Years ago, company websites that promoted offline products and services were little more than online brochures. They described what these companies had to offer, but they provided no mechanism for turning online inquiries into in-store sales.
Today many business owners are more savvy. They collect contact information from visitors, and follow up on that information to turn casual visitors into genuine leads.
If your business is still using its website to passively dispense information, with a little time and effort, you can turn it into a lead-generating machine that will dramatically increase your revenues and profits. Simply follow the two-step approach outlined below:
Step # 1: Create Incentives to Induce Visitors to Part with Their Contact Information
Although visitors to your site may not be ready to make a purchasing decision, they can be induced to give you their contact information if you offer them something they value in exchange. What do they want that you can offer? They’re already looking for information about your industry, your company, or your products and services, or they wouldn’t be visiting your site. Providing the information they seek in an attractive form usually provides sufficient incentive.
Here are some simple ways to provide instant gratification to your site’s visitors and obtain the contact information you desire:
Provide a simple form on your site that visitors can fill out and submit to you in order to get a price quote. Ask specific questions about what they want and when they want it. When you return the completed quote to them, provide your e-mail address and toll free telephone number so that they can easily contact you.
Give visitors the opportunity to request a special “Internet only” coupon, which you promise to e-mail to them when they give you their contact information. Coupons are powerful marketing tools. They not only capture your visitors’ contact information, they also can provide an incentive for the owner of the coupon to come to your location to cash in on the coupon’s rewards.
Publish a regular e-mail newsletter with relevant information about your industry, your company, and your products and services. This non-invasive way to deliver valuable information to your leads on a regular basis, increasing the “trust factor” that will ultimately drive buying decisions. Also, as your leads become conditioned to getting valuable information from you, they will be more likely to respond favorably to promotions.
In exchange for contact information, offer to deliver an online “e-course” over several days using an e-mail auto responder service. Choose a topic relevant to your customer base, such as “Seven Tips For Choosing The Right (Name of product or service).” Well-conceived e-courses that answer typical customer questions and objections will position your business as a trusted authority. .
Step # 2: Measure Your Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate, and Use that Information to Improve Your Site
After you have one or more lead-generating methods in operation, regularly measure how effective they are at converting casual website visitors into valuable leads. Fortunately, there are many free tools for tracking what visitors do on your website.
One of the most notable tools is Google Analytics, a free service that tracks an amazing amount of information about your website’s visitors. With Google Analytics, you can tell which search engine phrases led visitors to your site, what pages they visited, how long they spent on each page, what percentage of visitors converted into leads, and more.
For example, if you discover that you’re getting approximately one hundred visitors a day to your website, but that on average only one of these visitors converts to a lead (giving you a 1 percent conversion rate), you might decide to try to improve the page you use for conversions by strengthening its “call to action.”
To continue our illustration, suppose after making the changes, you again measure the results using your tracking tools and find that you’re still receiving the same one hundred visitors a day, but now you are converting an average of two visitors per day into leads (a 2 percent conversion rate). That may not sound like much of an improvement, but actually you’ve doubled your lead conversion rate, and that’s bound to have a large favorable impact on your sales.
Measuring how your website performs on a regular basis allows you to continually refine your lead generation process and create an ever-growing stream of valuable contact information.
Summary
Growing your business twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week is as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4:
Create a website that converts visitors to leads.
Continually improve your site by measuring results and making adjustments.
Follow up on all leads.
Enjoy the benefits of increased sales and profits!