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How to Generate Leads From Your Website
As a company, your website is your storefront online. It is your hub and your most important platform online. With that said, it can work as a greatly effective tool to increase conversions, generate leads, and boost your sales.
But only if you know how to use it properly.
In this article, we will teach you how to generate leads from your website.
1. There are really good alternatives to pop-ups that appear right away
Embedded Forms (Google Approved!)
Content Marketing and SEO go hand in hand, and instead of using popups, you can collect email addresses with forms that are embedded directly on the page instead.
Google loves embedded forms because they are already in the middle of content when the page loads!
Here are some ideas:
- In your footer, to collect subscribers to the newsletter
- On your product pages if you run an online shop (eg “Send me a note when this item is back in stock”)
- On a landing page, as part of your registration process.
- In a blog post
- In the shopping cart on your webshop, to be able to email your visitors a discount code.
- The list can be made long, but as you can see, you can use it almost everywhere with good results.
Trigger link
A trigger link is just like a regular popup, and it works just like a regular popup – but the difference is that it doesn’t appear if you don’t click a link.
It’s a very common popup, but pops up when you click on a link.
Since it is often used when giving away a resource in a blog post, many people call this type of link “Content Upgrade”.
Exit Intent
Your email list should always be Priority #1, and when it comes to how you can collect email addresses on your website, it is extremely important that you have the right kind of timing and control of your widgets.
If you choose to display a popup or Widget on Exit Intent, the visitor will not see it until they are about to leave the website.
Google doesn’t want your visitors to be interrupted as they browse your site.
It gives you a second chance to get a conversion, collect an email address or give someone a much-needed discount.
Now we have shown you some alternatives to popups that are all Google approved and how to use them.
In fact, most other solutions do not follow Google’s guidelines.
2. Email is the ONLY channel you can control yourself
If you think about it, there are almost endless channels that you can use to drive traffic to your website, right?
Some of the most common are …
SEO– The rules for what is OK and NOT OK change from month to month and all you can do is adapt. You have no control over what Google will change next, and you won’t get away with everything.
Social media– Facebook and LinkedIn provide the most engaging traffic, but they have full control over everything you build on their platforms. If they decide to decrease your reach or change the rules of the game, you can’t do anything about it.
Digital Advertising– A company can decide to raise the price, or reduce the reach when they want.
When it comes to email, no one can take away your email list.
You decide what you want to send out and you get to do it as often – or rarely – you want.
Not only that, about 72% of all consumers prefer to receive both offers and business communication via email.
Think of Google and Facebook, which are some of the world’s most innovative companies. They still use email as their main source of marketing.
Mail will be the email of the future
If, on the other hand, you can combine your communication with SMS and Facebook Messenger, then you could probably floor all the competition.
Here are some additional statistics that reinforce this point:
- Email subscribers are 3x more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other channels – Quicksprout
- Email has the highest conversion rate compared to SEO, social media and direct advertising. Only direct traffic has higher conversion rate
Email is 40x more effective than Facebook & Twitter when it comes to recruiting new customers – McKinsey
Google is a company, just like yours.
A large part of Google’s revenue comes from AdWords.
If you think about it a little, it’s not just an update to make mobile websites more easily navigated, but of course, it will also positively affect their own products.
Google wants to punish you for building your own platform – your own network – your own mailing list, by poking punishing yourself in the search results if you do it too aggressively.
Over 90% of all search traffic comes from the results found on page 1 and if you live on page 2, very few will find you.
The importance of personification
A survey by AgilOne shows that over 70% of your visitors expect you to personalize your content based on their past behavior, which also means that you should tailor your popups to the page they appear on, and to the people it will appear to.
As long as you collect email addresses in a way that is not disruptive, you are all good.
But, it also proves that the timing of when and how you display your message as well as how you segment your visitors is becoming increasingly important.
If you can’t give your visitors personalized offers, recommendations or announcements then this is definitely a solution you want to look at going forward.
Your visitors are not stupid. They are people with survival instincts on the highest readiness and so it has been ever since we lived in caves.
To show a popup directly when someone lands on your website is to disturb someone.
Since most people do not want to start a fight with their computer screen, many choose to kindly click on “X” and browse further, but the popup has left a bitter aftertaste that makes the whole visit a worse experience.
That’s the last thing you want to happen.
It is not always about selling something as quickly as possible, but many times it is the experience and feeling that leads to the sale.
What you have to realize is that it is a two-way street, and if you let your visitors decide how they want to use your website, they will also let you suggest how they can get to the end goal.
So, how can you control how your popups are displayed based on user behavior and interest?
Here are some examples:
Exit-Intent is a so-called “Smart” display rule that tracks the mouse pointer position, speed and movement pattern to show your popup when the visitor is about to leave your website – not before.
When clicking, your popup shows when someone clicks on a link.
Based on visitor segments, a customized pop-up shows a particular visitor segment. Then you can show your popup only to visitors who come from an email campaign, who have a particular interest or who have achieved a specific goal (eg bought a product, downloaded a PDF, etc.)..
Conclusion
Don’t stare yourself blind at Popups. It’s not always the right way to go, and now you know a lot more about the options available, where you can use and control them to get the best effect.
It is also not very difficult to create popups or widgets that actually convert, but it may take some time and experimentation before you find just the right offer or message for your target audience.
It’s like everything else …
If you just stick to a plan that you can execute as quickly as possible then you always have the opportunity to evaluate the results and build new experiments based on it.
