It’s nearly impossible to convert random visitors into buyers the first time they land on your site. But you can convert them into leads.
There’s no such thing as love at first sight when selling online.
The purpose of lead generation is to get a visitor to know you and your business. You want to assure them that they can trust your company to help them solve their problems.
You also want to assure them that you sell the best products or services. That you’re better than the competition.
First, I’ll like to make this clear:
Your site should be receiving some reasonable amount of traffic before you start thinking of leads.
Trying to collect leads on a site that barely receives traffic is worthless.
If you have an extremely low-traffic site, your time is better spent getting traffic than collecting leads.
Tony Ho Tran of the I Will Teach You to Be Rich (IWT) website shared how a single page on the site generated 50,000 leads.
That may sound good to you, but this is a site that receives a lot of traffic daily.
So, it’s easy for IWT to get 50,000 leads from a single web page. It doesn’t you can achieve the same result or something even close.
If you have the amount of traffic IWT receives, maybe you can even receive more leads from your landing pages.
Let’s assume your site has some good amount of traffic. How do you generate lots of leads?
Engage with your audience
If you maintain an active blog and write about topics that are related to your business, there’s no doubt that people who need your products or services visit your site.
There are lots of other blogs online. You should know that these people also visit other blogs and websites.
To make prospects pay serious attention to your site, blog, and brand and like it enough to give you their emails, you need to engage with them.
Almost every business online is doing marketing. We all want customers. Only a few businesses engage with their audience.
There’s a reason why:
While engagement is rewarding, it’s also time-consuming and tedious.
You can’t automate real engagement with your audience.
Respond to comments and mentions on social media
Sony Corporation is one of the well-known brands. They have a Facebook page for the brand.
Their Facebook fans, who are from various parts of the world comment on Sony’s posts on Facebook.
Even though the Sony brand is well-known, the brand has a team that responds to every comment made by fans on its Facebook page.
Sony has realized that engagement is key to winning customers online. A local business should do the same thing. For example, Nicholas Parr, a Baltimore personal injury lawyer uses respond to comments on his Facebook page.
When someone comments on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn post, make sure you respond to them.
Responding to social media users when they comment or mention you, is the key to building a relationship with them. For example, Elville and Associates, a Maryland estate planning and elder law firm responds to comments on Facebook.
It helps you gain their attention. They feel appreciated. They like your brand.
All comments may not deserve a response. But try to respond in some way. Even a GIF will do.
How does this help you get more leads?
A lot of your customers are on social media.
According to Statista, there are 2.62 billion social media users worldwide in 2018. This number is expected to hit 3.02 billion users in 2021.
Social media is a great place to start and nurture relationships with potential leads both before and after they visit your site.
If you have a good relationship with someone on social media, they are more likely to join your email list.
Facebook Retargeting
If someone visited one of your web pages and didn’t act, you can reach them again through Facebook retargeting.
Facebook retargeting is a smart way to engage with visitors who didn’t act on your site.
You can set up a retargeting campaign in your Facebook Ads Manager.
Here’s how it works:
Facebook gives you a code to install on your site.
Once the code is installed, Facebook will record each visit a Facebook user made on your site.
It means Facebook knows when a Facebook user visits your website.
Facebook allows you to target Facebook users who visited your site or viewed a particular page on your site. You create ads that reach these people on Facebook.
There are other ways to use Facebook retargeting to target Facebook users, but I like the idea of retargeting people who visited specific pages on your site.
When someone has visited a particular webpage, it’s easy to retarget them because you know what the page is about.
For example, let’s assume that you are a small business marketing agency based in Texas like Digiboost, and someone visited your webpage about web design.
It means the majority of prospects are small business owners or operators who are interested in web design.
You can create an opt-in that offers them an ebook that tells them what to know before hiring a web design agency.
You can also collect testimonials from happy clients who are based in the same city as the prospect. Create a page dedicated to testimonials and ask for prospects’ email addresses.
Then use Facebook retargeting ads to reach these visitors again. A relationship coach for men like Karen Brody may use Facebook retargeting ads to collect emails of prospects who had visited her website.
By doing this, you’re engaging with prospects without being annoying.
I highly recommend retargeting for local businesses, especially the ones that spend ton of money on Google Ads. You can retarget those customers who didn’t take any action the first time they visited. For example, a pest control service in Baltimore like On The Fly Pest Solutions can retarget their visitors.
Create an opt-in offer that’s related to each content
On the HubSpot’s blog, each blog post has an opt-in offer that’s related to the content on the page.
For example, they published a post titled, “Selling on Instagram: How to Use Instagram’s Shoppable Posts.”
At the end of the blog post, they offer a free ebook titled, “Instagram for Business in 2018.”
Each blog post published on your blog should have an opt-in offer that’s related to it.
Imagine you just finished reading about Instagram marketing on a blog. You’ll love to read an ebook that tells you more about Instagram marketing.
Now, imagine another scenario where you read about Facebook marketing and the opt-in offer is an ebook about Instagram marketing.
You don’t care about Instagram marketing. You want to learn more about Facebook marketing.
HubSpot has collected hundreds of thousands of leads on its blog using this lead generation tactic.
Turn your site into a powerful lead magnet by creating opt-in offers that are related to the content on the page.
A popup technology like GrowthFunnel makes it incredibly easy to collect leads on your site.
Simplify your site’s design
Your website is where you collect leads.
If your site is difficult to use, prospects are unlikely to give you their contact information.
How do you ensure that your site isn’t difficult to use?
The answer is simple:
Eliminate anything that gets in the path of conversion.
Drip IV Lounge is a offers IV Nutritional Therapy in San Antonio. The website is simple and focused on one thing: converting visitors.
Your goal when someone visits your site is to convert that person into a lead.
If your site is hard to use, it turns people away. Instead of helping you convert visitors into leads, then your site does the opposite.
Geekdom Media is a media company the publishes podcasts and books on personal development and business. Their website is very simple and focuses on collecting emails.
The design is the first impression
When a potential client lands on your site, your first goal should be to make the prospect stay longer.
Don’t rush into trying to make the visitor convert into a lead immediately. You’re better with leads that know what your business does.
People who have spent enough time and read many pages on your site are better than people who spent less than 10 seconds before dropping their email addresses.
According to a study conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, they found that the longer visitors stay on your site, the less likely they’ll leave.
And what makes visitors spend longer time on your site?
Good design and content.
It starts with design. The design is half the battle.
The design is the first thing. Content is what follows.
The design makes the first impression of your site.
If the design is ugly, visitors won’t stay long even if you have great content.
The best way to beat the competition and collect more leads is to make visitors stay longer on your site.
Then you need an exceptional opt-in form to make visitors fill in their contact details.
When you visit the Armored Group’s website, the first thing you see is a stunning picture of an armored vehicle that blends with the design of the site. So, if you’re on the site to buy armored vehicles, the site will surely make you stay longer on the site.
For example, Krisztina Toth is a freelance web developer and designer who works remotely.
She has a stunning site design.
Because of her attractive website, there’s no doubt that she’ll get more leads.
Make your design so simple and appealing that an 11-year old can use it.
Complex site design will only make you lose potential customers.
For example, the design of Kayako is simple. The illustration will capture your attention immediately as you land on the site.
When I see a startup struggling to convert leads, the first thing I look at is the site’s design.
Does it help visitors stay long and convert? Or, does it make them lose interest in the site even before they see the opt-in form.
Ensure that the design makes prospects spend more time on your site. Because the more time they spend, the easier it is for them to give you their details.
Collect names and emails early in the checkout process
If you’re running an e-commerce site of any size, you know that emails are very important.
Top e-commerce businesses like eBay and Amazon live off emails.
Even top social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn depend on emails to keep web users coming back to their sites.
When you have a potential buyer’s email, it helps you gauge his/her interest in your product.
For example, you can send prospects email messages to remind them of their abandoned shopping carts.
If they don’t open your emails, it shows they might have moved on.
If they open your emails and don’t buy, it could be that they are still deliberating on the purchase.
According to Baymard Institute, 69.89% of shopping carts are abandoned. That means about 70% of potential sales are lost.
You can’t recover all these lost sales, but you can recapture some of them. You need emails to do that.
Many marketers leave emails at the end of their shopping cart flow. They collect emails when it’s time for shoppers to make payment.
This is the wrong way to design your shopping cart checkout.
You should collect contact information very early in the checkout process. For example, Earth Class Mail collects emails early on their sign up page.
The below image best illustrates how to create the perfect shopping cart process.
Email offers you the greatest opportunity to convert visitors into customers. You’re closer to making someone a customer when you have their email than on social media, or even your site.
So, ensure that you collect email early in your shopping cart process.
Most shoppers don’t complete the checkout process before they abandon the page. However, when you have their email addresses, you can always reach out to them again.
When trying to sign up egg donors, the first and only thing Circle Surrogacy asks for is the email address. Nothing else. Once they have your email address, they can send you a message that instructs you to continue the process. This ensures that no potential donor is lost because of a long and boring form.
Conclusion
Prospects want you to engage with them.
They want you to create offers that are made just for them.
They want your site to be easy to use.
And finally, they also want to be able to engage with your brand through emails.
A vast majority of web users want to receive promo emails from brands.
According to a study, 96% of people earning $75,000 – $99,900 would like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with.
The same study also found that 92% of people earning $100,000 or more would like to receive promo emails.
By following the steps outlined above, you’ll build a brand and site customers want to give and receive emails from.
And also, don’t forget that you need GrowthFunnel to collect even more leads on your site. It’s free to start using GrowthFunnel today.
What other methods have you used to turn your brand and site into lead magnets?
