In reality, traffic is only the beginning. It’s the easy part. The hard part—and the real leverage in your marketing model—is the rate at which you convert traffic to qualified leads or sales. Improving your site conversion is the single most important lever you can pull to increase your customers.

Below are six tips to enhance your website conversion.

1. Speed up your site. Slow page load times are the number one reason for poor conversion rates. Optimize your images, get on a different hosting server or do whatever you need to do to make the pages pop. Page load time is the silent killer of visitor interest.
2. Make the landing pages relevant to the visitor. If you brought the visitor in through search marketing, make the headline relate to the keyword. If visitors came from a direct mail piece, mirror the offer you mailed. Relevancy tells visitors they’re on the right page and should read more. 
3. Use your landing pages to move the prospect to the next stage. Explain benefits clearly. Make an offer to act now. Write copy that shows they’ll miss out if they leave. In other words…sell. 
4.  If you have an ecommerce site, use offers and upsells throughout the shopping cart. Act as if your pages are an end-cap display and show them the “new” price or the free shipping. 
5. Give the user multiple ways to respond—form, phone, chat, email. If they don’t convert, give them extra value and a reason to at least join your mailing list for future offers or information. 
6. Measure and test. Test and measure. The only way you’ll know how many fields to put on your form is to test them. Testing is easy and cheap and can easily get you 20 to 100 percent more conversions.

Every visitor to your site wants something. Satisfy that and you’ll convert more. And the more you convert, the more you make!

Author:  Ken Robbins is president and founder of Response Mine Interactive (RMI), an award-winning digital agency that helps companies acquire more customers using direct response interactive marketing. Since 2001, RMI has generated billions of dollars in revenue for leading brands in the retail, healthcare, travel, home services and business channels.

Learn how to maximize the profitability and long-term success of your program with these 10 secrets of online lead generation.

1. Organize your content so that it is easy to navigate. Don’t make users hunt around for the information they’re seeking.
2. Qualify customers through the lead form. Don’t request too much information, just enough data to qualify a lead.
3. Always update the landing page of offers that may have expired.
4. Ensure that keywords bring users to the correct landing page. The goal should be to fulfill your promise to the customer.
5. Continually monitor landing pages to ensure there are no broken pages or loading errors. Slow loading times and loading errors = no customers.
6. Avoid using pop-ups on your landing pages. They are often seen as annoying by users. 
7. Offer more than one way for customers to convert, i.e. phone, online form, etc.
8. Know and understand your target audience so your product or service sells itself. Perfect example of a poor qualified lead generation program: Small font size on a website for a 60+ audience.
9. Constantly analyze your lead generation program and make improvements along the way.
10. Always, always invest in testing! Test the lander, then test again. Test the offer, then test again. We call this rinse, wash and repeat.

Remember, the effectiveness of your campaign rises in direct proportion to the amount of value you deliver and to how many people to which you deliver it. By incorporating these tips into your next online lead generation campaign, you’ll ensure you’re not missing out on qualified, lifelong customers.

Author:  Ken Robbins is president and founder of Response Mine Interactive (RMI), an award-winning digital agency that helps companies acquire more customers using direct response interactive marketing. Since 2001, RMI has generated billions of dollars in sales for leading brands in the retail, healthcare, travel, home services and business channels.

TFAC is a first-ever social media initiative, led by Response Mine Interactive and BrainJocks, formed to support the non-profit organizations that make a difference in the lives of millions worldwide and to promote the wellbeing of our nation’s communities.

Aligning with its first non-profit organization, Komen Atlanta, TFAC aimed to:

• Increase awareness for Komen Atlanta and its mission to save lives and end breast cancer
• Encourage dialogue and sharing among those affected by this devastating disease

The program was initiated by the creation of an educational landing page that included information on Komen Atlanta and breast cancer. Leaders at Response Mine Interactive, BrainJocks and Komen Atlanta teamed up to notify their individual Twitter followers about the upcoming TFAC initiative. A modest PR push targeting local Atlanta media, along with national breast cancer and charity bloggers complemented the program launch.

On May 5^th at 11 a.m., TFAC sent out its first tweet: “8 Signs Your Mom, Wife, Sister May Have Breast Cancer: http://bit.ly/wUSED.” Social media users were encouraged to retweet the message and to share their personal breast cancer stories and experiences. Multiple tweets regarding breast cancer and Komen Atlanta were also sent throughout the course of the day.

Within a mere 24 hours, TFAC significantly increased awareness for Komen Atlanta and its mission as measured by the following engagement metrics:

• More than 300 retweets of the message “8 Ways Your Mom, Wife, Sister May Have Breast Cancer”
• 5,000 total link clicks to the educational landing page including 2,900 link clicks in the first 20 minutes after the initial tweet
• Exposure of Komen Atlanta to 1.2 million twitter users
• 11,000 visits to the Komen Atlanta Web site
• 10,000 visits to the TFAC Web site
• Mentions of Komen Atlanta and TFAC by targeted power-twitters including @mashable, @G_man and @zaibatsu
• Editorial coverage of Komen Atlanta and TFAC’s collaboration on CNBC.com, BreakingTweets.com and other media outlets
• Sharing of breast cancer experiences among TFAC Twitter followers including breast cancer survivors
• Contact by more than 20 non-profit organizations seeking to collaborate with TFAC in the future

Most importantly, TFAC was able to help generate awareness for a valued local charity dedicated to finding a cure for one of the most devastating diseases in our nation’s history.

Author:  Ken Robbins

At Response Mine Interactive (RMI), we’ve identified six of the most common mistakes marketers make that kill online sales.  We’ll tell you how to avoid these mistakes—and show you how to turn your lead generation efforts into powerful customer acquisition channels.

Mistake #1:  Falling into the “Cost Per Lead” Trap

Whether you’re planning your lead generation strategy or analyzing campaign results, strike “cost per lead” from your vocabulary. The metric you want to focus on is cost per acquired customer. Your real goal should be to win a profitable customer at the lowest possible cost.

To achieve this, clearly define what a lead is and set the price you’re willing to pay for it according to how deep in the conversion funnel it is. Keep in mind that leads from different sources convert at different rates. Setting up a program to generate profitable leads begins with a close look at your business model. What are the telltale qualifiers for your best prospects? What are your close ratios? Expect to pay more for better or deeper leads.

Mistake #2:  Wasting Traffic with Poor Conversion

Have you ever listened to a group of marketers talk about their websites? The misguided brag about traffic to the site; the savvy ones talk about what happens to their traffic. The point is, generating traffic is the easy part. The hard part is the rate at which you convert traffic to qualified leads or sales. Improving your site conversion is the most important lever you can pull to increase customers.  Here are a few tips to boost your conversion rates:

• Understand the intent of your traffic
• Identify a different process and offers for less qualified prospects that are still in the research stages
• Invest in well designed landing pages
• Allow visitors to convert on their own terms either by calling or using a registration form

Mistake #3:  Failing to Use Content to Pre-Qualify the Person

What’s the best front-end way to qualify leads? “Use landing pages with a series of qualifying questions to ‘score’ each respondent,” many would say. And they would be half correct. A well-conceived registration form can certainly be a great qualifier. But putting the right content in the right places so that prospects can self-select is often more effective. By responding to relevant, compelling content, prospects qualify themselves.

Mistake #4:  Forcing the Form

Time is your worst enemy in lead conversion. An inquiry is more likely to convert if he or she calls a toll-free number instead of completing a registration form, simply because he or she is in the mood to shop now. Yet we know that many marketers rely on elaborate forms to snare prospects. RMI’s advice: Make the online form registration secondary. Encourage people to call if you can. Your chances of converting are much better with a trained human being talking to an interested human being. If you can, put the phone number to your call center or other fulfillment service “above the fold” and put the forms below the fold.

If you do use a registration form instead of, or in addition to, a toll-free phone number, it’s okay to ask a few qualifying questions. But let the offer and the value proposition carry most of the qualification load and you will get better leads. A form with too many fields to complete is frustrating to the user and is the main reason for high abandonment rates.

Mistake #5:  Stopping After Becoming #1

Many companies believe that achieving a number one ranking for their most popular keywords is the be-all and end-all of digital marketing. But why stop there? While number one rankings are great, the real goal is to acquire new customers. Consider implementing an organic SEO campaign to augment your pay-per-strategies. One strategy is to create content rich sites that are specifically developed to be more informative than a typical corporate site. In this case, these additional sites help drive more total traffic than the high ranking site can do on its own.

Mistake #6:  Failing to Invest in Testing

You’ve paid to develop a great website and great content. You’ve paid for SEO, keywords and performance-based media buys. So you’ve used your budget wisely, right? Well, did you allocate funds for a significant amount of testing? A little testing won’t get the job done. But an ongoing program of testing will.

Test. Test. Test. And then test some more. Have a continuous process for testing everything, with emphasis on segmenting your tests and learning as much as you can for each customer segment, offer segment, list source segment and all of the other building blocks of your digital campaign. Track and measure everything in the lead generation cycle such as:  referring domains, keywords, content, offers and sub-offers, landing page design, and registration forms. A smart testing program will produce a stream of incremental increases in the conversion rate and will have a cascading impact of success over time.

There you have it, the six most common mistakes advanced marketers make in lead generation. Those that can avoid these six mistakes and effectively draw, capture and convert online leads will thrive over those that can’t manage the opportunities, risks and details involved in Internet marketing. The rewards of the Internet channel are substantial, so capitalize on the opportunity to effectively sell your products and services online.

Author:  Ken Robbins, Response Mine Interactive