Getting More Leads From Your Website

I have to say that I’m appalled at the current state of small business web design and you’d think that with so many professionals and software making it easier than ever for anyone to build and design their own website that it’d be getting better… it isn’t!

I just saw a commercial for a cheap web design from a major hosting company.  Now I understand that their real product is selling hosting, not websites, but that web design is a great way to get people in the door for them, but you’d think they’d be able help people build websites that don’t look like they were built 10 years ago.

You’d think that… but I digress.

Today I’m going to talk about how to get more leads from your websites.

Depending on what business you’re in, that may mean a phone call, an email, a text message, or it may involve the person filling out a form and submitting it.  As far as I’m concerned, that all falls under the purview of “lead generation.”

Decide What You Want

The very first step to getting more leads is to actually decide what action you’d prefer your visitor take.  In my line of work, I’ve found that most of the time that means getting a phone call but again, it’s up to you to decide what you actually want them to do.

Make It Easy To Take Action – Ask The Prospect To Do So

Once you’ve decided what action your want your visitor to take, you’ll want to make sure it’s easy to do so.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to websites where the owner has told me they want more phone calls and I have a hard time even finding a phone number to call.   If you want more phone calls, then your phone numbers should be on every page and it should show up on your home page several times.

Test & Track

One of the things I love about internet marketing and online advertising in general is how easy it is to track the effectiveness of a campaign.  And it doesn’t have to be hard.  Heck, Google will provide you with just about every tool you need to test your campaigns for free!  And if you want to track using phone numbers (which we use all the time and highly recommend you do the same), you’ll probably be surprised how affordable having several extra phone numbers is.

When you are actually tracking where your leads are coming from, it’s easy to know what marketing campaigns are effective and which aren’t which makes it easy to know where to spend your marketing budget.

Provide Alternatives

Back in 2003 when I was still selling sunglasses, we set up the website to take payments four different ways.  You could pay with a credit card online, call in your order, fax in your order, or even print off the order form and mail in your order.  While ordering online was always the most popular, plenty of people used the other methods.  If alternate payment methods weren’t available, those people would have simply ordered somewhere else and the sale would have been lost.

The same applies to your website – make sure there are multiple ways to get in touch with you.  Some people just don’t like using the phone and some people will flat out refuse to fill out a contact form.  Make sure you have alternatives available to maximize the number of leads you get.

Follow Up

I remember being told once when I was a fledgling marketer that the fortune is in the follow-up.   While I’ve at times been guilty of not following up with leads, I can assure you that if you take the time to follow-up with those who’ve raised their hands and said they’re interested in your products or services, you’ll make more money.   Be proactive – don’t assume they’ll get back in touch with you if they want to work with you – people live crazy hectic lives and misplace phone numbers and forget who they’ve even contacted all the time.

Get Started

I hope you’ve found several tips here that you can start using right now even if you’re not ready to hire us right now.  However, if you’d like some professional help with turning your website in to a lean mea lead generating machine, just give us a jingle at (414) 376-5545 or use our contact form (click here) or you can even send a fax to (888) 699-7645.

See what I did there?  :)

-Gary