Business owners, marketers or web designers has transformed the way they promote their products and services from outbound marketing into inbound marketing techniques.
Inbound lead generation is the act of attracting visitors the right customers, at the right time to your site and presenting them with targeted content with calls-to-action and contact information so they can convert.
Optimizing your website to generate leads and convert into new customers is not as simple as throwing a "click here" button on your home page and watching the leads pour in. Instead, marketers and designers need to shift in thinking, tactics, and approaches to establish an effective lead generation process that integrates inbound elements is essential to your business success.
In this post, we'll go over some quick but effective ways that work to optimize your website for lead generation. Be sure to test the three key pieces of the lead generation process:
1. The Calls-to-Action
The purpose of designing a website is to make it convenient for users to find your business, purchase products and services. A simple way of encouraging potential customers to convert is by integrating CTA (or Call-To-Action) in the website by way of buttons, images and links incorporated with a valuable text that explains to the site visitors the result of their actions.
The function of a CTA is to lead the users along the sales funnel, by persuade them to do several actions such as purchasing a product, signing up to a newsletter, commencing a free trial, requesting a discount coupon, etc. or even clicking through to a landing page.
If your website has been receiving a lot of traffic, but a low conversion rate, among the many possible reasons, there often is the lack of well-designed and strategically placed CTAs.
You can place a CTA anywhere on your site, but it’s important to do it right. You want your CTA to grab the attention of your visitors and really entice them to click. So, you should make them attention-grabbing by good use of color, contrast and font size/styles, keeping it simple but visually appealing with persuasive phrases such as:
a. Sign Up Now
b. Subscribe Now
c. Join Free for a Month
d. Get Started for Free
e. Claim Your Free Trial
f. Find Out More
g. Request a Demo and more…
When finalizing your website design and integrating the CTA, it is important that the website is optimized into a responsive web design to make the website accessible to a variety of screens including the relatively smaller mobile phones that allow users to have a great experience for both the full-page content, including the CTA, to be clearly visible.
2. The Landing Pages
According to HubSpot 2018 State of Inbound survey results, companies with 30+ landing pages on their website generated 7X more leads than companies with 1 to 5 landing pages only.
A landing page is a distinct page on a website that web visitors will be redirected to when they click on calls to action and capture their information through a lead-capture form, also called a conversion form. A landing page is an indispensable part of marketing and the heart and soul of an inbound marketer's lead generation efforts that can effectively convert leads into prospects and customers, drive traffic, improve your SEO and build your brand online.
In fact, marketers can capture leads at a higher rate by sending them to dedicated landing pages, rather than sending them to home page. The landing page is the simplest, most effective way to generate more leads for your company.
The results of landing pages can be tracked and analyzed through different tools like Google Analytics, and this can help you understand what’s working and not working on your marketing efforts or just how engaged your prospects are. You can optimize your landing page by testing different colors, images, headlines, copy, and form fields to see what make prospects to take an action and what’s stopping them from doing so. Then, you can improve your landing pages based on what visitors respond to the most to be able to achieve the highest possible conversion rate from the visitors who arrive at that landing page.
3. The Thank-You Pages
A thank-you page is one of the most vital pages on your website where the visitor is led to once they submit a form on the landing page and convert into a lead. However, the landing page does not always receive the attention it deserves. In some cases, it is overlooked entirely. So, it is now important to make an effort in incorporating a thank you page on your lead generation process.
A thank you page can serve as a great first step for nurturing your leads. It provides an opportunity to build trust and engagement with customers at that particular point in their decision-making and buying journey.
By thanking your customer, they will feel special and appreciated which will make them come back on your site because they know they’re welcomed and know they’re in the right place.
Along with saying thank you, be sure to have a clear call-to-action and email responses to suggest other ways in which readers can make a deeper connection with your brand and learn more about your company's offerings.
Examples of good calls-to-action:
- Subscribe to Our Blog
- Follow Us on Twitter
- Sign Up for Our Free 30-Day Trial
Without a CTA, there's actually a 0% chance for a conversion on a thank you page. Choose your CTA wisely to fix the thank you page ROI. You can also include social sharing buttons so your site visitors can share the good news with their friends.
Remember: Google now favor social sharing over others; one of your goals should be to have as many users as possible to share your site to gain more traffic and conversions.
Now, it’s time to take advantage of these lead generation strategies to make higher-quality leads that will be more likely to convert into customers for your business.
