As a marketer, nothing's more frustrating than consistently improving your website traffic with SEO, but failing to convert more website visitors into sales leads.
Your growing website visitors will be nothing more than window shoppers until you work on your conversion approach. Here are three steps to get you started with increasing your website inquiries and leads.
Turn More Website Visitors Into Sales Leads
1. Educate Visitors to Make Selling to Them Easier
Your first instinct may be to build website pages that highlight how great your business is. To sell right from the beginning. This is the online equivalant of walking onto a used car lot. At least make some small talk - geez!
Enter: your blog. You have one, right? You consistently write new blog posts targeted to your buyer personas, right?! If not, make it happen.
Your blog is key to genuinely educating your website visitors into sales leads. With educational content, you not only help your prospects, but you also build rapport and trust. Sales conversations are much easier with established trust and rapport.
2. Plan Your Conversion Paths From Visit to Lead
Window shoppers don't turn into sales opportunities by chance. You have to deliberately plan a visitor's path from clicking on your search result in Google to becoming a lead in your CRM.
This involves having
- great content that attracts your prospects,
- a call-to-action that directs the prospect to further education,
- a landing page that sells the hell out of a premium educational offer,
- a form on the landing page that allows the prospect to exchange their email and name for the offer,
- a thank you page that delivers the offer and promotes further conversion opportunities, and
- marketing automation that nurtures the prospect through their buying process and informs your staff of this new opportunity.
A contact form and RFQ button are not well planned conversion paths. In fact, they are likely the reason you have so many window shoppers and not enough leads.
3. Set Up Conversion Opportunities That Don't Require Visitors to Contact You
Have you ever walked into a store, had someone ask if they could help you, and responded, "No, I'm just looking"? I bet that's happened a lot. As a shopper, it's quite annoying to be asked repeatedly to talk to the salesperson.
If your only conversion point is a contact page or RFQ form, you should expect your conversion rate to be extremely low. Why? Because most website visitors are "just looking."
You need to change your approach to generating leads on your website to improve this conversion rate. You need to provide lower-commitment conversion opportunities like the one I outlined above. Provide some added value through an ebook or toolkit or webinar. Exchange this valuable content for their contact information.
Website visitors will be much more interested in exchanging their contact details for what they find valuable. No one raises their hand to be stalked by sales unless they are ready to buy now.
Check ALL of the Boxes for Online Lead Generation
Start with the three steps above to increase the number of website window shoppers that turn into sales leads. For more detail and to make sure you maximize your online lead generation effort, check out our webinar, and download this FREE Online Lead Generation Checklist:
How to Audit your Online Marketing
If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?
Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.
