The leads that your website produces are only as good as the website itself. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be time-consuming or difficult to design a landing page that produces great leads.
Although it may be tempting to just add a “Click Here” button to your home page in order to generate leads, it is not that simple.
Marketers and designers need to take a more strategic approach to website design if they want to generate leads. Here are some quick tips that can help.
Ways to Optimize Your Website for Lead Generation
Let’s unpack simple ways to optimize your site for lead generation:
1. Add forms to the pages that get the most traffic
Before you start improving your lead generation, it is important to benchmark where you are currently so you can track your success and identify which areas need the most improvement. You may have pages on your site that are already generating leads without you realizing it.
To start, conduct an audit of where most of your online traffic and outreach comes from — your lead generators. Here are some common places a business might get visitors:
- Email Marketing: Traffic might come from users who click through to your website from one of your emails.
- Social Media: Traffic might come from users who engage in a campaign through one of your social media profiles.
- Live Chat: Traffic might come in the form of users who reach out to your customer service team through a live chat window on your website.
- Blog Posts: Traffic might come from your highest-performing blog posts.
2. Measure the performance of each lead generator
Website Grader is a tool that can help you determine how well your lead generators are performing and identify ways to improve your existing content.
You can examine how successful your landing pages are by comparing their conversion rates. For example, if 1,000 people visit Landing Page A and 10 of them fill out the form and convert into leads, then Landing Page A has a 1% conversion rate. If another landing page, Landing Page B, gets 50 visitors to convert into leads for every 1,000 visits, Landing Page B’s conversion rate would be 5%.
3. Optimize each step of the lead generation process
It is important to make sure that the offer on your website is relevant to the page that the customer is currently on. If they are on a page about lawn care, then it would not make sense to have an offer for a snow-clearing consultation. This way you can make the most of the customer’s interest in that particular subject.
The moment a potential customer arrives on your website, you can begin to track their journey towards becoming a lead. This journey starts from the moment they land on your site, and ends when they hopefully fill out a form.
If you want to run an A/B test on a landing page, be sure to test the three key pieces of the lead gen process:
The CTAs
To create an eye-catching image for your blog post, try using contrasting colors from your site. Canva is a great, free tool to use to create images quickly and easily. For ideas on what types of CTAs (calls-to-action) to test on your blog, read this blog post.
The Landing Pages
According to a survey done by HubSpot, companies that have 30 or more landing pages on their website generate 7 times more leads than companies that have 1 to 5 landing pages.
Use these 15 well-designed landing pages for inspiration.
The Thank-You Pages
The thank-you page, which a visitor is led to after they submit a form on the landing page and convert into a lead, shouldn’t be ignored even though the landing pages usually get more attention during the lead generation process.
Bonus: The Kickback Email
Once a visitor converts into a lead and their information enters your database, you have the opportunity to send them a thank-you email
The HubSpot study found that thank-you emails had double the engagement rates of standard marketing emails. Kickback emails are a great opportunity to include a super-specific CTA and encourage sharing by email and social media.
4. Start with a basic CTA on your homepage
If you want someone to stick around on your homepage, make sure your call-to-action (CTA) is strong. But don’t try to get them to engage with your longest or most complex content right away.
Consider including one of the following CTAs on the front of your website:
“Subscribe to Updates”
In general, consumers want their browsing experience to be as non-invasive as their buying experience. This means they don’t want to be bothered with ads or pop-ups when they’re just looking around. They’re often not ready to make a purchase when they first find your website, but if you give them a good experience, they may come back later.
To get them interested in learning about your company with no extra effort on their part, invite them to subscribe to an email that notifies them of industry trends and product updates. Personally follow up with the ones who opt to stay on this mailing list to gauge their interest and eventually turn them into marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
“Try Us for Free”
Free trials and demonstrations are essential for a growing company. They allow you to generate interest in your business and create a list of potential customers who are currently using your product.
Your homepage should have a CTA for a free trial of your product, as well as a form to collect the user’s name and email address.
5. Offer e-books for download on specific blog posts
To generate more interest in your business, you could create blog content that promotes an ebook or whitepaper on the same topic. This would allow website visitors to learn more about what they just read about on your blog.
If you want your website to rank on Google, you need to develop page authority. Organic visitors who come to your site from Google are usually looking for a solution to a problem, which makes this a valuable form of lead generation.
6. Develop a live chat service for your website
If you’re not using live chat on your website, you could be missing out on a major lead generator. Live chat services are becoming increasingly sophisticated and more and more people expect them when they’re researching vendors they might want to buy from.
You should audit your website to see which pages your visitors spend most of their time on if you want to generate leads through live chat. If you have the right development resources, you can install a live chat tool on the pages where customers need the most assistance or information. This would allow you to collect information on their product needs while answering their questions.
7. Personalize your CTAs
The content on your website can be customized to each individual web visitor to create a more personalized experience. This can be done by tailoring the images, buttons, and product options to the visitor’s interests, pages they have viewed, or items they have purchased before.
Calls-to-action that are personalized convert 42% more visitors than basic calls-to-action. Therefore, dynamic content and on-page personalization help you generate more leads.
8. Test, test, test
A/B testing can do wonders for your click-through rates.
The number and quality of leads is a conversion factor that should improve over time.
If you want to see significant improvement in your click-through rate, try testing out different calls-to-action. Something as small as changing the wording or the layout could make a big difference.
9. Nurture your leads
Once a lead has filled out a form on your landing page, place them into a workflow so they don’t forget about you. Follow up with emails that deliver content that is relevant and valuable to their interests. As you nurture the lead, learn as much as you can about them and tailor all future communications accordingly.
10. Include a contact number
While it may seem counterintuitive, adding a contact number to your website can actually increase consumer trust and lend credibility to your offer. Even if your customers don’t actually call, the presence of a phone number does bring them some comfort.
One lead generation site for a Los Angeles dentist used its phone number as part of its domain name and marketing strategy.
11. Post forms on every page
Online forms that generate leads are more effective when they are easily accessible and require minimal amounts of personal information. Forms that ask for more information are less likely to be filled out.
If you place your lead generation forms above the fold, customers are more likely to see them and fill them out. This is especially true if there are visual cues, like arrows, and an enticing offer, like a free quote.
12. Add photos and testimonials for greater credibility
While testimonials alone can be powerful, adding photos, videos, or audio can make them even more effective. However, the rich media versions may be too large to use on websites designed for generating leads. Nonetheless, testimonials can still have a strong influence and help to promote your product.
13. Make your videos speak to the user
Online videos help connect online and offline commerce, and also lead to way more conversions for a bunch of different industries—especially ecommerce websites. The best videos are the ones that speak to the viewer instead of just talking at them. You can see an example of this in the one thousandth episode of Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV show below. Online users who watched a product video were way more likely to convert than users who just saw an ad.
Visiting a product page that has a video is like having a conversation with the company about the product. The user feels more informed and confident about their possible purchase.
14. Use trust seals – but make sure they’re more than just eye candy
The majority of companies that offer trust seals state that using one on your website can lead to an increase in conversion rates, but it is difficult to find verifying statistics. Instead of simply adding a seal for the benefits it provides visually, select one that comes with a consumer guarantee, such as the BuySafe guarantee used by OrientalFurniture.com. Customers who noticed the seal were 7.6% more likely to make a purchase than those who did not see it.
15. Use power words when describing your offer
Active voice is more persuasive because it sounds more concrete and tangible. Additionally, active voice places the customer in a position of power, as they are the ones who will be experiencing the benefits of the offer.
The lead generation page for a successful chronic pain course uses impactful “power words” at the top of the page.
16. Avoid “Cookie-Cutter” site templates
Cookie cutter “all-the-work-is-done-for-you” website templates are not good for quality lead generation. Instead, invest in the best possible website you can afford, and make sure the purpose of the page is clear to the designer so it can be focused on generating leads. A well-designed website also increases trust and customer confidence levels when shopping online.
17. Consider the end-goal first
What is your definition of a lead? Consider what actions you want the user to take as they progress through each stage of your sales funnel when thinking about this definition.
18. Make Good Use of Whitespace
Whitespace is important in web design because it makes things easier to read and navigate. Too much clutter on a page can be overwhelming and make it hard to find what you’re looking for. Giving your content some breathing room can help solve this problem.
A lead generation page can help you test important design changes before implementing them site-wide. Test different changes on different landing pages to see if they improve your lead generation efforts. Having the right software in place will help you understand which changes are having the desired effect.