Lead Generation
5 Simple Tips for Lead-Generation Sites
Several of my recent columns have dealt with testing and optimization. Today, I’ll focus on the other half of the online marketing world, those who must drive leads through their site.
1. Review Your Lead Generation Forms
Typically lead-gen site forms fail in two major areas:
- Many lead-gen sites simply copy forms from a site they like, giving little thought to the nuances and the difference between their business goals and the site they copied. The result can lead to a slew of unqualified leads, or low conversion to lead.
- Some companies make their complex lead scoring requirements the visitor’s job. We worked with a client with a highly complex lead scoring system that, in turn, created an intimidating lead form with a dozen intrusive questions and several drop downs with more than 20 choices. Only the most determined of leads would actually complete the entire form. The obvious result was an offensively high form abandonment rate.
The obvious advantage to collecting information from potential prospects in a lead form is that it can help a business convert more qualified leads. To solve both of the above problems, there’s one successful approach: use a two-part lead form.
On the first page, ask the minimum amount of questions possible for a visitor to become a lead, where each field is a required field. Ask for the contact information and little else.
On the second page, ask several more optional questions that will help the company better qualify the lead. Above the form, explain that the more information they provide, the better you can prepare for a conversation with them. With this technique, even if little (or no) information is provided on the second page, you at least have contact information that the sales team can follow up on.
2. Develop More Than One Lead Form
Many sites still link to one lead form on the site. Consider placing lead forms in several places on the site. Providing lead forms on each product/service pages and on other key pages allows you to track where the lead form was filled out and provides a helpful nugget of data for the sales team as they contact that lead.
3. Avoid Asking for the Lead Too Early
While recently shopping some demand-gen companies, I did a Google search for Eloqua. The second paid listing for Marketo caught my interest, so I clicked through.
Someone on my staff ended up on a landing a page that successfully enticed them to learn more — specifically this person wanted to see the video demo. Unfortunately, one couldn’t watch the video without filling out the lead form.
Many visitors in this situation aren’t ready to begin the sales process by filling out a lead form with only a promise to watch a demo. My colleague was one of those visitors and bailed. Ironically, another member of my team noticed that the logo on top of the page was a link to the Marketo home page and was able to watch a demo video without filling out a form.
While it may be a “best practice” to limit visitor choices on landing pages, this certainly isn’t a persuasive practice, especially for someone in the early stages of the buying process. My colleague didn’t know what Marketo was, and certainly wasn’t ready to give up personal information at this stage to find out. Marketo is losing conversion opportunities by not providing more actions on this page for visitors who aren’t ready to give out personal info until they know more.
4. How to Do Lead Gen the Right Way
Our partner and marketing to women guru, Michele Miller recently blogged about Jenny Craig’s successful persona-based marketing plan. Whether on purpose or by intuition, Jenny Craig’s celebrity spokeswomen appeal to specific personas and buying types. As we dug further, we were even more impressed. We Googled both Queen Latifah and Valerie Bertinelli and were surprised to find that Jenny Craig had purchased some AdWords ads on those two terms.
Even better, as we clicked through the ads to their landing pages, we noticed that each landing page was crafted and had elements for the persona type that would be attracted to each celebrity.
We extrapolated that Latifah appealed to a more humanistic persona. The page was filled with relational language giving the overall impression to the humanistic persona that becoming a lead for Jenny Craig meant starting a relationship — a key motivator for a humanistic buyer. Take a look at the page and see if you can see the strategy at work.
Bertinelli’s page reflects her methodical style, thereby making it easier for a methodical prospect to get more information. Elements on this page are more information focused and allow for the methodical persona to take action their way. Can you see the difference a persona-based page makes?
5. Aggressively Optimize Your Lead-Gen Process
Many e-commerce sites pour resources and time into improving their checkout process. Lead-gen sites don’t seem to have the same commitment to testing and optimizing their lead generation process. If you’re a lead gen site, your lead-generation process is your checkout process — it’s just as critical to your business as a shopping cart is to an e-commerce site.
What have you done lately to improve your lead-gen efforts? Let me know in the comments below.
*Cross-posted on ClickZ.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Free Webinar: August Session of “Always Be Testing” Webinar Series
Who: Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder & EVP at FutureNow, and Tom Leung, Business Product Manager at Google.
What: “Always Be Testing” Webinar: Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action
When: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 | 12:00pm EST
Where: Online, register here to receive your invitation
How much: It’s free, but space is limited so sign-up today!
About this session:
Last month kicked off the series with a webinar on testing trust and confidence building elements on landing pages (view archive ). Our August session will continue to explore landing pages focusing on testing calls to action and headlines. register today! Space is limited.
“Always Be Testing” Webinar Series is a monthly webinar that covers specific testing ideas, how to structure tests, and how to use Google Website Optimizer. The best part is that Google has decided to participate in it first-hand, offering the lastest tips and insights straight from Tom Leung, Google’s Business Product Manager.
“Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action Webinar” will be on August 27th, at 12:00pm EST and last 30 minutes.
For more details and to sign-up to attend, visit futurenowinc.com/abtwebinar.htm
We hope you’ll attend and share this with anyone you know who is looking to begin to test their marketing or to increase their testing effectiveness.
About the Series:
Whether your business has just started testing, is planning to test, or has been testing for years identifying the areas and elements that have impact is often challenging. Each month, Bryan Eisenberg starts off by taking attendees on a dive deep on a specific subject area to test in your marketing and give you ideas on variation you could test. Along with these ideas each month Tom Leung will bring you useful insider tips and tricks about using Google Website Optimizer to easily test your marketing campaigns and website. Lastly, the two will team up to answer a popular question spotted on the Google Website Optimizer forums or sent in by our readers and listeners.
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3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads
Want to ramp up the conversion rate on your lead generation site?
Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:
1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.
2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.
3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.
Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons, but for now, these three culprits are enough to start you identifying specific problems on your site and determining action items for optimization.
Keep in mind, more leads may not be what you need. You may need more qualified leads, and a properly planned Web site should help the visitor qualify herself.
We’ve worked with several companies that have seen a decrease in the number of leads, but increased sales and optimized the sales team time and closing ratios because the quality of their leads was improved.
Exchanging Value: My Name for Your Service
Many sites offering “free” whitepapers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information do a poor job of merchandising their downloads. Your downloads contain valuable information. Treat them as such.
Stop thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information “merchandise” your downloads better. Show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange, valuable information for valuable information.
- Include thumbnails of documents.
- Let them know what they’ll learn from the download.
- Let them know what they can do with the information.
- List everything what’s “in it for them” in the download.
- Let them know what will happen with their information. Will you be calling them? (More on this, below, under “Establishing Trust and Expectations”.)
If you offer a free trial or demo period, provide clear information about what they are getting. Is it a fully functional trial with a time limit? What happens when the demo runs out? Will you offer them support during the trial? (Sounds like a good way to win over a potential customer doesn’t it?) Disclose system requirements before they begin the sign up process.
Track the number of “bogus” e-mails you get, either bad e-mail addresses or e-mails from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If you get too many emails from lucilleball@yahoo.com or elvisp@hotmail, rest assured that visitors don’t see value in the offer and the exchange.
Beware, sometimes these tactics will cause a drop in the number of leads, but rid you of junk leads. You have to determine if this is an acceptable trade off (it almost always is).
Help for the Informationally Challenged
Information, information, information is all around us. Some is useful, sometimes it’s hard to find what’s useful, and some information is just plain not helpful at all.
One approach to determine if you have info problems is to examine time spent on page. Often times I work with sites that have low time spent on main content pages but their FAQ page gets more visitor time. This may indicate that visitors aren’t finding information they need elsewhere. If a visitor relies on your FAQ to get information, it reduces trust. Why aren’t these frequent questions answered frequently (or linked to) on key pages like home and service/product pages?
Often sites put up so much information that visitors cannot find the piece of info they seek. This occasionally indicates an information architecture problem, but more often indicates that the visitors’ needs and motivations aren’t addressed in the content.
Another key issue often neglected is that often the person doing the research on the Web site isn’t the decision maker. She’s trying to gather, sort, and print (you do make it easy to do that, right?) information to give to the person making the decision. Are you making your site easy to understand for this person as well?
There really are no easy solutions to get your information in order. First begin to establish a persuasive framework, building personas then planning each persona’s interaction or persuasion scenarios with your site, and determining what information they need and when and where they need it on the site.
Establishing Trust and Expectations
Visitors must trust you. If they don’t, they don’t become leads or often they become bad leads. Visitors may even fill out a lead form if they mistrust you. Sometimes they are just going through the motion of getting proposals and pricing and are planning on buying from your competitor. You might have the better solution for them but the site or the lead process doesn’t instill enough confidence to take you seriously.
Most visitors who aren’t confident simply won’t contact you. They fear harassment from the sales team. Or sometimes your site is ineffective in communicating the values of the visitor and they bail. Again, this is a tragedy especially when you consider they could be in the market to buy what you sell.
Other times, visitors are in early stages of the buying process and an overly aggressive lead form will cause them to tighten up, assuming you’ll push them somewhere they don’t feel ready to go. Here are some things you can do to help instill trust.
- Include information about what it’s like to work with your company. Let them know when you will contact them. Assure them that you will only help them determine their needs and not pressure them.
- Ramp up your About Us page.
- Ask as few questions as possible in your lead form. Don’t force them to give you all types information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs.
- Include short, friendly lead forms in several places on the site (not just your contact page). This will help you track where they filled out the form and better inform you what they might be interested in.
- Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their info, tell them how soon they will be hearing from you. If possible give them a choice of how and when they prefer to be contacted.
- Some visitors like to be prepared for the call. Provide a checklist of information they might need to have handy when they speak with you.
- Some visitors prefer to call. Provide the phone number near the lead form.
Now go get some leads.
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Originally seen on ClickZ.
Editor’s Note: Want more tips on lead-generation? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Conversion Rates, Eat Your Heart Out
Quick question for anyone with a lead-generation or e-commerce site…
Which is easier: Getting people to trust your website and complete its web form or checkout process, or getting them to literally donate their hearts and eyeballs?
Take your time.
Apparently, the answer depends on where they live. While 99.98% of Austrians agree to donate their organs upon death, only 12% of Germans do the same. Virtually all French citizens will donate a kidney to save a life, but the Brits? Only 17% of them seem willing. Meanwhile, your chances of having a heart (transplant) are nearly four times better if you’re having a triple bock in Antwerp than they are if you’ve already had a triple bypass in Amsterdam.
Seems odd, doesn’t it? Take a look at this graph from a recent Freakonomics article:
Here’s how Dan Ariely — Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions — explains this bit of research (from colleagues Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein) in the Freakonomics post mentioned above:
…It turns out that it is the design of the form at the D.M.V. In countries where the form is set as “opt-in” (check this box if you want to participate in the organ donation program) people do not check the box and as a consequence they do not become a part of the program. In countries where the form is set as “opt-out” (check this box if you don’t want to participate in the organ donation program) people also do not check the box and are automatically enrolled in the program. In both cases large proportions of people simply adopt the default option.
You might think that people do this because they don’t care — that the decision about donating their organs is so trivial that they can’t be bothered to lift up the pencil and check the box. But in fact the opposite is true.
This is a hard emotional decision about what will happen to our bodies after we die and what effect it will have on those close to us. It is because of the difficulty and the emotionality of these decisions that they just don’t know what to do, so they adopt the default option (by the way this also happens to physicians making medical decisions, and also to people making investment and retirement decisions).
[…] The moment you realize that your intuition about your own behavior might be wrong it is clear that you need another, more objective input.
This is what experiments are all about. We could have never intuited the opt-in, opt-out effect, nor could we have intuited the magnitude of this effect, and this is why empiricism is so important.
If you know anyone who’s skeptical about testing content from the visitor’s perspective, please take a moment to share this with them.
. .
[Image credit: Kistyn E]
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Written by:Robert Gorell
7 Tips for Boosting Web Form Conversions
Whether your site is lead-generation or retail, you probably have a form somewhere. Here are some basic things you can do to optimize your forms.
1. Indicate which fields are required by using asterisks next to these required fields. Ask yourself if the non-required fields offer enough value. If they don’t, remove them from the form. This could potentially make all fields a requirement — and if that’s the case, the asterisks would be overkill — which brings us to our next point.
2. Only have them fill in required fields. Asking for too much information on a web form is like proposing marriage on the first date. We would all like to know our customer’s age, work title, phone number and address, but if you don’t absolutely need it, then remove it from the form. This will make the form shorter and less likely to frustrate the impatient, fast-paced visitor who may not feel comfortable exposing their personal info. Don’t let this be the reason why visitors are dropping off.
3. Clarify what you expect them to do. Doostang gives the visitor a dialog bubble explaining each field when the visitor clicks to fill out a field. This removes any potential confusion as to what information is being requested and could lead to a reduction in errors taking place if a field is filled out incorrectly.
4. Offer reassurances when asking for personal information. Your visitors are concerned about privacy and security issues. You can offer a link to a privacy and security page so that the visitor can click to read and gain confidence.
5. Clearly state what the visitor will get by filling out the form, and do it at the very beginning of the page. Tell them what the benefits are. There should be no question as to what they’ll expect once they fill the form out.
6. Don’t ask people to submit. Call to action buttons should clearly state the action they’re about to take. Use colors and shading that make the button stand out effectively and, please, try to not use the word “submit” — it’s generic and misleading geek-speak.
7. Offer contact information somewhere on this page and/or in the top-right corner of the site (on every page). Give the visitor a phone number and a “Contact Us” link. If they don’t feel comfortable filling out the form, persuade them to call and speak with you directly.
Do you have any other suggestions to add to this list?
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
Is Your Lead Generation Site Proposing Marriage on the First Date?
It was truly one of the scariest forms I’ve ever seen. It was an example Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch Marketing gave at Search Engine Strategies, Toronto. It was a form a B2B site (pictured) that was, like, 9 pages long, and asked everything from your company’s annual sales to your budget for the year to the social security number of your first born.
OK, I made up that last one, but it really was that bad. The even scarier thing is, I’ve seen hundreds of forms like it.
When someone does a search and lands on your website, they might have some familiarity with you if you’re a well-known brand. Or, more likely, they have little-to-no awareness as to who you are and what you do. Basically, you’ve just met. So, why ask for so much personal, sensitive information on this first meeting? Are you proposing marriage when you should be asking him/her out for coffee?
Part of the problem is, the only way many B2B or lead generation sites measure success is by the number of people who fill in a lead form. That’s a pretty big step. Many visitors to your site won’t be ready to make that kind of a commitment to you yet. So, do you just write them off? Do you consider that a failed conversion?
Don’t forget, there are other micro-conversions to consider. Your visitors might agree to a cup of coffee, or a short “date” to find out more about you. Examples of these types of conversions could be as simple as someone taking the time to read your ‘About Us’ page, or watching a short product video, or signing up for your newsletter. These are conversions. You should be planning and measuring them.
When trying to measure the ROI of your website, you need to take into account the ways you engage prospective customers when they’re earlier in the buying process. Yes, some people are ready to start some sort of relationship with you; meaning, of course, that they fill out the lead form. (You’re only asking for the least amount of information, right?).That’s a measurable success. But don’t forget those who were engaged enough to spend some time on your site, gather information, watch a video, download a whitepaper, sign-up for a newsletter, and so on.
All these micro-conversions indicate your visitors are at least engaging with your brand. They may only be willing to commit to a cup of coffee right now, but that’s an encouraging first step!
Several of the B2B panelists recommended this report by Enquiro. (Notice the wonderfully short registration form 
) I haven’t read it yet, but it got high marks from the panel. Let me know what you think!
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Back to Basics: Customer Information Forms
OK, this is conversion 101 stuff, but it’s still too common a mistake on websites.
When you’re asking customers for information, only ask for what you absolutely must have. Especially if you’ve just met. (Lead generation sites are usually prone to asking for too much information.)
Do you have to ask for a phone number? Why not let the visitor tell you their preferred method for contact? Give them the option of receiving a reply by phone or email.
The same rules apply when asking for a “friend’s” information as well. If you have some sort of “email a friend” option, do you clearly spell out what you will do with that friend’s information?
I had a friend–yes, I did have a friend, once ;)–who was very proud of her email. She’d kept it “clean.” Hadn’t made it onto any lists. Then a friend of hers (not me, thank goodness) signed her up to receive a special promotion. Well, not long after, her pristine email was infected. She started receiving lots of unwanted email solicitations. She did not have a good reaction to this.
It’s basic, but important: ask for minimal information. And tell them what you’re going to do with that information.
Click to read more about customer information forms.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
The Grok’s Top Ten Countdown
You wind up writing a lot of articles in six years! Yep … six info-packed years of Future Now, Inc., in GrokDotCom, ClickZ and other places! Of course, every one of these articles is special, but which are the specialest of the special? Which have truly, madly and deeply inspired our readers? You’ll find the answer in this issue.
This December, I’m featuring my Top Ten Countdown. These are the articles Future Now, Inc. has published, here and elsewhere, that have inspired folks to write (in droves), click through, investigate more and take notice. Whether you are revisiting the material or discovering it for the first time, I hope this issue encourages you to jump start your New Year’s resolutions for your business plans, online and off, in 2007.
And however you celebrate your holidays, may your preparations fill you with the inspiration of the season, may your relationships bring you joy, and may you experience it all in wellness and safety.
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 144
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Written by:The Grok
Online Planning for Offline Results
Your online persuasive process can help fuel offline sales as well.
Let’s pretend for a moment that your analytics reports are lying to you. (It’s nothing personal; they just don’t always see the big picture.)
Now think about a few key questions: Do you know what percentage of online visitors your business converts into offline customers? How many offline sales have you lost from bad online experiences and vice versa? How depressing and/or exciting would it be if you could accurately measure such things? Would you rather have more business or more data?
Okay, don’t answer that last one. Let’s talk about the others.
If there’s any offline component to your business’s online sales process whatsoever-from cold call leads for complex B2B sales to moving consumer goods in brick-and-mortar stores-your website should be anticipating and answering potential questions for potential customers. One thing is certain: your customers/clients/whatevers don’t care which channel they used to find you. In their minds, your brand is some combination of how you’ve treated them and how they’ve perceived your actions. Although brand perceptions tend to ebb and flow over time, an exceptionally good or bad experience-regardless of the medium-can quickly tip the scales.
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 141
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Optimize Online Lead-Gen for Offline Sales
Internet Retailer reports Internet retail sales in the U.S. are ballooning at a very healthy rate, about 25 percent in 2004. But as I reported last year, the Internet still influences more offline spending. When the transaction is completed somewhere other than an online shopping cart, how do you measure and optimize your site’s role in the conversion process?
With the new marketing and advertising landscape, companies are demanding greater accountability for their ad spend. Current technology and better persuasive planning can help a company not only increase the lead/cross-channel pipeline but also to measure and optimize it.
Drive Mass Media to Your Site
If your company spends a significant amount of money buying mass media, tracking effectiveness can be tricky. It may not be completely accurate, but you can likely measure which channel generates the most traffic for your site:
- Use friendly, easy-to-remember URLs in mass-media campaigns. If you want to compare campaigns by using a unique URL for each, use differentiating URLs, such as “go.clickz.com” or “read.clickz.com” rather than “www.clickz.com/tv/1234.html.” If you use a forward slash (”/”), it generally won’t work. If mass-media visitors actually remember the URL, they’ll likely just go to your home page and forego anything after the slash.
- Create a different offer for each campaign. Or, track campaigns with a coupon code on a printed piece. Beware: only certain customer types will actually participate in an offer.
- Realize mass media is mass media. Judging mass-media campaign effectiveness on a cost-per-lead basis is almost impossible. When you buy any mass media, reaching a bunch of people who will never buy from you is unavoidable. It’s also extremely difficult to funnel mass-media activity into a specific channel (e.g., a landing page) and measure it with any degree of accuracy. You’ll likely send traffic to some of your other channels, too (e.g., a call center or a brick-and-mortar store).
Continue reading my column at ClickZ…
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
