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Lead generation: How to Convert Visitors to Leads
You have started getting traffic to your site.
Maybe through a long-term and successful SEO job or an effective advertising campaign.
But you only get visitors. No leads.
No conversion happens.
What is the problem?
We know that lead generation is most effective through landing pages because they are designed with the aim of converting visitors to leads.
But not all of your visitors come from ad campaigns where you can choose to specifically send them to a landing page.
This means that your visitors end up navigating many of your other important pages such as home, contact, price, about us, product and service pages.
And if you build a website for someone or yourself, chances are that the purpose is to make money.
Either by selling a product directly, offering a service or generating leads. No matter what, a website is an asset that ultimately must generate a return on investment.
The website must meet a revenue goal and therefore every element must be designed to achieve that goal.
With this article, we are going to talk about a mix of actions that will help you lead your visitors further into the sales tunnel and convert them into leads.
Design is important.
According to numbers that Adobe reported, as many as 38% say they stop engaging with a website if the design is unattractive.
What is attractive or not is highly subjective. But we know that if your visitors find what they are looking for easily and quickly, it means that the site has been designed with usability in mind. And that’s good design.
Good design builds confidence and guides your visitors to act.
So design is super important.
It has a major impact on conversion and customer experience.
Our best tip is to never try to save money on design, it is an investment and not a cost.
Make it clear what you are offering
Because it is the text that convinces visitors what it is you want them to do on your website.
Just think about it.
If you do not explain what people should do, or why, then they definitely will not do it.
You catch the attention with visuals, but when people read, it’s how you tell them what you want them to do.
How to write good texts?
Research is the best foundation for coming up with good ideas and angles for your copy.
Understand your target audience.
We have sait it many times and will therefore not bore you with a long explanation. But you have to identify your target audience, otherwise, it’s like driving blind.
When designing, you should think online and not print.
This means that for your texts you should use strategic copywriting so that you can convince your visitors and differentiate yourself from the competition.
The most important thing first
If you take a newspaper and draw a line right in the middle, the top part will contain the most important, in other words, above the fold.
News magazines are usually stacked and presented folded and therefore the focus is on the top part.
The same goes for a website.
Introduce the most important thing first.
If you have an image with large dimensions you want to display, make sure that it works as a background image with text above so that you present your promised value early.
Do you have buttons you want your visitors to click on?
Place these above the fold.
Visual clues
Help your users focus on the most important thing with visual clues.
What are visual clues?
Visual or routing clues are a UX design “trick” to literally direct your visitors in the management of elements that are most important to your conversion goals, such as your buttons and forms.
The clues help your visitors navigate your site while maintaining a visual hierarchy.
It can be with the help of arrows pointing to a form. A person who is watching or pointing to a particular direction.
What it does is give your visitor’s eyes natural compliance from one section to another and guide them to the next step in your sales process.
In a study conducted by ConversionXL, eye-tracking heat maps were used to track visitors’ eye movements. In the study, tests were made with different visual clues. They concluded that the image with an arrow pointing towards the form was what guided the visitor with the greatest precision.
Answer questions
Your users are on your site because they have questions and want to achieve or learn something.
They are determined and will probably want to buy your services. And if you fail to answer their questions, you have lost sales.
An effective way to answer questions is to explain what something costs with, for example, a price page.
An e-commerce platform would never make the mistake of not specifying prices, but this is common in B2B.
Price is the most specific piece of information for customers to understand if the product or service is right for them.
You can at least set an expectation for what it costs to invest in your products and services.
Showing prices is a great way to build trust online and an important issue for potential customers who are in the research phase.
Simply put, satisfy your users by answering their questions.
Create emotions with colors
Colors create an emotional request and the colors you choose for your website should match the feelings you want to be associated with the company.
And of course, you can take your graphic design into account, but it has more to do with your brand than conversion.
When it comes to a CPI as a conversion, you want to test and change all the time, unlike what you do when it comes to the colors of your brand.
Because you will probably never change them.
In a study titled “Impact of color on marketing”, researchers found that within 90 seconds, people make an assessment of a product and even people.
And that 62-90% of the assessment is based on colors!
The truth is that there is no “cheat list” with what is the perfect color.
When we talk about conversion, the only true truth to test is that your opinion is not important.
It’s harsh but true.
However, if we only talk about the brand, we face other issues and can, therefore, take other aspects into account.
For example, is it women or men we are targeting? Is it young people, adults or seniors? Is our product or service exclusive?
Color is a complex subject and it is easy to get into an endless internet debate about what is “best”.
But not really complex at all when it comes to assessing what works best for conversion.
For example, if we change the color of a button, we just need to follow up on the data and answer a simple question to determine what gave the best result.
Did we increase our conversion after the change?
Answer yes: Keep the color.
Answer no: Test a new color.
The great thing about learning to interpret data is that you will not end up indecisive and instead be in a continuous improvement phase.
That said, you can discuss color choices endlessly, so my tip is to keep it simple by thinking of contrast before what the “perfect” color is.
Social proof
Is a psychological phenomenon and it can be a powerful way to convince your visitors that you are a serious business.
We buy products and services that make us feel good about ourselves.
By using social proof in the form of customer references, reviews and “trust icons” you can help your customers make a decision where they feel confident that their choice is a good choice.
Optimize your loading times
If you want to increase the profitability of your website, make sure it is fast.
“Slow” is not a feeling you want your visitors to associate with your brand.
The reasons why it is slow do not matter. All they know is that they get poor service, and it annoys your visitors and ultimately gets them to leave your sie.
It has long been known that if a site is slow and makes users wait, they will leave and go to the next site.
Since loading times are not visible but must be experienced, it often leads to many failing to focus on it.
With fast load times, your visitors get a better experience while being better for your SEO.
And in terms of SEO, things have changed in recent years, especially after Google released the Panda and Penguin updates.
After the updates, the focus has shifted from optimizing for the crawlers to optimizing for the users, and the search engines love websites that deliver an optimal user experience.
Avoid animated sliders or slideshows
Sliders provide a poor user experience.
Throwing too much information at your users at once and at the same time makes it overwhelming, and there is a big risk that you will miss presenting the most important thing when the slideshow is rolling.
If you need to have a slideshow promptly, consider stopping the automatic browsing and giving your users the choice to browse themselves.
They then get more control and you can be sure that the most important thing is emphasized.
Make it easy to find with a search function
Consider having a search feature on your site.
It’s a handy feature and so most of us use when we navigate the internet.
It can also give you insight into what your visitors are looking for when they come to your site.
Use original and high-quality images
Avoid using stock photos.
You want your website to be distinctive in that you cannot find the same images on your site as on others.
Amateurs use stock photos.
Professionals create their own graphic images, take their own photos or hire a photographer.
Don’t be an amateur and pay attention to this simple thing so as not to impair your conversion rate.
Stock Photos are OK for blog articles or PowerPoint presentations, but not for your website.
Test your design on other devices
Reports say that almost 60% of all search traffic now comes from mobile devices.
Test your design on different devices to make sure it looks as you expect.
An easy way to see how it looks on different devices is to inspect your site with your browser.
Test your hypotheses and update frequently
The purpose of your entire site is to help your visitors achieve their goals.
It is with texts, pictures and colors that you do it.
With continuous adjustments and testing, you can constantly improve your website.
Ask the question: What do visitors expect when they visit our site?
Your website usually has several things they can do.
Give thought power to what you think is most important and what you want them to do. Then you can optimize from that perspective.
The goal is to provide an experience to your visitors that aligns with their goals and your business.
Summary
Web design is not about what designers want because it is the latest trend.
It is also not about what you as a project owner or decision-maker want.
To avoid your visitors pressing the back button, design your website for them, and not to satisfy your personal taste.
Your personal opinion is no more important than best practice for usability.
In the end, it is about what the visitors want and how the design can help you achieve your business goals.
If the goal is to generate revenue, then your job is to figure out what will enable you to achieve that goal as efficiently as possible.
Is the design of your site not what it should be?
Get involved to do something about it.
It pays off. If done right.
