Seeing fewer Leads?
Here’s five little fixes…

Paul Stratford, Creative Director

Wish your website was generating more qualified sales leads? Find out why it doesn’t and discover five fixes anyone can do…

As a follow-up to ‘winning back lost leads’, this release is skewed towards directly seeing new inbound leads. Imagine increasing the volume of qualified inbound leads – sales units could then focus energy on closing qualified targets (and not on cold outbound activity).

Blending lessons from Amazon’s frictionless sales funnel with our own testing, we’ve positively influenced visitors’ behaviour on our own website – and our clients’. This list of tried and tested techniques is now our own best-practice bible. We use it to boost the rate at which ‘visitors’ convert into ‘sales leads’ on websites.

These techniques known as Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), combine both science and art, to increase leads from websites. The list of techniques is unique to each industry, although there are five main topics you can expect results from …

Fastest CRO fixes first…

#1: Improve Page Speed

What is it and why does it matter?
Description:The speed at which your web pages load can affect how many prospects find you on Google. How? Google rewards faster-loading pages with higher rankings.

Quick Cure: How do you measure this? Use Google’s free tool, here >

Impact: Reducing page speed substantially has bumped some of our client websites from page 4 to page 1 on Google.

Effort: 1/5 – if your web pages are too large, reducing the size or resolution of your images can often help. There are many free tools available – see here >

#2: Reduce your Readability Score

What is it and why does it matter?
Description: A readability score is the numerical grade given to your text, based on how easy it is for visitors to read it. The more readable your text, the wider your audience.

Quick Cure: Test your copy, using Flesch Kincaid’s WebFX’s free tool. Follow the recommendations, ranging from slimming down your sentence lengths to simplifying your words. Aim for an average grade of 7 which should be easily understood by 12 to 13 year olds.

Impact: High. Not doing it will hamper any other efforts and throttle back marketing ROI.

Effort: 1/5 – As easy as copy, paste, edit. Copy, paste, edit.

#3: Define your Value Proposition

What is it and why does it matter?
Description: In half a second, visitors have judged your website on:

Its appeal
What (if any) problem it solves
How easy it is to navigate

Tomes of text, imaginative images and animations satisfy web designers, but are proven to distract and halt conversions. Ensure your value propositions are mapped to visitors’ needs and are immediately visible.

Quick Cure: Instead of long copy, use Strategyzer’s value proposition method to identify between three and five key sales messages. Make sure these are above the fold on any core pages, including the home page.

Impact: Black and white. We’ve quadrupled enquiries for clients.

Effort: 3/10 – But your site isn’t a sales machine without it!

#4: Capture data using triggers

What is it and why does it matter?
Description: Offering useful content in exchange for visitors’ contact details. Very few of your website visitors will pick up the phone on a hunch you might help them. Making ‘lead-magnets’ or intellectual gifts available on your website persuades visitors gathering knowledge at the start of the buyer journey.

Quick Cure: Perform a deal review. Analyse the most common questions new customers ask and offer something to answer them – like a calculator, free trial or checklist.

Impact: Converts a static website into a lead-generating machine.

Effort: 2/10 – You don’t need fancy automation tools to test this. Add a message on your current website forms offering your FREE lead-magnet to all new enquiries.

#5: Add Site Search

What is it and why does it matter?
Description: Visitors using a search bar on your website have a higher chance of conversion. 43% higher according to Econsultancy, as their intent is intrinsically stronger. Analysing phrases these visitors type into your search bar also informs your business about trends and buyer needs, which influence the content you add.

Quick Cure: With WordPress, this should be free to add to your site as a widget or plugin. Just take care to ensure the results it displays are optimised.

Impact: One website we audited, had 70,000 searches a month for a specific category that didn’t actually exist. Remedying this increased engagement by 7%. It also provided a business case for a brand new, profitable, product category.

Effort: 1/10 – Easy, download Ivory Search FREE, and setup Google Analytics Goals to record visitors searches.

If you want to know more about increasing leads the fastest way, get in touch. We’ve added over £100m in sales for UK businesses – from the NEC and JCB to many mid-tier software and technology clients. The techniques we use follow proven behavioural psychology patterns and form best practice for lead-generation websites.

Market leaders in your industry know these techniques – and more. We see the evidence every day. If you want to know how your successful competitors are winning, we offer digital due-diligence to benchmark and highlight the opportunities in your field. Talk to one of our experts now.

In my next post, I’m looking at the response speed effect on sales, and how automation solves this.

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