Not every website is built to generate leads. A high-converting website is laid out with a good understanding of the end user. It goes beyond throwing a “click here” button on your homepage, sitting back, and watching the leads roll in.
In reality, the bar has been raised. As a digital marketer or company, you need to adopt a more strategic approach to website design.
In this informative guide, I’ll walk you through some of the important elements and ways you can optimize your website for lead generation. No, it’s not that difficult!
The first important element to keep in check is you must…
1. Design for lead generation
When a visitor arrives on your website, it’s an opportunity to make an impression. Make a good one, and the visitor would have no hesitation in giving you their details as they want to come back. That’s the premise by which lead generation thrives.
However, if you present a low-quality or valueless website, your chances of gaining a lead has been greatly reduced.
What are the vital design elements to put in place to give your website the best chance of generating leads?
i). Fast website speed:
Users today expect websites to load in a few seconds. Section.io found that bounce rate increases as the page load time increases. In the same token, the number of leads you capture also reduces.
To improve your website speed, some steps to take include:
- Reducing the number of elements on the page.
- Reducing the number of scripts.
- Reducing the size of images you use.
- Making your images load as a reader reads through your post rather than loading the images all at once.
ii). Navigation and Sitemaps:
All the links to important pages must be present where visitors can easily see them.
Also, there should be a lot of white space on your website. White spaces make your page easy to skim through and visitors can identify the most important links and pages.
You can also use a sticky navigation on your website for easy navigation by users/visitors.
iii). Mobile responsive:
Mobile marketing is a must for your business if you want to reach a wider audience. In fact, a large portion of your traffic and leads will come from mobile.
Making your website mobile-responsive means users on mobile can have access to your landing pages and lead capture forms.
By implementing a responsive design on their website, Walmart Canada boosted conversions by 20%.
You can also use click-to-call functionality. This allows users to call your phone number while browsing your website.
2. Integrate landing pages throughout your website
Having 1 or 2 landing pages on your website can get you leads. But a lot of potential leads will slip through the cracks. To get as many leads as possible, you should have as many high-converting landing pages as possible.
HubSpot found that companies that increase the number of landing pages on their website from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads.
This is an example of a simple landing page by Teambit, a HR software. It has a single field and other options if you don’t want to use your email.
This is another example by Trulia that shows you how much your home is worth. The single field you fill in is an address.
On the next page, you fill in your details where you can get the report.
3. Add forms to the pages that get the most visitors
These pages are the biggest opportunities for signing up more leads for your business — that is if you utilize the opportunity.
With the addition of forms on these pages, you can capture leads while they’re still gaining value from your content or immediately after.
There are various positions/sections you can place these forms on your page.
- Middle of your post
- At the end of the post
- Before they exit the page
To make your forms convert as high as possible, you should limit the number of form fields to 2 and not more than 4.
Research by Formstack shows that fewer form fields lead to higher conversion. In fact, Dan Zarrella of HubSpot found that reducing the number of form fields from 4 to 3 could increase conversion by 50%.
HubSpot marketing grader is one of their most popular pages and they utilize this to get more leads. This page grades your website. But before it does that you enter both your website and email address.
4. Test & Optimize each step of the lead generation process
There’s no single strategy for generating leads that work for every website. And there’s no perfect strategy either. This is why you must always perform A/B tests on your landing pages and lead capture forms. The elements you can test include:
- The number of lead capture form fields
- The color of the call-to-action button
- Call to action words
- Landing page content
- Landing page background
Note that while testing, you should only change a single component of your page so that you can easily track your results.
Friendbuy is a company that helps to create referral programs and drives customer acquisition. They had a banner on their product page for any user who wants to see a demo. However, this banner had a click-through rate of 1.44% which was too low.
They decided to A/B test the call to action of the banner. They used 2 variants ‘Test it out.’
And ‘See demo.’
Both variants were improvements on the original but ‘See demo’ had the highest improvement with a 4.49% CTR. This is a 211% increase compared to the original.
When visitors land on a page on your website, any offer presented to them or any landing page linked to must relate to the content on the page they’re reading.
This takes advantage of their present interest and has a higher probability of converting more leads.
5. Start with a catchy CTA on your homepage
Converting a new visitor straightaway is an option you should explore when they visit your website. There are many variants of “call to actions” you can use.
Usually, these call to actions will depend on your service or the problem you want to solve for your visitors. These could be:
‘Sign up for more updates’
‘Get a free demo’
‘Sign up for a free trial’
‘Get the ebook’
‘Shop Now’
It’s important to note that your call to action should just be that. It should include an action word that tells visitors what to do. It should also show urgency. Visitors should know what to expect when they click on the call to action button.
For instance, Lifeproof, an electronics cases designer, initially used ‘Shop’ as the call to action button on their homepage.
But this word is vague and could serve as both a noun and verb; which means visitors don’t know what they’ll get when they click.
They changed that to ‘Shop Now’ which shows action and urgency. They found that visitors were 12.8% more likely to click on this than ‘Shop.’ This equated to a 16% lift in monthly revenue projections.
6. Offer Ebooks for downloads on popular posts
Popular posts are avenues to get more leads. Because your visitors engage well with these posts. Offering an ebook related to these posts is a way to gain more leads.
Due to the traffic, you’ll get more leads from these posts even if your conversion rate is the same as less popular posts.
Foundr magazine has many followers on Instagram (more than a million). This is something many businesses will like to achieve.
So Foundr created an ebook to explain their techniques and also capture more leads in one of their most popular posts by Nathan Chan.
This is another example by Flywheel where they used their ebook to capture leads. And they have indicated that it’s free which is a kind of encouragement for interested visitors.
7. Engage your audience with high-impact content
When people visit your website, they visit because of a need. The best way to convince them to sign up for more updates or a free trial of your product is to meet their specific need with your content.
How do you achieve this? Your content must have these traits:
a). Relevance: Your topic and content must be relevant to the industry and people reading it.
b). Authority: Conducting a thorough research for your content makes it more valuable and trusted by your readers.
c). Persuasiveness: When producing content, you must put yourself in visitors’ shoes and understand their pain points. This will help you to convince them to take the necessary action step.
d). Usefulness: Readers must find value in your content. It must solve an immediate problem. Period!
e). Shareability: Your content must be so good people share it to give you more opportunities to capture more leads.
To make your content easy to consume, implement these tips:
- Use short paragraphs
- Use bullet points
- Use subheadings
- Use bold and italics
You can also have your content in various formats like infographics, videos, etc. apart from written content for easier consumption.
IntelliResponse, a customer service software company, to increase awareness and leads improved their content strategy.
They designed infographic case studies, produced video case studies, created white papers, and shared more content on their blog.
This led to a 400% increase in site traffic and a 100% increase in leads generated.
Conclusion
To acquire more leads for your business consistently, you need to build a website that convinces a visitor. When you have a visitor on your website, it’s an opportunity to impress them.
It is an opportunity to provide value and show them they could gain much more when they give you their personal information.
One thing you have to note though is that every part of the user experience on your website has an effect on whether you’ll gain a lead or another bounce.