Leads are the foundation of your marketing. Only when you have won leads can you contact them with your offers and develop them into customers ready to buy in a targeted lead management process. Or in short: no leads, no email marketing.
However, since email marketing is still proven to be the most successful type of marketing, it is even more important that you generate leads efficiently. There are certainly various ways of doing this … Be it via lead Ads in social networks, at events, via competitions, etc.
Your website also plays a particularly important role – after all, this is probably the primary contact point for all those who have already noticed the name of your company and want to find out more about you.
Therefore, in this article, we are devoted to the 5 elements that your website needs to effectively convert website visitors into leads.
Table of Contents
A lead is a person who is interested in your company and has given you a contact address. As a rule, this is at least the e-mail address in the online area. It is important, however, that the person in question – i.e. the lead – has given you their contact details voluntarily and that you have not researched their contact details to contact the person.
So when you contact the lead, you’re doing it because of the person initiating the communication. In other words, you are permitted to contact the person.
With the keyword “Permission” we are right in the middle of the topic “Permission Marketing” and thus in the basis of every modern marketing strategy. While marketers used to buy the “right” to contact people with offers without being asked (for example via letter mail or TV advertising), good marketing works much smarter today.
So instead of “bombarding” people with offers regardless of your interests, ask for permission to contact them. This has the huge advantage that you only transmit your content to people who have already expressed an interest in you and your company – your leads.
These considerations are also the answer to why it makes no sense to buy leads. Leads generation is about gaining the contact details of people whose interest is so genuine and great that you become customers to buy. However, it is of course much easier to buy leads than to generate them organically.
However, these bought leads do not know your company and therefore have not naturally developed an interest. As a result, you would invest all of your marketing activities in a largely disinterested audience and incur similar wastage as in the past with TV advertising or letter mail. That is why we appeal to your patience and an efficient lead generation process.
The good news: The efficient and successful generation of leads follows simple rules and is not rocket science. At the same time, however, this also means that an inconspicuous reference to the newsletter on your website and the hope that someone will possibly subscribe there is not enough. So that you can successfully generate leads via your website, we explain which 5 elements are required in each case.
Personal contact details are of great value. Ask yourself: How gladly and voluntarily do you give your data to previously unknown companies? Probably rather reluctantly. As a result, you need an incentive, i.e. added value, for website visitors to give you their contact details. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a fair deal. Fortunately, there are many different ways to make the “trade” attractive to your leads. So how about, for example:
The format doesn’t matter at all. It is only important that you offer your prospective customers a small “gift” with real added value in exchange for their data. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. What is the greatest benefit for your potential customers at this point – i.e. before the first contact has even taken place? Is it perhaps a free update on a certain topic or does it require certain knowledge for your product and a free whitepaper would therefore be suitable?
No lead management process without a call to action! The call to action is a clear call to action for your prospective customers. After all, even before the first contact has taken place, these are new and need orientation. A precisely formulated call to action takes on exactly this task and calls for specific action without further ado.
For example in the form of “Register now for the newsletter!”. This call to action must be visually highlighted and quickly catches the eye. After all, he is the linchpin when it comes to lead generation.
Make sure that where the call to action is placed there is also an answer to the question of what benefit there will be for interested parties if they follow the request. In our example, the interested parties might receive a discount code. As a result, the request could be: “Register now for our newsletter and receive a 10 euro discount on your first purchase!”
This request can appear on virtually every single page of your website. Of course, the start page or the “About” page is particularly suitable for this.
Of course, all of this only works with the appropriate form. The form is the place where the interested parties finally enter their data and send them to you via a button. The following applies: Always ask for as little information as possible, especially at the beginning. In this case, and not least because of the GDPR, only the email address may be marked as a mandatory field.
Other information, such as the name or position in the company, can also be requested in form fields but must be marked as optional information. At this point, however, we urgently advise you not to request more data from previously unknown website visitors, as each additional data entry represents an additional inhibition threshold.
Once you’ve won your lead, however, there are many different ways to gather more information about your recipients and enrich their profiles for more personal communication.
Your website provides an overview of your company, maybe even contains a shop, but in any case, has various subpages with navigation. That’s great and a good thing. However, your website offers a lot of control elements, visual impressions, and information that can (and will!) Sometimes be distracting when you are pursuing a specific goal. Landing pages are therefore exactly the right tool to draw the attention of your prospective customers to a specific offer.
Landing pages are only dedicated to a special offer and dispense with any further link or even a navigation bar. It fully focuses on the product or service to be sold, explains the advantages that arise for the prospective customer, and supports the arguments with evidence.
Such a landing page is therefore perfect for generating leads. No matter what your “offer” is that you are offering your prospects in exchange for their data – a landing page gives you the space to concentrate fully on it and is proven to convert better!
“What do you say when you get an ice cream from your uncle?” This sentence will be well known to all parents, otherwise, it may still cause the same eye roll as it did as a child, when mom tried to teach us the word “thank you”. But why should it be any different online than at the ice cream stand? So don’t forget to thank your new leads for sharing their data.
It is therefore essential to implement a thank you page to which the leads are directed after entering your data. Professional email marketing software offers you the option of integrating such a page into the double opt-in process.
If you have not yet integrated a lead generation process into your website, the following applies: the faster you start, the better. A / B tests can be used to gradually optimize conversions. Because maybe a red call to action works better than the blue one after all? And maybe more people will sign up for your newsletter if the form is at the top of the page instead of the bottom !?
The possibilities, the conversion rate optimization are very fine-grained so that you can gradually test them against each other. In general, a “good” conversion rate on a website is between 1-3% and on a landing page between 40-50%. Here, too, and especially in the case of landing pages, professional marketing software such as MAILING WORK supports you with sophisticated A / B tests.
Lead generation is the first of four steps within the lead management process. Now it is important to find out more about your new contacts than just their email address. In this way, the communication can gradually be personalized so that you can always send your recipients the most relevant information and offers. When the contact is finally “ready for a sale”, you can automatically hand it over to your sales team.
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