When you began your business, one of the first things you probably heard was, “You need a website.” And for good reason. A website is the spine of any eCommerce business: the central point that holds everything else together.

Consequently, it’s also one of the first places to look at if you’re looking to increase your leads.

You may be funneling a good amount of traffic to your website, but just because they’re browsing, doesn’t mean they’re buying. 

You can’t just give people a place to go, you need to give them something to do when they get there. If you’re seeing healthy traffic flow, but lagging in your number of solid leads, you should ask yourself: are you giving them your audience enough opportunities to click and convert?

Here are 3 simple but powerful methods (that we use ourselves!) to get more leads from your website.

First, a note about leads

It’s important to remember that leads are not just those who have directly expressed interest in buying your product.

A lead is any customer or audience member who has indicated interest in your service, through signing up for your newsletter, downloading an ebook or attending a webinar. 

Very, very few of your leads are going to rush down your sales funnel, from reading a few of your web pages to buying your product. Most are going to need some nurturing before they commit to a sale.

With that in mind, most of these methods are about finding these leads that are interested in your product or service and nurturing and building that loyalty and trust — not rushing them to a hasty, low-value sale.

Ready to get more high-value leads from your site? Let’s go!

Gated Content

Content marketing is all about providing your customers with high-quality resources and information.

If you have a particularly original post or collection of posts — one that took you a long time to compile, or that contains original research — there’s nothing wrong with packaging it and offering it to readers as a downloadable in exchange for their email. 

Wishpond has found success with this, devoting a landing page entirely to our collection of downloadable ebooks:

Note that each downloadable is designed to attract its audience: your ebooks won’t get themselves downloaded! 

Keep in mind that when your content is gated, audiences will need an idea of what it is they’re signing up for: this can be in the form of a preview or bullet point list of what’s inside.

Of course, ebooks aren’t the only kind of content you can offer. Some other, less labor-intensive (but equally useful) ideas are:

1. Checklists
2. Calendars
3. Templates 
4. Recordings of webinars or presentations
5. Quiz results
6. Industry reports

The important thing about your gated content is that it be thorough, actionable and unique. Think to yourself: is this something I would want in my own inbox?

You might like: 31 Psychology backed lead generation tips for real estate

Implement Pop-Ups

You may have hesitated to add pop-ups to your site because you personally don’t click on that many. Nonetheless, implemented right, they are a powerful lead generation tool. 

Additionally, there are different types of pop-ups, and how you use each will affect your user’s experience. You can choose between click, timed, scroll, entry and exit pop-ups. Each one has their unique strengths and weaknesses, and each is optimized for its own type of offer. For example, an exit pop-up is best for discount offers to grab customers when they’re about to leave your site.

You might like: How to use beacon technology for lead generation

Remember our landing page about ebooks? One of our tests showed a higher conversion rate on our ebook pop-ups than on our landing page.

Why? Pop-ups reduce friction, not asking people to load another tab; they ask people to make a decision.

The research backs this up.

According to Wordstream, the average pop-up coverts at 3.09%. The best convert up to 9.28%. Back of the envelope math, If you have 100 site visitors a day, that equals an additional 92-274 conversions per month.

The important thing to remember about pop-ups is that to be effective, they have to be implemented strategically. That is, well designed — with a valuable offer, compelling copy and at an appropriate stage in your customer’s journey. 

You might like: Disruptive marketing strategies for small business learned from the pros

For an example of a great pop-up, see this one from uncommon goods, which appears after browsing their store:

The timing makes sense: you’ve spent some time poking around the site, so it’s clear you’re interested in their products.

The design works with their branding: the colors are cohesive and match their logo.

The copy is intriguing — “can you keep a secret” (in the largest copy, so you’re sure to read it first) makes you want to read further, and ‘secret sales’ makes you feel like you’ll be a member of an exclusive club. 

You might like: SMB Guide: How to create and use QR Codes for lead generation

As the cherry on top, you’ll be getting savings on the products they already know you’re interested in.

Free Tools

Designing, launching and maintaining an entire tool might seem like a lot of investment, but the dividends can pay off.

If you have the bandwidth to keep it  up, launching simple online tools that serve a real market need can have users from your industry flocking to your website to use them  (and giving you their email to do it.)

You’ll  know you’re getting leads actively working in your industry, and you’ll be establishing yourself as a market leader, and an integral part of their own success and a solution to their everyday problems (over and over and over again!)

Just as a few examples, Buffer has Pablo, Coschedule has their Headline Analyzer, Moz has the Mozbar,  and Wishpond has the Contest Rules Generator.

Ensure that you get a lead’s information to use your tool so that you get some return on your investment in running and troubleshooting any bugs. 

Summary

These certainly aren’t the only methods of lead generation, but they are straightforward to implement, measurable and you can start all of them today on your website! 

Gated Content: For this, you’ll need a crack content team and a CMS that can handle downloadables, but with that, you’re set!

Implement Pop-Ups: An eCommerce website staple, with good reason! If you choose to implement pop-ups, be mindful of where you place them in the customer journey and tailor your offer to ensure your users feel they’re getting value. 

Offer Free Tools: The most resource-intensive option, but, executed properly, the one with potentially the highest returns in the number of leads and brand awareness. Having a genuinely good and useful free tool will have industry practitioners returning to your site over and over and over (and recommending it to their friends!)

Another great way to generate leads across all verticals is to use Beaconstac’s forms and landing pages. Check out our features here or speak to one of our experts.

• Author Details

Author Details

Farahnaz Mohammed

Content Marketer , Wishpond

Farahnaz (you can call her Farah) is a content marketer at Wishpond, with a background in journalism and a love for digital marketing, travel and dogs. You can find her on twitter @FarahColette.

https://www.wishpond.com/

farahm@wishpond.com

This blog was originally published on November 15th, 2019 at 08:07 am