Your company has a great product. You’ve always known it, and the stellar reviews from satisfied customers only confirm it.
And yet, you feel like your online leads aren’t where they should be. Maybe they’re not even close.
Why not? You have a nice looking, functional website. A strong URL. You’re active with SEO and social media. What on Earth could be the problem?
The truth is, checking those boxes is merely the bare minimum for digital marketing in 2020. When it comes to your website, your company must consider the same thing it did when first developing that great product: user experience.
What’s it like to actually navigate your website? What is there to see? What is there to read? Is everything clear and concise, or is it complicated and vague?
As you begin to try and answer those questions, we have some suggestions for you. Nine of them, in fact, courtesy of marketing managers and other thought leaders from all around the globe. If you want to increase your online leads, this is an excellent place to start.
Time is of the Essence 🕑
This is so simple that it’s easy to take for granted, but it’s vital. How fast is your website?
Richard Garvey, the founder of AcerSEO, says increasing speed is “easily the most important upgrade that a website can make.”
“For every second your site takes to load, you are losing huge chunks of customers,” Richard says, summarizing this article about page load time. “The bounce rate doubles after four seconds and you have already lost about 25% of your potential customers. If you could make one change and increase your customer base by 25%, that would be a no-brainer.”
Claire Shaner, product marketing manager for ZooWho, completely agrees. Both Claire and Richard recommended using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how fast your website is.
That tool can help you identify any problems, with a common one being images that are unnecessarily large.
As Claire notes, “in order for someone to become a lead, they need to first find your website.”
“If they're finding your website organically, your SEO needs to be top-notch,” she says. “Google has said that one of the most important modern ranking factors is your site's page speed. If you improve your page speed, you could improve your search rankings and drive more traffic to your website.”
Let’s Chat 💬
You’ve tried hard to answer every conceivable question about your product or service on your website. But inevitably, potential customers will have more to ask.
As Jeff Moriarty, marketing manager at Moriarty's Gem Art, learned firsthand, there’s much to be gained from adding live chat.
“We expected some questions here and there, but we were astounded by the number of very specific questions from customers on a daily basis,” Jeff says. “Many of the conversations originating here have turned into high-ticket sales.”
And the results didn’t end there.
“Our operators started getting a lot of the same types of questions, which has led us to add much more content to the website covering these topics,” he says. “Since the integration of live chat, we have seen a nice increase in our overall conversion rate and a drop in bounce rates.”
These findings are in lockstep with the view of Kevin Dhimitri, an independent SEO expert and web designer. He thinks live chat is particularly useful when selling expensive products and services.
“A lot of your potential customers will have questions, and aren't ready to contact or call you yet,” Kevin said. “So, having a good live chat plugin is a great way to get more sales by being available whenever you have potential customers actively browsing your website.”
Moving on Up ⬆️
You know the saying: location, location, location.
Stan Tan, digital marketing manager at Selby’s, recommends making your calls-to-action readily apparent and easily accessible.
“We did this for our website and moved our quote form to above the fold,” Stan says, “and our conversion rates jumped to around 6-8%.”
"That’s especially significant given how much information the Selby’s form requests," Stan said.
Blake Sutton, Senior Electrical and Software Engineer at Electrical Knowledge, can attest to similarly positive results.
After moving their opt-ins up on the page, Blake’s company saw a 330 percent increase in leads.
“I’m yet to find an easier way to increase the conversation rate of your opt-ins,” he says. “We noticed that less than 40% of our users read more than half of the post – so then why were we hiding our opt-ins at the bottom of the page? It just didn’t make sense.”
Honey, I Shrunk the Page ⬇️
Maybe you feel it doesn’t make sense to raise your forms or buttons. In that case, why not condense the page? Users will reach the good stuff at the bottom that much more quickly.
Michael Alexis, CEO of Team Building, loved the results after downsizing their landing pages.
“One main reason vertical compression is so effective is simple: More leads reach the bottom of your page and find the lead form or other call to action,” Michael says. “Using this method I’ve increased conversion rates from 3 percent to 10 percent or higher.”
"An easy way to do this without cutting content is to resize images to be smaller, or reduce your font size. An added bonus: Measures like those should boost the page speed."
The Perfect Popup 💥
There’s nothing quite like the agony of products added to the shopping cart, only to be left to wither. But you don’t have to let them go without a fight.
David Walter, CEO of Electrician Mentor, says they’ve experienced “incredible results” with a cart-abandonment popup window offering a 10 percent discount that appears before users leave the site.
“We found that this dramatically decreases the bounce rate and significantly increases user engagement at this critical stage of the buying process,” David says. “Our sales have seen a massive 23 percent bump doing this.”
Fiona Kay, Digital Marketing Manager at Nigel Wright Group, is also a big fan of popups to generate online leads.
“We use Unbounce to create our landing pages and the tool also provides popups that you can add across your website,” Fiona says. “We’ve been using the popups to generate leads for our Salary Reports that we publish every year.”
Content Check 🔍
When’s the last time you took a good, honest look at the content on your website? Because if you’re dissatisfied with your amount of online leads, a lack of quality content could be why.
Kelly Wade, an independent Marketing Specialist who runs kmwade.com, emphasizes the importance of targeted, SEO-friendly content and copy.
“Many businesses neglect content for prospects who aren’t yet aware of the problems they face or are about to face,” Kelly says. “Producing blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, infographics and other content that solves the immediate problems of those who will soon become aware of another problem -- that your product/service solves -- is a highly effective way of increasing brand awareness and proving you can solve problems without seeming to be ‘only in it for the sale.’”
Ken Marshall, Founder of Doorbell Digital Marketing, suggests creating individual landing pages for each and every product or service you provide. You should be as specific as possible, with each landing page being optimized for SEO while including calls-to-action and answers to frequently asked questions.
“Your content is specific to the target user's needs and useful for them to make a buying decision,” Ken says. “A search engine will see the level of detail put into your efforts and reward that laser-targeted approach with higher visibility. That higher visibility will result in more organic traffic and more inbound leads over time. All with minor tweaks made to the content after its initial creation.”
Speaking of landing pages, Jamie Anderson — CEO of jamie-anderson.com — finds it helpful to make sure every single one contains video content, even if it’s just a quick explainer or testimonial.
“This almost always gives my conversion rates a boost compared to the video not being present when split tested,” Jamie says. “The other benefit is that if you host the video on YouTube it provides another source of traffic that you would never have gotten before from YouTube itself, and your videos can even get ranked in Google for some target keywords if the competition is low enough.”
One last content idea: customer reviews. Celeste Huffman, who works on Rogers and Hollands's marketing efforts, found they can make a big difference.
“These reviews help to not only increase unique content on our product pages — which is great for organic rankings — but they also helped increase conversion rates, as it helps potential customers choose which products they want to purchase,” Celeste says. “As the number of reviews grows, we should see an even more dramatic change to the success of the website.”
Just Add an ‘S’ 🔒
If you believe in your content and are looking for a quicker fix, you might consider a URL tweak.
Adeel Shabir, a Marketing Executive at Smith Thompson, suggests using HTTPS instead of just HTTP. Simply adding a SSL certificate can make a big difference.
“This will not bring any traffic but it will increase the perception in the reader’s view that the website is secure and ... well-connected,” Adeel says. “This also gives you the opportunity to gain trust among your audience.
More credibility can’t hurt, right?
Fix Your Forms 🛠️
How much thought have you given to the lead forms themselves?
Darcy Burk, Senior SEO Expert & Web Developer of burkdigitalfactory.com, thinks the more efficiently you can get the necessary information, the better.
“Businesses are asking too many questions in their forms,” Darcy says. “Make them as simple as possible.”
He recommends just procuring basic contact info first. Then you can worry about items such as “where did you hear about us” and “service interested in” later when following up on the lead.
“In most industries,” Darcy says, “assume that for each additional form field you add, your conversion rate will decrease.”
Remember What — and Who — It’s All About 👤
Anyone ever tell you not to talk about yourself too much? That applies to marketing too, even on your own website.
That’s the conclusion that BlinkList Founder Tim Uittenbroek came to after some competitor analysis.
“The biggest mistake we were making was, we imagined the home page is about us,” Tim says. “But, to our surprise, giant companies were doing the opposite. We did alterations to make our home page about our clients. Instead of just writing down our services, we wrote about how our services would impact their business or lives.”
By adjusting the tone of their copy and incorporating second-person voice (“you,” “your,” etc.), BlinkList successfully adopted the new approach.
“Our text reflected how our services would impact potential clients positively,” Tim says. “Merely writing services do not attract the client; it is a must to brief them on how it is beneficial for them.”
Like so much on this list, it was a subtle yet effective change — and one that can inspire a noticeable increase in online leads.
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