Chapter 10
Convert Visitors into Leads

You now know how to get your website and other content found by your target market using various methods, including how to pull people into your business using blogs, Google, and social media. However, simply getting visitors to your website isn't enough. You need to convert these visitors into qualified leads and eventually paying customers. The true power of inbound marketing lies in its ability to not only stretch the top of your sales funnel (and pull more people in), but also stretch the middle (get more to convert).

Conversion is the art and science of encouraging site visitors to further engage with your business. You do this by helping people take some sort of action: subscribing to your e-mail newsletter, filling out a form, or requesting a demo. It's important to provide a variety of different ways for visitors to further engage—versus simply calling your company or buying something from your site. This is because not everyone who visits your site is at the same place in the buying or sales cycle—meaning some people are ready to buy now and some may not be ready until three to six months from now or longer. It's better to provide people with options to engage at whatever level they're comfortable, from handing over only a name and e-mail address for your e-newsletter to filling out a longer form for a white paper, webinar, or demo. (We cover how to nurture those leads who aren't yet ready to do business in Chapter 12.)

It's also important to understand that site visitors do not always enter your site from the home page, which is another reason why you shouldn't think of your website as a “brochure.” More often than not, when someone finds your website via a referral from Google or another third-party site, they'll be taken to the web page that most closely matches what they were looking for. This could be a page with information about your product, a blog article, or any other web page on your site. As a result, when thinking about conversions, think about the potential action a site visitor can take to further engage with you when he or she lands on any page within your website.

Once you get that visitor on your page, you need to show him or her exactly the action to take—and you do this with a compelling call-to-action. We can't stress enough the importance of a call-to-action. The difference between a weak call-to-action (e.g., a Contact Us page with an e-mail address on it) and a compelling one can mean the difference between a half a percent visitor-to-lead conversion rate and a 5 percent visitor-to-lead conversion rate. On a site with 1,000 visitors per day, that is the difference between 5 qualified leads per day and 50 qualified leads per day. Next, we describe the four qualities of a killer call-to-action: valuable, easy to use, prominent, and action oriented (VEPA—see Figure 10.1).

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Figure 10.1 VEPA

Compelling Calls-to-Action

Site visitors were attracted to your site due to your remarkable content; it will require an equally compelling call-to-action to convert them into qualified leads. The visitors you are drawing in are asking themselves the following questions:

“Why should I click this button and give them my information?”

“What's in it for me?”

“Is the value of the thing I am getting worth giving up my e-mail address for?”

People have become quite skeptical about giving out their contact information, so there needs to be an obvious perception of value that exceeds their expectations and overcomes this skepticism. Generally, businesses underestimate how valuable offers need to be in order to obtain people's contact information, so it's a good practice to think about a whole series of increasingly valuable offers and experiment with them. You'll remember our adage from earlier in the book, “You've gotta give to get!”

Good calls-to-action typically involve giving your users helpful information, to enable them to do their jobs better or help them become more valuable to a future employer. The giveaway or offer is generally more remarkable content, including:

  1. img Webinars
  2. img White papers or reports
  3. img An ebook
  4. img A 30-minute expert consultation
  5. img Research studies
  6. img A free class, demo, or trial offer

Experiment with various types of offers to see which generate the best conversion rates.

Easy to Use

Web usability expert Steve Krug wrote a great book about web design titled Don't Make Me Think. His basic premise is that when people arrive at your site, they shouldn't have to think about what to do next. The title of his book sums up how you should consider your calls-to-action: They should be clear and simple (few words) and should indicate what action to take and the result of that action.

Prominent

To encourage conversion, your offer needs to stand out—it should pop! What can you do to ensure that your offers are prominent?

Placement on the page is critical. The call-to-action should sit near the top of the page so that the visitor can see it without having to scroll down the page.

The call-to-action should also be a clickable image with a relatively large font—versus a text link buried amid page clutter—with white space around it so that the eye is drawn naturally to it. It should also be highlighted with color to make it stand out. (See Figure 10.2.)

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Figure 10.2 Screen Shot of a Call-to-Action

Every page on your site should have a call-to-action, not just your home page and landing pages, and the calls-to-action should be context sensitive. For example, your product page might have a “see a demonstration” call-to-action while your services page might have a “get a free 30-minute consultation” call-to- action.

Action Oriented

Your call-to-action should begin with a verb and tell the visitor what action to take. Here are some of the action-oriented calls-to-action we have seen work well:

  1. img Test Yourself Against Your Peers
  2. img Get Your Grade
  3. img Win Our Contest

Mistakes to Avoid

One of the lowest converting calls-to-action is “Contact Us.” If your site uses this call-to-action, make it a priority to change it as soon as possible.

A related mistake is using an e-mail address to have people contact you versus filling out a form. Using an e-mail address is problematic for three reasons. First, you want to capture your users' contact information in a database in order to nurture these leads should they not be ready to buy just yet; capturing them manually is difficult to do when you're only getting e-mails from them. Second, you invite spammers who scrape e-mail addresses from websites. And third, people without desktop e-mail applications, such as Outlook, often cannot open those e-mail links. Every contact e-mail address on your site should be replaced with a short web form. Remember, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for the user. We talk more about forms in the next chapter.

Optimizing Through Experimentation

In order to maximize your prospect-to-lead-conversion percentage, it is important that you test multiple calls-to-action with different VEPA (valuable, easy to use, prominent, and action oriented) emphasis. Testing one variable, such as the offer or the headline of a page, is called an A/B split test and is relatively easy to conduct. You test your “control” offer or headline against another—with all other variables (colors, fonts, page layout, etc.) remaining the same. Testing two or more variables at the same time is called “multivariate testing.” As you test small changes, you'll be surprised at the differences in conversion rates. You can do endless experiments, but you should focus on those with increasingly valuable calls-to-action and increasingly prominent calls-to-action.

In order to do those tests, we recommend you have your site set up so that you (not your IT guy) can make changes and run tests on your calls-to-action very easily.

Tracking Your Progress

It's important that you track the percentage of visitors who convert into qualified leads over time. As you make changes to your calls-to-action and you improve VEPA, you will see changes in your conversion rates. Obviously, higher is better with this metric!

As a rule of thumb, you should have at least a 1 percent visitor-to-conversion rate on untargeted traffic. Having a conversion rate of over 5 percent is quite good on untargeted traffic.

Inbound in Action: Google

Google is a master at making/testing changes on their site to increase conversion rates. Before becoming CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Mayer was an executive at Google. She told a story about how the Google team debated which shade of blue would convert best on one of their properties. The answer was not obvious, so they tested 40 different shades of blue to see which one converted the most visitors into committed users.

Now, you don't have as much traffic as Google, so it would take too long to get enough data to make a test with 40 different variations. Having said that, you should continually question core assumptions about your site by running a few different variations of calls-to-action, landing page design, and form length to find the optimal conversion rates.

To Do

  1. Ensure your site has a call-to-action on every page and is set up such that you can change these calls-to-action and measure the changes in conversion rates from visitor to lead.
  2. Make sure your calls-to-action are valuable, easy to use, prominent, and action oriented (VEPA).
  3. Measure your overall visitor-to-lead conversion rate on your site religiously and work to increase it through testing.
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