You know you’ve done something very right when you start to see significant traffic coming into your website. That’s not an easy feat and should be celebrated. But higher traffic doesn’t always equal more leads. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee qualified leads.
So if your website’s success can be summed up like this — more traffic = lower conversion rate — it’s time to rethink how to generate more leads from your website.
Read on to see practical ways to turn your website into the lead generation powerhouse you need it to be.
10 Tips For Lead Gen Optimization
1. Think Holistically About How to Generate More Leads from your Website
Lead generation isn’t just about creating the perfect CTA through A/B testing. To generate leads, you need:
- Targeted traffic filled with likely customers
- A plan to move them further into the sales funnel
- Content that speaks directly to them at the different stages of the Buyer’s Journey
- Strategies to keep them coming back and to recapture missed opportunities
- Clearly defined conversion paths you can measure, test, and optimize to continually improve lead conversion rates
- A system to generate more online reviews and/or referrals
Your website could be phenomenal in one or more aspects, but lead conversion rates will stay low if you do not see the whole picture.
2. Look at Your Site From the Customer’s Perspective
When’s the last time you clicked a call to action and signed up for a SaaS demo, tour, or trial? What compelled you? How did they present information and guide you through the decision-making process? Look at your website through that set of eyes. But don’t stop with here.
Truth: Your preferences may not be representative of your ideal customer. So what you think should work based on your own frame of reference may not connect with customers.
Test any hypotheses you develop from this way of thinking through A/B testing to make sure you’re on the right track. Subjective opinions from various experienced people in the department can help you move in the right direction. But always test and verify.
3. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
60% of marketers create a piece of content every day. That’s certainly a good goal to have. But if it comes down to choosing quality or quantity, always go for the quality.
Think about it this way: The quality of your content is directly proportional to the quality of traffic your website attracts and the percentage of that traffic that will become a qualified lead.
The average B2B customer views 13 pieces of content before making a decision, so if the quality is inconsistent, the buyer sees a big red flag.
Use content to showcase expertise, share industry secrets, and add real value to the buyer’s life. Research your customers to learn about their pain points, goals, and behaviors so that you can build the content they’re looking for.
4. Make Use of Forms
People instantly recognize a form, so their eyes go right to it. Add forms to your high traffic pages to convert more of this traffic. But try posting a lead generation form on every page, so if the person is viewing multiple pages, it’s there when they’re ready to move forward.
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5. Measure Conversion Pathways and Optimize
Use analytics to determine where traffic is coming from and how it moves through your site. Apply this data to streamline conversion pathways so that you can more easily track them in Google Analytics or a paid SaaS. This is how to get more leads from your website efficiently and cost-effectively.
Once you do this, you can look at each stage in the Buyer’s Journey or level in the sales funnel and optimize the rate at which traffic moves into the next stage. If you’re losing people at a certain stage, then focus there. This involves A/B testing various landing page elements like:
- Lead generation CTA
- Form lengths
- Messaging
- Images
- Font size, type, or color
6. Start With the End in Mind
What does a lead look like to you? What does a sales-qualified lead look like to the sales department? When you start at the end and work your way back, you can identify the Buyer’s Journey steps that were most impactful at getting a visitor from point A to B. These are the places that you want to improve your conversion rate.
7. Don’t Discount “Other” Pages
Some pages are intended for another purpose. But they can significantly increase web leads when you make them do double duty. These kinds of pages have incredible open rates compared to other pages and may include website pages, emails, or other media used to:
- Say, thank you
- Confirm a new subscription, trial end, unsubscribing, etc.
- Provide decision-making information like downloaded case studies, eBooks, tutorials, etc.
- Confirm order receipt or delivery
8. Don’t Front-Load the Home Page
Your homepage may be the highest-ranking page in organic search results, thanks to SEO services. And no matter what page a person enters your site from, they will usually visit it if they don’t bounce.
For this reason, we know it’s tempting to go straight to closing the deal with a paid product offer CTA. But most people here are in the Awareness Phase of the Buyer’s Journey, Top of Funnel.
They’re not ready to buy anything, so instead, start with a lead generation CTA. This reaches people where they are, usually when they first view the home page. A lead generation CTA might be:
- Try a demo
- Sign up to get weekly tips in your inbox
- Download our free guide
9. Make Use of Live Chat
Live Chats are much better than they used to be. You can set them up to be non-intrusive but still very visible so that people think nothing of starting a conversation when they have a question. It’s a lead generation CTA that doesn’t feel like a CTA to the visitor.
If you choose to allow a chatbot to initially pick up the conversation, this is a great opportunity to show off the wealth of helpful content and calculators on your website. If you choose to go straight to a customer service representative, you can demonstrate how attentive your team is.
Both would be strong selling points that build trust, increase conversions, and strengthen the lead. And a combination of live chat and chatbots can help you avoid this scenario:
10. Display Testimonials Prominently
When it comes down to it, what you say about yourself means nothing without curated and prominently displayed testimonials to provide social proof and build instant trust that it might otherwise take months of lead-nurturing to achieve.
Place testimonials near your lead generation CTA and test placement just as you would A/B test your CTAs. When possible, make those video testimonials to really increase the conversion rate.
Lead Generation CTA and AB Test Significance
While a holistic view of lead generation is critical, the lead generation CTA is by far the most important element and the most optimizable element when it comes to figuring out how to get more leads from your website.
A/B testing your CTAs while ensuring A/B test significance is the organized and efficient way to generate more leads through your website.
When A/B testing, don’t forget the importance of A/B testing significance. If you don’t have A/B test significance, then a page may appear better when you test it one time and worse when you test it a second or third time.
If the goal of A/B testing is to determine which page is better, you can’t have that. Chance is too much of a factor in your results. To increase A/B test significance, you must ensure your sample size is large enough to represent the whole.
SaaS Company Sees 180% Conversion Rate Increase in PPC.
Through A/B testing and customer research, Digital Current helped one SaaS company better align their PPC strategy with customer pain points to achieve:
- 180% conversion rate increase
- 22% lower cost per click
- -3.51% cost per conversion
And while you’re here, don’t miss your opportunity to Get CRO tips (and more) to your inbox!
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