Your website is the most important tool you have for turning anonymous prospects into leads and then into customers. It makes sense to have a lead generation-friendly website. Having compelling content, visually appealing design, and easy navigation is vital for your website. Also, there are plenty of ways to increase the number of people visiting your site, but unless you convert these visitors into leads, you won’t be able to ultimately get new customers. As a result, your business won’t be able to grow at a healthy rate.
That’s why it’s so important to build a lead generation-friendly website. Think about what your website looks like in its current state. Does each of your webpage clearly guide visitors to take action, or do they leave these pages wondering what to do next? Do you use a tool that automatically pulls the submissions from your forms and puts them into your contact database? Are you creating custom landing pages for every single campaign that you run? Do you have lead generation CTAs on each of your blog posts?
1. Lead generation forms
Forms are the crux of any business’s lead generation efforts. Without them, you won’t be able to get contact information that your site visitors actually provide to you as a part of the opt-in process. The opting-in part is important: When people voluntarily hand over their information by filling out a form, they’re actively showing interest in your business, your products, or your content. These leads are valuable because they’re more likely to turn into customers down the road.
When you’re thinking about how long your forms should be, consider whether you’d rather have more inquiries coming in, or higher quality inquiries coming in. Often if you have longer forms, it leads to abandonment. Remember these people do not know you enough to be sharing a lot of information with you. Keep the information as little as possible and you can always get more information as you go along.
2. Primary and secondary call-to-action on every page
When people go to a website, they’re usually trying to take some action. Sometimes, they know what that action is like when you’re looking for a coffee maker to buy for your spouse’s birthday and you plan to make a purchase as soon as you find one that’s good enough. Other times, visitors simply don’t know what they want to do on a website and they’re just there to browse or research.
It’s your job to guide these people forward in their research and/or buying process through calls-to-action (CTAs). Remember, your website exists to compel visitors to dig deeper into your business and offerings and move them further down the funnel. CTAs tell them what to do next so they don’t feel lost or overwhelmed. The more you can pre-empt what the customer is thinking, the easier it is for you to design relevant CTAs. In this way, CTAs can turn your homepage into a lead-generating machine.
You’ll want to create multiple CTAs for your site that speak to different parts of the buying funnel. But it’s important to have a primary CTA one that exists above the fold of your site pages sticks out from the others, and leads people to do the #1 thing you want them to do on each page.
What that CTA leads to will depend on your end goal. What do you want your site visitors to do most do you want them to sign up? Create an account? Request a demo? Defining what a “lead” means to you will make your analytics goals much clearer and will help you build a more intuitive funnel.
3. Gated offers on landing pages
We already went over the importance of embedding forms on your website in a more general sense, but landing pages deserve a section of their own. Landing pages are the hub of your lead generation efforts which is why every marketing campaign you run and every offer you create should be tied to a custom landing page. 10 Essential elements in designing a highly converting landing page
The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities you have to convert site visitors into leads. There’s also a huge SEO benefit to having more landing pages, which can have an impact even before visitors land on your site. There are many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, from design to form length to navigation, share buttons, social proof, and so on. If you’re looking for detailed information on building well-designed landing pages that are optimized for lead conversion
4. Pop-up forms
There are a variety of pop-ups that are used to grab user attention. Several providers also provide an exit-intent popup to retain a user on the page, in case he is trying to move away from it. Pop-ups are useful if you are :
- Offering something valuable and relevant so they add to your website visitors’ experience, rather than interrupting it;
- Timing their appearance so they’re triggered by certain actions or time spent on a page in a way that feels natural and not interruptive;
- Using language that’s actionable and human;
- Not ruining the mobile experience.
5. Intuitive design and thoughtful CTA placement
The point of your website is to guide site visitors toward the actions you want them to take. Your conversion efforts will be far more compelling when assets are easy to find and are built with a reader-centric mindset. Think about how you can use layout, CTA placement, whitespace, colors, fonts, and other supporting elements to clearly communicate your value proposition, help visitors find specific information easily, and build trust. Most importantly, you’ll want to make sure your webpage, especially your most popular ones, like your homepage is designed beautifully, intuitively, and with lead generation in mind. In other words, you’ll want to direct your visitors’ attention to the areas of the page that will convert them into leads.
6. A blog with lead-generating CTAs
If you don’t have a business blog or aren’t using it consistently, then you’re missing out on huge traffic- and lead-driving engine. There are many business benefits to blogging, which not only include helping drive traffic to your website but also converting traffic into leads for your business. Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. And thanks to the compounding value of blog posts over time, every post you write will drive value for you in the form of traffic and leads not just when you first publish it, but for years to come. But in order to generate leads from your blog, you can’t just write, hit “publish,” and call it a day. You’ll need to add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post that points to free content gated behind a landing page.
Read more about how to drive 10x traffic to your website.
7. Mobile Responsive Design
The facility for a website to reconfigure itself depending on the viewing device does not happen automatically. Much careful design consideration goes into crafting a user experience that works well on all mediums. Certain designs may work well on a desktop but not scale to a smartphone or tablet.
Read more about 8 Things to Consider While You Build a Website to Generate Leads
Last but not least is the significance of the brand image. The challenge that most companies face is that they try to say too much, particularly on the homepage. If you approach the navigation process in a purposeful way on every page, the homepage does not have to bear all the weight of the site. Take a look at your own website, are you using these lead generation principles to engage your audience?