Editor's Note: Jane Hurst is a business writer and regular OMI contributor. Today, she joins us to discuss how your company's website can be optimized for lead generation.
Driving fresh traffic to your website is essential for getting new customers, and nowadays it’s vital for marketers to be strategic and creative when developing ways to build their client base.
As a further challenge, getting traffic is half the battle: afterwards, your site needs to be optimized to capture leads and turn them into sales. Otherwise, your visitors are meaningless statistics that won’t do anything for your business. If you are looking for ways to optimize your site for lead generation, here are some ideas to get you started.
Optimize at Every Step
Let’s say you are selling a rare kind of product. If someone has searched for the type of product you are selling and they end up on a blog post about it on your site, make sure that the post is linked to a relevant sales offer. This way you get to capitalize on the interest of incoming traffic and get more sales.
For instance, if your visitors are reading an article about a type of auto insurance policy, link to an offer for a deal on the auto insurance that you sell. You want to keep your visitors’ attention and get their business. Once they are thinking about a certain kind of item, they are never more likely to buy it: instead of waiting for them to browse your site further, make sure they can act immediately.
The moment someone visits your site, you can start to learn about how your conversion path works. If that path doesn’t take visitors where you want them to be, it is time to optimize that path to turn those leads into sales. The key is to keep giving visitors things to look at that they are interested in. If you can do this, then they are more likely to stay and come back for more down the road. If they really like what they see, they will recommend it to others, generating even more leads.
Use Thank-You Pages
A lot of marketers miss out on a big opportunity to deliver premium content to those who might be interested. Once visitors have submitted the form on your landing page and are taken to a thank-you page, include a link to informational content related to their purchase. This is an opportunity for you to suggest further offers that could be of interest. Never miss out on an opportunity to get more sales.
Send out an automatic thank-you email known as a “kickback email” after a transaction, and include more specific calls to action. Don’t go overboard and send daily emails. After a while, that approach will just land you in the spam folder. A good rule of thumb is not to send out offers more than once a week, and once every two weeks is considered a standard rate. This will keep you in your prospects’ minds without coming across as pushy or over-the-top.
Studies show that by using kickback emails, companies can double their engagement rates when compared with rates that result from traditional marketing emails. Calls-to-action aren’t just about selling to a particular lead, either: you can also include social media links and offers to encourage sharing and social engagement.
Take Advantage of Social Selling
Instead of using email as your main source of lead generation, consider what social selling can do for your company.
A content analytics tool like Leadfeeder can show you what companies your website visitors work for, and exactly what they are doing while on your website. This allows you to qualify your sales leads so that when it’s time to reach out, your sales reps knows the exact interests of each prospective buyer. Content analytics tools can often integrate with your email marketing tools and CRM to further increase lead-flow.
Leadfeeder is free and easy to set up; it can be used to identify new leads, get automatic reports, and output relevant data that will help you to know which leads are most promising.
Personalize Calls to Action
When using calls to action, aim to be personal. For instance, if someone has already visited your return policy page, you can use this information to be more personal with him or her the next time they visit. Let’s say a customer has visited your Father's’ Day Gift Guide page three times in the past two months. It’s time to create a call to action just for her: the next time she visits any page on your site, it can offer discount codes on Father's’ Day gifts.
A stranger obviously won’t see this level of personalization – at least not until until he or she has submitted a form. But the next visit can be tailored specifically for his or her interests. In order to pull this off, all you need is a set of simple tools such as Hubspot’s Content Optimization System. Using this or something similar will help you to serve up the smart content that you need to personalize messages for your leads.
Nurture Leads Individually
Getting a sale is an achievement, but getting repeat sales from the same customer is icing on the cake. Customers are people, and people will only stay interested in your company as long as you are interested in them: so stay interested.
As soon as a lead fills out a form on the landing page, put it right into your workflow. Send them useful content that is relevant to their interests and needs. The more you nurture, the more you are going to learn, and the more your customer will know when the time comes to close a sale.
Learn more with these related OMI classes:
How to Get Clients & Generate Leads
How to Create the Perfect Landing Page
Visit the Online Marketing Institute to browse over 400 classes in the digital and social media marketing space.