Below are some common mistakes that could be hindering your landing page conversion rates from reaching their true potential.

Your Landing Page Does Not Explain The Value of the Offer

Remember that people’s attention spans are short. What this means is that you need to ensure your offer can be understood by your visitors in less than five seconds. In order for people to understand your offer within five seconds, you have to keep your landing page simple and clear. Use the title, text, and images on your page to ensure your visitors easily grasp what you are offering.

Your Headers Do Not Align with your Calls-to-Action

Keep in mind that your headers need to match your CTA text. If your visitors click on a CTA to download a freeguide, then they are expecting to be directed to a page where they can do that. Strive to be clear that they are in the right place when they get to your landing page by keeping your copy and page title consistent.

Your Form is Too Long

Another factor you need to consider is the length of your form against your prospect’s willingness to fill it out. If your form is too long, prospects might not fill it out and evaluate whether filling it out is worth their time. Many companies request too much information and ask tons of questions to their visitors without realising that asking too many questions may significantly lower conversion rates. Try to use shorter forms and only ask questions that are really necessary.

Are you making the following mistakes on your landing pages?

To ensure your business is using social media appropriately for lead generation efforts, check out the list below to make sure you are not making any of the rookie mistakes that can be detrimental to your business.

Not Being Where Your Prospects Are

Don’t just maintain presence on any social media network. You have to be where your target customers are. If you are posting great content on Twitter but your target market isn’t there then it’s a complete exercise of futility. Before you choose any social media network, it is important that you first research which social media sites your target market frequent and from there share your content and promotions.

Useless Content

Don’t just put content about your product. People do not like when it you promote your products and services too much. What you want to do is write informative content and focus on tips and tricks that can help solve the problems of your customers. You may also want to write persona-based content and target different marketing personas. By doing so, your prospects will be more likely to engage with your brand and therefore more likely to complete your lead-capture form.

Not Using Calls to Action or Sharing Targeted Links to Landing Pages

Remember that the most effective use of social media for lead generation efforts happens when people share links to your content, blog, and promotions. Keep in mind to always have a clear CTA and link to a targeted landing page where your visitors can register. It would even be better if you can designate specific to different platforms. For example, you may want to create a different offer for your Twitter followers and another different one for your Facebook fans.

How do you use social media for lead generation?

Use Them at Conferences and Events

QR codes can be used by marketers at conferences, events, and trade shows. By using it, visitors can easily gather information from your business quickly without having to jot anything down. The next time you are participating in an event, make sure that you add a QR code to the content you are producing. Configure the QR code to send people who scan it to your landing page, preferably one with a form to help you with your lead generation efforts.

Use Them on Your Business Cards

It’s difficult and can be a hassle to transfer a person’s information from their business card to your contact database. You would need to manually input their name, title, email address, and phone number. However, with a QR code, all the information from your card can instantly be transfered to a database just by scanning your code. Placing QR codes on your business cards will certainly be helpful in capturing leads you get from in-person communication.

Print Advertising

When people see advertisements on newspapers and magazines, they usually ignore them. However, when it’s a QR code they see, they become interested as to where the QR code will lead. With a QR code, you will be able to gauge the success of your ad by knowing how many people scanned your code and visited your landing page. With millions of ads people see everyday, placing a QR code can help your ad stand out and make a good first impression.

What other ways are you using your QR codes?

Below are important steps each salesperson should do to maximise conversion of inbound sales leads into customers.

Follow Up All Your Inbound Sales Leads

Always keep in mind that every lead needs to be followed up. Ensure that all inbound sales leads are included in your CRM system upon receipt and that each lead is assigned to a salesperson for immediate call. Monitor your CRM system to check and ensure that 100% of your leads are being called.

Call Leads Immediately

According to recent studies and research, companies that immediately call their potential customers are nearly 7 times likely to have meaningful and productive conversations with decision makers than companies that try to call leads an hour later. Remember that each minute is important especially if you do not want your competitor to swoop in and talk to your prospect before you do.

Give Complete Answers Quickly

If you want to double your sales, you need to learn how to provide complete answers to questions in the least time possible. It does not really matter who first responded to the customer, what matters is who first gave a complete answer to their question. Keep in mind that the first seller to give a complete answer will build trust, credibility, and improve his chances of winning the sales lead thus making a sale.

In Summary

Though the tips we have shared are definitely helpful, it is important that you continually work hard to improve your follow-up process. You may want to set goals and check every month if they are being achieved. If they are, set even more aggressive goals and fine tune your follow- up process to achieve your new set of goals.

By analysing your conversion assists data, you get to learn why some of the pages in your site aren’t as effective as the others and how you can improve those pages using the components of your best performing web pages. Below are steps on how you can analyse your conversion assists data and start implementing changes for an improved conversion rate.

Step 1: Identify your best performing pages

Needless to say, the first thing you need to do is analyse which pages of your site are performing well. Google Analytics can help you determine the percentage for leads or customers who viewed your pages before converting. Of course, the pages that have the highest rate mean that they are your top performing assisting web-pages.

Step 2: Identify reasons why some of your pages are performing well

There may be several reasons why some of your pages are performing well. It could be that your products pages are performing well because customers may visit those pages and look around your other products before deciding to purchase.

The key is identifying patterns and drawing conclusions from it. What are the site elements that contribute to the most conversions? Only when you have identified the reasons behind why some of your pages are performing well, can you start making enhancements to poor performing pages and adjustments to your marketing strategies.

Step 3: Use your findings to improve your lead nurturing strategies

Use the insights you have gained from your top pages to improve your lead nurturing campaigns. You may also want to rethink your email marketing strategies to include more relevant content or landing pages that contain the best percentages for converting leads to customers. By doing so, you improve your lead nurturing campaign and increase lead to customer conversion rates.

Step 4: Write more content similar to your top performing pages

Your audience may prefer the format or the content of your top performing pages over another or probably want to know more about certain topics in your site more than the others. Use the insights you have gathered to write the kinds of content your audience is more likely to read.

Step 5: Improve the calls-to-action of your other web pages

Needless to say that you’ll want to improve the calls-to-action of your pages that are not performing well. What you need to do is look at the individual Call To Actions (CTA) of your pages and from there isolate different variables to try to improve the click-through on your CTAs. For instance, if a CTA is pointing to a landing pages that has very low conversion assist rate, then this may indicate that the offer is not one of your best offers. In this case, you may want to switch CTAs. Point the not so good CTA to the page which has a high conversion assist rate.

In Summary

By analysing your conversion assist data, you get to know valuable pieces of information and insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing efforts. By following the steps we outlined above, you will surely create a more efficient lead generation and lead nurturing system.

However, before you decide to score your leads, the first thing you need to do is determine if your business can actually benefit from a lead scoring system. The reality is that not every business can benefit from this system and for some can actually be a waste of time.

Below are some critical questions that you need to contemplate on before deciding if lead scoring is indeed beneficial for your business.

Is my sales team getting a sufficient amount of leads?

If  in the first place your sales team does not even have enough leads to work on, then lead scoring is not necessary. Instead what your marketing should be doing is focusing on generating more qualified leads.

Does my sales team work on all the leads being sent to them?

If you are worried whether or not your leads are being worked on, then a lead scoring system may solve the problem. But you also have to take into consideration a sales or a marketing issue. If your company does not have a system in place to clarify how many leads your marketing campaigns must deliver to your sales funnel and how many leads need to be worked on by your sales team, then you might want to sit down together with your team and crate one before you even think about implementing a lead scoring system.

Do you have enough data to score your leads?

In order to carry on a lead scoring system, you need to gather two kinds of data. One is demographic information and the other one the behavioral data which your visitors exhibited when they were still on your website. If you have been collecting these pieces of information from your lead generating forms and analysing it using analytics and lead management platform then there’s a good chance that you can benefit from lead scoring.

Has your business implemented a lead scoring system? How has it affected your sales processes? The comments section awaits your helpful input!

Quite often though many websites have unknown issues in their homepages that significantly contribute to high bounce rate and low conversion rates, and it is these issues that can have a devastating effect on your lead generation efforts and sales goals.

Below are three elements of an effective homepage. If you are planning to redesign your homepage, make sure that these three elements are present.

It Should Answer Who, What, Where, and Why

When redesigning or revising your homepage, it needs to clearly answer the who, what, where, and why, of your products and services. Your visitors need to know who your company is. What is so special with your products or services. Where they can use it and why will they purchase and remain on your site when there are other sites similar to yours. If your company has an effective value proposition like for instance a great marketing offer, chances are people will remain on your site since they know that they won’t see that kind of offer anywhere else. Check out our previous post about the Three Important Qualities Your Marketing Offer Should Have.

It Should Contain Clear Calls-to-Action

As mentioned in our previous post, it is essential to give your visitors different kinds of options depending upon where they are in the buying cycle. Remember that not everyone who visits your website is ready to buy. The majority of your visitors might be unfamiliar with your company and your product and so they need for you to guide them through the buying cycle. You may want to offer a whitepaper which visitors can download and position it front and center with an engaging headline and stong call-to-action. Your white paper should make your visitor realise that the product and services you are offering are needs not just wants. Only when your visitors realise that they need your product will they be ready to be contacted by your sales team.

Make Use of Meaningful Graphics

Instead of putting images or graphics that do not really give any value to your homepage, it will be better if you can put graphics that can add distinction and identity to each of your products. For instance, if you are promoting your whitepaper as the main call to action, it will make sense if you use a whitepaper image. It is of extreme importance not to place graphics or images for the sake of using them or for the sake of making your homepage more beautiful and appealing. If you are going to use images and graphics, make sure that it relates well to the concept of your website and its products and services. Though images can really be useful, it can also have a negative impact on your site if you do not use it properly.

In Summary

When was the last time you examined the effectiveness of your homepage? You might want to start evaluating your homepage and identify possible leaks as soon as possible. Once you get to know the issues or problems on your homepage and once you have applied the three important elements above, expect that soon you will see surprising improvement in your conversion rates.

How do you make a good offer?

There are a number of qualities a good offer should have in order for it to be generate and nurture leads effectively. Below are the top three important qualities an offer should have.

Should be of High Quality and Valuable to Your Target Audience

Remember that people do not like to give up their contact information freely. It will even be worse if you start putting up mediocre offers behind your forms. Your business may start to be known for bad offers that are not worth the form completion thus definitely hurting your lead generation efforts.

To make it very easy to understand, an offer is only considered valuable if it can address the problems and needs of your visitors. For instance, by offering a free product trial you not only encourage your visitors to sign up you also nurture the existing ones who are about to make a purchasing decision.

Should be Aligned with The Business and Products You are Offering

An effective marketing offer complements the products and services being sold. Educational e-book is a example of a great marketing offer. By writing an informative e-book about why your products and services are needed and including statistical data from reputable research companies, you establish your company as an industry thought leader and you educate your prospective clients about the kind of problems your products and services can solve.

Should Target the Right Buyer Persona at the Right Time

A great marketing offer also considers a person’s point in the sales process not to mention the visitor’s specific interests and needs. For instance, if your business is all about photography and a first time visitor comes to your site then downloads an e-book on how to take good photographs at night, you may want to further nurture that lead by inviting them to attend a webinar so they can learn how to better understand their camera modes and their usage. As they go up the sales cycle, you can offer them other products and services as you build trust and provide value to them.

Does your current marketing offer have the three important qualities we mentioned? If yes, how much do they factor when it comes to your business lead generation and nurturing efforts? We would love to hear your thoughts!

Web Leads up 75%

Sales from web leads up 29%

These numbers are going up, so what is the problem? The figures showed that the lead-to-sale conversion rate had dropped dramatically. That means that our customer was not being as effective at converting leads as they were at the start of the year.

Looking inwardly, we engage in marketing because we want to make more profit from our business. So we are either looking for more customers or better customers (higher profit).

For all the effort that you put into getting more website traffic or even website leads, you could be just spinning your wheels. Working harder but not really going anywhere.

The data from our customer above tells us that they were spinning their wheels. Sure, they were making more sales, but they had to spend more time with more leads to get those extra sales.

To demonstrate, look at the numbers below which are exaggerated to make the point:

Before: 10 leads = 5 sales

After: 20 leads = 5 sales

So because the leads have gone up, they are making more sales. But they have to spend much more time to get those extra sales.

Of course, if you didn’t know these numbers, you would be busier than you have ever been before, but you would not be making more profit. Nobody wants to work for nothing.

So at this point, there is a significant danger:

If this company spends all of their effort generating traffic, the numbers show that they are heading for trouble!

The real problem was occurring after the lead was generated, so extra traffic would just make the problem worse. Something needed to be done about the declining lead-to-sale conversion rate.

So why the drop in conversion rate? There are many possibilities including:

• Increased competition in the market (pricing, service, features and response time become important)
• The global economic conditions are causing people to hold off purchasing
• Staff are overwhelmed by a 75% increase in leads, and are being less effective with follow up, response times and general helpfulness
• Staff are not equipped to deal with the extra enquiries effectively (need more training)
• The extra leads are simply not right for the business, and are unlikely to buy (not qualified or bad traffic).

Any combination of factors could account for the drop in conversion rates. The important lesson is that because we closely monitor these trends, we are already 6 months into implementing a program designed discover the real factors and to turn these results around.

It’s really not hard to be able to see when this is happening in your business. All you need to know to be able to manage your lead generation website is the following pieces of data:

1. Visits – How many actual people visit your website (not hits or page views)
2. Enquiries – How many leads you get by email, phone or foot
3. Sales – How many of those leads turn into sales.

Once you have that basic data, you can begin to add to it so that you get a more detailed picture. Unfortunately what we find is that most Australian businesses are still in the dark about their websites because they do not have the numbers.

Key 5 :- Design for conversion

A website that is designed for conversion will be:

• Easy to read - why do so many designers hate words? I say that because so many of them try to hide your text by making it tiny, grey and putting it on a white background
• Easy to scan – highlight keywords and concepts, use good headlines and sub-headlines, bullet points, short paragraphs and short sentences
• Easy to navigate – It will be intuitive so that your visitors won’t have to think about where to find things
• Easy to act on – Phone numbers, contact details and contact forms will be built into the logical flow of your website content. On a high conversion lead generation website these things will never be sacrificed for aesthetics.

A good lead generation website is designed for content and designed for conversion. It’s not designed for other designers or to be judged at website design awards (did they go the way of the dodo?).

Key 6 :- Get website traffic from the right places

From a conversion perspective not all website visitors are equal. For instance, if your product is only available in Australia then there’s no point in getting traffic from India.

If your product is only for Architects, be sure that they are the ones who are going to come to your website. So you might advertise your website in the local Architects journal. You might decide to use Search Engine Optimisation to get traffic to your website from Google, but you would target the terms and keywords that Architects are likely to use in a search.

If you get website traffic from the wrong sources, your conversion rates will be low.

If you get people coming to your website who are likely to be interested in your services, then your conversion rates will naturally be higher. Concentrate on getting traffic that’s likely to convert.

Key 7 :- Active measurement and continual improvement

A high conversion lead generation website is never really finished. High website conversion rates rise out of continual measurement and improvement.

You need to be continually monitoring your website to know the answers to these questions:

• How many visitors are coming to my website?
• Where are they coming from?
  
• How many leads am I getting?
• What’s my conversion rate?
• Where are the best leads coming from?

You can easily get the answers to all of these questions from your website and your website analytics software. If you want a high converting lead generation website then this must be your priority. At a minimum you need to monitor this every month.

Oh, and Google Analytics is free. The insight that it can give you into your website is remarkable. There’s no excuse for not having it configured on your website.

So there you have the 7 keys of high conversion lead generation websites. They are:

Key 1 :- Clearly identified customers and goals

Key 2 :- A simple, clear message

Key 3 :- Trust

Key 4 :- Call to action

Key 5 :- Design for conversion

Key 6 :- Get website traffic from the right places

Key 7 :- Active measurement and continual improvement

A well conceived lead generation website will play a critical role for your business by making all of your marketing more effective. TV, newspaper, magazine, outdoor and radio advertising can all leverage a high conversion lead generation website.