People tend to think that a good way to increase website leads is to add more traffic to the mix so they increase their advertising spend on services that bring them traffic. This could involve buying more advertising on Google, increasing their SEO budget or spending more on Facebook ads.
These are all great ways to increase your traffic to your website but they will not necessary increase your leads. Before you go diving into adding more traffic into the top of your sales funnel, perhaps you should take a look at your funnel and see if there is a way of improving the current conversion rate of your website.
This would mean any relevant traffic you add to your sales funnel in the future will have a better ROI (return on investment) as your website will do a better job of turning that traffic into leads, then hopefully customers.
It is more about qualified leads and relevance than the numbers
Just like I said about traffic it is not just about more leads, you want more qualified leads. However a lot of the leads that you will receive may not always be ready to buy so you need to use lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing is a great way to qualify leads that may not have bought from you otherwise. By nurturing and moving prospects through your sales funnel you will convert more of the leads you already receive.
If you also create great content, that more qualified leads are interested in, this will mean the traffic you receive will also be of a higher quality.
Always be testing
Your website should always be in a state of change. You should be continually testing different aspects of your website to help persuade your potential customers to buy. This can sometimes be the cheapest way to increase your leads on your website as you are persuading more of your visitors to convert.
You should test different headlines, button placements, tone of voice, content length, content type and much more. When it comes to testing never go on a hunch, make sure you are recording visitor behaviour on your website and base all your testing decisions on facts.
By installing Google Analytics on your website you will receive great insight into what works and what doesn’t. Take a look at the lowest performing pages and find ways you can change them to be more persuasive.
You would be amazed what a simple headline change can do to your conversion rates.
Tell them what to do next
If you don’t make it clear to your potential customers what you want them to do once they arrive at your website, they will leave without doing anything. You must lead them by the hand and have a clear picture of what you want them to do. Some of the things could be:
- Contact you
- Buy a product
- Subscribe to a newsletter or blog
- Download a helpful guide or catalogue
- Sign up for a free trial
- Sign up for a webinar
- Free assessment
If you don’t make it easy for your visitors to do these things, do not be surprised when no one performs your desired actions.
Improve your products or services and customer services
Although you would think this would not directly affect leads, you would be surprised. Word of mouth and social media is a great way to spread the word of great products but it also works the same way when people are unhappy.
No marketing in the world is a substitute for bad products or service and if you have lousy customer services you will not retain customers and they will let all their friends know on social media how lousy you really are.
Spend some of your marketing budget on improving the products you sell and the services you offer and at the same time creating an experience your customers will love.
Now it’s your turn
What are the biggest challenges you face when it comes to increasing website leads? Let us know in the comments below.