Ever wonder why people never use your contact form or call from the phone number on your website? Maybe never is too strong. Do you wonder why you don’t get as many calls and form submissions as you want?
It’s not hopeless. It’s not dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time, and it has nothing to do with being the first to market. There is a process, a formula, for getting more people to fill out your contact forms and call your number more.
Here’s the truth. You didn’t build a website just so you could burn some time and money. You built a website to help you grow your business, generate leads, and ultimately, make you money.
I know I’ve spent hundreds of hours year after year to make our website perform better. It would be a huge disappointment if I never saw a return on my investment.
The truth is it doesn’t matter how much traffic your site gets if no one ever calls or submits a contact form. If you’re not getting leads, having a website can feel like a poor investment.
Well, I’m going to share what I’ve learned and continue working to get better at. I’m going to tell you what I did to get 10 leads in one day.
Sure, it cost me some time and effort, but it was well worth it. Shucks, I’m not sure who was more excited; me, my wife and business partner, or our sales guy..
Consider this a freebie. This is not one of the 7 things, but to tell you the truth it’s the most important step. Even with the results we’re starting to see at this point, we are always working to improve our strategy for generating more leads.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to know what you are doing from start to finish. It will save you time and money in the long and short term.
Make it a point to draw out your entire conversion path and your customer journey. Look over it to make sure it flows and there aren’t any holes in your strategy.
Ultimately, it will help you get better results more quickly. That means more leads, which equates to more sales, and more revenue.
So let’s get started. I know you’re ready to get rocking with these tips.
Okay, I know. I start off with a task that may be challenging. Well, think about it. If people are not familiar with your business, your service, or product, you need to educate them. Creating helpful premium content is one of the easiest ways to start generating traffic.
Yes you can do this on your website, but if you want leads you’ve got to give people a reason to give you their info when they are not ready to buy. And it has to be something so good that they can’t pass it up.
Give them something helpful that adds a ton of value. Something related to your service, or product, that will help them solve a problem on their own.
We have several, but one that helps our clients a ton and gets viewed and downloaded all the time is our 47 Point Checklist. You may even want to check it out for yourself. There’s a link to it here and on the image below...
Now that you’ve created your offer, you have to put up a landing page that includes a form to capture emails and any other information you need.
Be careful not to ask for too much information. People don’t like to fill out forms, but they will if the content is worth it.
Don’t forget to create a thank you page and deliver the content that they are trying to get. Remember they are trading their valuable email address; don’t leave them high and dry by forgetting to give them the content that you promised.
If you don’t provide the content on the thank you page, be sure that you send it in an email. You don’t want to give anyone a bad taste for your business by not delivering on your promise.
Another way to increase your leads is by having a series of emails that follow up with folks after they’ve joined your newsletter or grabbed one of your offers by filling out a form.
Keep in mind that every offer may not create a hot lead, but may be at the top of the funnel where it’s just a cool or warm lead.
Sending emails to build trust, provide a reminder, or talk about your services and how you can help can move cool leads further down the sales funnel and make them warm or hot.
We saw a huge increase in revisits to our offers and related offers from the emails that we sent out.
It was also surprising how many folks from our newsletter started responding to our emails. Some had been subscribers for years and we were seeing them respond for the first time.
We stopped having a one and done attitude with email and realized that people are busy and often need a friendly reminder, even when they want to buy from you.
We started optimizing everything we could. What do I mean by optimize? I mean we started adding links to our lead magnet everywhere we could. On our individual and company pages on social media.
We even added links to our email signature. And we are continuing to test links in our signature.
We even looked for ways to add our offers to our website. Since most of our offers are on landing pages; they’re not included in the site navigation, so we added links in our blog, and pop-ups on every page of our site.
Anywhere we could get away with adding a call to action we did. We continue to look for places to add calls-to-action for our offers. You will even see offers in my personal LinkedIn profile.
We are constantly looking for ways to get our offers in front of folks on our site and every where we can on social. We’ve even used our offers to answer questions for people on social channels.
Yes, a newsletter. Email marketing is still considered one of the highest, if not the highest converting channel in marketing. With so many people (including me) checking their email on their smartphones every 30 secs, I can see why.
In my opinion, my chances for someone opening my email have increased because who goes anywhere without their cell phone. I think I may be telling my age by calling it a cell phone instead of a smart phone.
At anyrate, the days are gone where people have to wait until they get back to their desk to check email. People are checking business emails everyday of the week at all times of the day and night.
People are checking their phone on their lunch breaks and even in the movies. Why do you think they have that announcement about turning off your phone during the movie?
We’ve found that email is a great way to get people back on your site or a good place to share your offer directly.
Oh no, more writing. I can hear your sighs of dismay from here. I know blogging takes time, but if you included it in your strategy you should have a good idea what you’re going to write about.
Moreover, you will reap a huge benefit from creating and adding content to your site. Blogging is a great tool for getting more traffic to your site through SEO and social media.
This is a part of your strategy that will work for you in multiple ways. You get to promote it, if well written, it will promote your site, and if properly optimized will promote your offer.
For example, this blog was specifically written to help increase leads to our site as well as boast about our 47 point checklist. Remember this?
Having that banner ad above makes this a great place to talk about our 7th step, promotion. I’ve already alluded to promotion quite a bit, but let’s pull it all together here.
The bottom line is, use every free resource you can, but if you have the budget you will see exponential increase by spending some ad dollars.
Okay, so now that that’s out of the way, we shared our offer by sharing it with friends and colleagues by email. We also scheduled it to be shared in our newsletter.
Of course we promoted it on social media by adding it to our profiles as well as posting it. Did I mention that we included it in our email signature.
We took time to share our promotion with various associations and organizations we are members of or want to work with.
We talk about our lead magnets as often as we get a chance. I’m certain that you noticed we even included links to it in this post.
Be creative, find ways to share, just be careful not to turn off your audience.
So you’ve got an offer that they must have that brings them to your landing page. Now it’s time to move them down the funnel primed and ready to discuss working with you.
Now you must create a second offer or conversion tool that has a high value and would put you in a position to talk with them about their issue.
This offer could be just about anything. We sometimes offer discounts, specials, or a free year of hosting if you schedule a web discovery session within a specific amount of time.
Okay, maybe I’m beating the drum on this, but I don’t want to assume that everyone knows to track everything.
Google analytics is free, and here’s a link to sign up if you need to, so there’s no excuse not to track your site traffic, especially when setting up a conversion funnel like this.
You want to track how many people land on each page, and where they are coming from so you know what is and is not working.
Most newsletter software handles the tracking for you. You may want to look into other tracking tools if you need to track the emails you send from your inbox.
Be sure to look at the data regularly. You don’t need to look everyday, that may be a bit obsessive, but weekly would be good. This will help you make adjustments to improve your funnel.
It will also let you know how well your offers are working. If you’re not getting any traffic (after promoting it well) it may be a good idea to create a new offer.
Okay, so this is the system we set up to start getting more leads on our website. Through a combination of these tactics and a strong strategy we started seeing leads almost immediately.
After a few days we started seeing 10 leads a day. Some were at the top of the funnel some were ready to talk about improving their website.
We do use HubSpot to manage our funnels, but we’ve also used Clickfunnels and Mailchimp. We also use the tips in our 47 Point Checklist on our own site.
We use everything we listed in this blog on our own site. We’ve tried them all individually, but have found the best results when using them within a strategy where they are all working together.
We are confident that you can benefit from this strategy if you are willing to invest the time and effort and money to get it done.
To get started I recommend doing the following 3 things:
Once you’ve created your offer, send me a link. I’d love to hear about your offer and what other tactics you we able to use from this post.
Don’t forget to tell me about the results you get as well!