A simple way to get more leads from your website – Part One
Most of the visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy or get in touch when they first visit. In fact, statistics suggest that only 2% of your website visitors are considering buying at the exact time they visit your website. The problem is, that once that visitor has left your website, even if they were impressed and considering buying from you, they could potentially forget about you, get distracted by another offer or just leave their buying decision for sometime in the future.
So what can you do to help prevent these potential customers from vanishing forever?
The answer is fairly simple. You need to have a way of capturing their contact details, usually their email address, so that you can send them something that is going to help keep your business in their mind.
Introducing the lead magnet
A lead magnet is something of value that you create and offer to your website visitors for free – in exchange for their contact details.
Examples of lead magnets include:
- An industry related blueprint
- An educational document
- A money off voucher
- A how to video or guide
- Exclusive free content
- Access to a free webinar
- Sign up to a valuable mailing list
Although some lead magnets ask for a phone number or postal address, for the purpose of this article, we’re going to focus on getting their email address.
Now, people are very precious and protective of their email address, so you need to make sure that your lead magnet is something very appealing to them. You’ll hopefully know who your ideal customer is. You’ll know their pains, what motivates them, what compels them to buy etc. With this in mind, you should be able to craft your lead magnet to appeal to them directly and convince them that if they give you their email address, they’re going to get something that is going to make a big difference to them.
People will usually give you their email address if you offer them one or more of the following:
- Some free information that is going to help them solve a problem they have
- Something that they perceive to be very valuable
- Something that is going to save them time
- Something that is going to save them money
- Something that is going to make them feel good
Offering your lead magnet
There are a number of ways in which you can present your lead magnet to visitors. Here’s a list, along with a short explanation:
- A section on the page promoting the lead magnet
This would usually be in the lower half of a product or services page. It should be something along the lines of “Not quite ready to get in touch? Why don’t you download our free guide to ?????. Just pop your email address in the box below and we’ll send it directly to your inbox” - A pop up box
Not the most popular option, in fact, I despise them on other websites. However, they have been proven to work and we use them on a couple of pages on our own website, simple because they do work. You can use ‘exit intent’ software that detects when the user is about to leave the page. It then opens a pop up box and presents the lead magnet to them. - A Chat box
These usually sit at the bottom of the website and after a set period of time, a pop up message appears asking the visitor if they’d like help. As part of the conversation, you could ask them for their email so you can send them more details.
There’s lots of other methods but these are the most popular.
That covers the first step of getting their email address. In the next post, I’ll cover what to do with that email address once you’ve got it. I’ll be introducing some very cool tools that you can use to start building a relationship with these contacts. And the best thing is that all the work is done automatically in the background, whilst you get on with running your business.