perfect way to identify issues and opportunities with your website.