Wondering how to increase leads on a website? On a website most visitors will leave within a few minutes never to return. Unless you capture their email address by offering some free giveaway, such as an ebook, most of your traffic won’t convert into a sale.
Website owners know this and that’s why they will attempt to get website visitors to enter their details into a form. Once they have captured the visitor’s email address, they can follow up over a much longer time period. They can build trust and connect with their subscribers multiple times over weeks, months and years!
To get website visitors to join your list, you need some kind of offer. Ebooks, PDF’s and video courses are typically the “legitimate bribes” offered on a website. They encourage people to opt in to your email list.
But before this can happen you first need website traffic.
How To Increase Leads On A Website – Get More Traffic
While more traffic will invariably give you more leads, getting more traffic can be tough, especially if you’re creating content for that traffic. The other way to increase traffic is to pay for it using an ad platform such as Google Adwords. But this can get pricy and if you’re not getting a good return on your investment, you can easily spend a fortune without profiting.
Creating content on a website is one of the main strategies used by bloggers. With a lot of content you can attract traffic from the search engines, social media sites and through building backlinks from other websites.
One of my favourite ways to generate traffic to a website is through writing articles targeting long tail keywords. See how to increase website traffic organically for more on this strategy. More traffic doesn’t necessarily relate to more leads. You need to make sure your traffic is well targeted and aligned with your giveaway offer and of course whatever it is you’re selling.
How To Increase Leads On A Website – Increase Your Opt In Rate
Another simple way to increase the number of leads you get from a website is to increase the opt in rate. If you do this successfully, you can turn more visitors into subscribers. So even for the same number of visitors, you can get more leads. To do this you can experiment with different opt in options.
Use a popup offer on your website and show your offer on every page of your website. Use more than one offer too – you can use drop down offers, banners, links in your text and opt in forms. The more ways your visitors have to opt in to your email list, the more visitors are likely to do so.
You’ll probably see on this website I have a number of annoying popups! I have a free webinar banner which uses a drop down menu, a popup and a static form. I use banners and contextual links within my text.
How To Increase Leads On A Website – Use A Landing Page
Why use landing pages? A landing page is useful for collecting leads because it is much less busy that a normal website. On a normal website there’s a lot of copy you can read and you can browse around freely. But on a landing page there’s only two options: sign up or leave the page. This type of one page website is also known as a “squeeze page” because you’re squeezing a decision out of your visitor, or squeezing them into your email list! Here’s what a landing page looks like:
Landing pages can be tested against similar pages to optimise your opt in rate to give you the lowest cost per lead. Cross testing is one way to find the best performing page. Here’s a cross testing option in one of the pages I have built:
Two variants are tested against each other over a certain number of visitors per page. The best performing page gives you a cheaper cost per lead. You then cross test again and again trying out different elements of the page and/or targeting in your advertising.
This is much more difficult on a normal blog or website because there are too many variables. Visitors on a website can click around and look through your content. On a landing page it’s much easier to “tweak” your page until it performs at the lowest cost.
Access a landing page software here.
List Benefits Not Features
On an offer someone opts in because they see the value in your giveaway offer. So for example, if you’re promoting a free ebook, your offer title might describe the benefit of opting in a receiving your free ebook.
It’s important to know the difference between the benefit of getting your free ebook and the features of it. So for example the benefit might be:
“Make your first 10K online”
A feature of it might be:
“Over 30 pages of information about affiliate marketing”
When you showcase your offer, be sure to present the main, major benefit to your visitors. If you do this well, you should increase your opt in rate. The benefit of “making 10K online” is much easier to understand than the benefit of “reading 30 pages of something called affiliate marketing”, for example, which your visitor might know nothing about!
Summary
There’s two main things you can do to get more people signing up to your email list. You can generate more traffic and you can increase your opt in rate. Generating more traffic is considerably more difficult than increasing your opt in rate. If you use a landing page software to cross test your landing pages and optimise your opt in rate, you can drive your cost per subscriber down even further.
While this does take some testing to find your best performing landing page, once you do you’ll save a lot if you’re running paid marketing.
If you’re using content to attract your audience, you can place a few options to showcase your offer to your website visitors. Have a pop up sign up form, a static form, a drop down menu and use contextual links and banners throughout your content. The more options someone has to sign up, the more people will likely do so.
