How is your online lead capture strategy going? Internet marketing can be a tricky business, and I don’t want to toot our own horn (toot toot), but over at Web123 we’ve had a great response to our new home page at Web123.com.au. Our enquiry rates are up in a big way, and that’s because of a few factors:
- It’s now a slicker looking website;
- We have a great customer testimonial video on our homepage;
- We have more ways for clients to contact us, and;
- We have more opt-in boxes on our website
So today I wanted to talk about using an opt-in box (or boxes) and specifically, how much information to ask for. When we were redesigning our site, we played around with where to place all the contact spots for potential customers, what to offer, and what to expect in return. Certainly as a marketing-centric web design company, we’d LOVE to know everything about each visitor to our website. Lead capture is great for sales, but it’s also great for marketing. Knowing more about our visitors would help us offer the right products to the right people. But, realistically, we know we’ll never get it, and it would hurt our lead building efforts if we tried. After years learning about internet marketing and online sales optimisation, I’ve realised something really important about asking for details: Every extra question is one more objection to completing your opt-in box. You don’t have to be a genius to know that when you visit a website and you give your details away, that you’ll probably be marketed to. Sometimes you don’t mind because the reward outweighs the inconvenience of another marketing message in your inbox (remember ‘the offer’ I wrote about last time? If not, have a read about creating valuable content to increases your conversion rate). But sometimes, the questions a website asks are a little too long-winded, or a little too intrusive, and suddenly the information/reward exchange doesn’t feel so balanced! I can’t remember how many times I’ve surfed the net and seen a free PDF download I wanted to read and yet, when I get to their opt-in box, the website demands I almost give them my life story in exchange. Not cool, especially if I don’t know just how much value this PDF is going to give me in return. Most of the time I can’t be bothered, and I surf off to another website. So the moral of this story is:
If you ask too many questions too early, you’ll lose potential customers.
That’s why my Web123 internet marketing team and I agonised over our lead capture strategy, we deliberated over how much information to ask for in return for giving visitors a free eBook or our most popular giveaway, our website starter kit bundle. In the end we decided, even though we are a web design company who wants to sell websites, we are also small business educators with a friendly, approachable personality. We didn’t feel comfortable with nameless subscribers and at the very least, we wanted to personalise our email messages with a first name greeting. So now we ask for a name as well as the email address where we’ll send a simple eBook. But with our biggest free product, we took a risk that the huge educational value of our website starter kit bundle would be worth giving us a bit more information. We asked potential customers for a name, an email AND a few optional survey questions about their business. Here is a screen shot of our website starter kit lead capture page (this is once they’ve already clicked that they’d like one):
So with your website and your opt-in lead capture boxes, these are the first questions you need to ask yourself:
- What are you asking for on your opt-in box?
- Are you asking too much and losing potential customers? (check your Google Analytics for bounce rates on your opt-in page.)
- What’s your website conversion rate? Could it be better?
- What do you really need in order to build a relationship with this person?
- Do you really need their full name, and their phone number and their address?
- Wouldn’t you rather more people signed up to receive a branded message every now and then without throwing you in the spam box?
Remember: don’t push your marketing on potential clients, pull them to you with the amount of value you offer.
Massage them gently, reward them by being a good internet marketing business. Don’t burn your valuable leads with your eagerness to get more business now. Be confident that you will organically build a level of trust/credibility with them over time… and of course, you’ll need a great end product or service too… but I hope you have that part already covered! Until next time ABN readers! Bianca.
