If companies want visitors to their website to voluntarily provide their contact data, the company needs to have a good strategy. And the threshold should be low, as many people are wary of sharing such information and thus becoming website leads. Here is where marketers can discover how to go about things.
Website leads: definition
In terms of online marketing, the term “website lead” refers to a person who has visited a company’s website and shared their contact information. Generally speaking, this is an email address, which users provide because they would like to find out more about a certain offer, for instance. Those who harness this information to address the user in an individual way as far as possible can turn website leads into genuine customers.
The leads generation process ordinarily begins when a user follows a call-to-action (CTA), which is integrated into a website or blog article. This CTA leads to a landing page that contains a form which captures the visitor’s contact information. As soon as this form is filled out and submitted, their data can be used for marketing promotions.
5 steps for turning visitors into leads
Many people are very conscientious when it comes to sharing their contact data and are reluctant to pass on the information. Which is why companies have built up a step-by-step strategy for animating website visitors to provide their contact data.
Step 1: Analyse the current status of your leads generation
Firstly, you should analyse where the majority of your online traffic and reach is coming from. It is at these points where it pays off the most to optimise leads generation. At the start, the best lead generators should be looked for – with the most typical ones that draw in visitors being:
- Social media: when interested persons have participated in a campaign via a company profile in social media
- Live chats: when people turn to the customer service team on a company website via its live chat window
- Blog articles: when data comes from articles read on a company blog
To animate users to provide their email address, you must increasingly offer content that gives added value to the target group. The content may be free of charge, but only accessible when the user provides their email address:
- White papers
- Checklists
- Webinars
- Vouchers, discount codes
- Test versions
Particularly offers which are often frequented should feature forms that ask visitors for their contact data.
At the same time, you may want to try to take care of less successful digital touchpoints and to optimise these – or no longer support them when they obviously have absolutely nothing to do with the target group. In any case, an analysis tool should be leveraged to investigate the difference between very and seldomly frequented pages in order to gain a starting point for improvements.
Important: every time a visitor provides their contact information, ideally a thank you page should appear. With this, you are expressing your acknowledgement and appreciation. After all, it is not a matter of course that visitors share their data. As a reward, you could offer a voucher, for instance.
Step 2: Optimise each element within the leads generation process
Visitors want to find out more about some things and less about other things. For example, a person who visits a page with tips on lawn care is hardly interested in consultancy services offered for snow removal. In this case, the conversion path leads to a destination that does not match. For this reason, it makes sense to harmonise the linked website with the current website’s content.
Here is where an A/B comparison can help to improve the user experience. You set up a website with two versions and monitor how the visitor numbers develop for each. Frequently, critical differences can be seen in the three key elements of the leads generation process:
- CTA
- Landing page
- Thank you page
It pays off to experiment with these (and other) criteria when it comes to the design of the website and the presentation of content. For CTAs, for instance, an eye-catching, contrasting design is important. What’s more, companies should offer as many landing pages as possible and, for example, include a social media share button on the thank you page.
Step 3: Personalise CTAs
Among the above-mentioned key elements within the leads generation process, the CTA plays a major role. After all, it is the digital gate which visitors must go through for them to, ultimately, become customers. This makes it a decisive station within the customer journey – and much more effective the better the CTA caters to the personal needs of each visitor.
So, it is about offering website visitors images, buttons and product options that specifically match their interests. And companies should know these well. It makes sense here to use search engine optimisation (SEO), whose findings can be harnessed for the CTA. To support this, several marketing tools can be leveraged for the personalisation – the word being marketing automation.
Step 4: Design the ideal contact form
Last but not least: so that website leads can be generated, you need a contact form that animates the visitor to fill it out. To keep the threshold as low as possible, just ask for a little bit of information at first. The key mandatory field being the email address. Of course, additional information can be asked for, but each further mandatory field can put the visitor off, preventing success.
Step 5: Monitor on an ongoing basis
The tools for website leads should be continually examined and adjusted if need be. In this case, remember the possibilities of the A/B test. Even small changes can have a big effect. This includes the wording of the CTA, the layout of a landing page or the kind of images used on a website. Errors within the optimisation process, however, can never be completely avoided and need to be accepted.
Website leads at Visable: excellent data quality
To date, cookies have been an important function for the identification and generation of website leads. This also goes, for instance, for retargeting measures and affiliate marketing. But the use of cookies is soon to be eliminated due to data protection regulations (amongst others the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR) and waning support by browser providers. This makes it more difficult to turn individual, anonymous traffic into website leads.
An alternative option for identifying website visitors is offered by the B2B specialist Visable, via the digital sourcing platform wlw. The service, WEBSITE LEADS, allows companies to identify visitors to their online offers and thus directly address them as customers.
The requirement for this service is a pixel code which you embed in your websites. Afterwards, you can find a list of companies in your wlw login area who have visited your websites. The information and contact data captured can then be exported to other solutions. Important for the future: the information is GDPR compliant and is transmitted without the use of cookies.
