How to Convert Web Visitors Into Prospects:

Learn what you need to consider and implement to convert visitors into permission marketing prospects. Step two in the creation of a lead generating web site.

Effective Content
Content is the most important aspect of a web site. Effective content draws visitors in, speaks to their problems, and resonates with them on an emotional level. Most web sites are terrible at this – they are designed from the perspective of “all about us”, when the appropriate style is “what’s in it for you”.

Positioning
What’s so special about you? How are you different from your competitors? What is the single most compelling reason why prospects should do business with you? Positioning is a concept created by Al Ries and Jack Trout in their landmark best-seller, Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind. In today’s overcrowded, ultra competitive marketplace, you must stand for something and own your position to be successful. Has this entered into your web design and overall marketing strategy?

Persuasive Copy
Getting visitors to your site is only a small battle in the Internet marketing war. Getting visitors to take action is the beachhead that must be taken for the war to be won. Persuasive copy and compelling offers are essential to get visitors to take the first baby step of giving you permission to enter into a dialog with them.

Engagement Devices
Interactive tools, surveys, games, questionnaires and the like are extremely effective ways to draw visitors in so you can ultimately get their permission to market to them. Can you template the questions you would ask a prospect to make a recommendation to them? Turning your knowledge into an online interactive tool is a fabulous way to provide value to visitors and interact with them – strengthening your relationship with them. Ask us about Engagement Devices

Information Architecture
Is your site easy to navigate? How do you know for sure? Have you asked people besides yourself, your friends and those who work for you and know you and your products well? Do you use web analytics software to measure your content and navigational effectiveness?

Persona based design
Do you have the appropriate information on your site for all of the audiences that visit your site? In most businesses, there are many different types of customers with vastly different needs and concerns. The reasons why people buy your products will be different from person to person.

Sales people are effective at selling products because they can adapt their pitch to the needs of the buyer. Without persona based design, web sites are not capable of adapting to each visitor, nor do they have the information that real buyers are looking for and need to make a decision or take the next step.

Online Forms
To obtain permission to market to visitors is the most important goal of any web site. Making sales or qualifying leads needs to be secondary to this goal. Very few visitors will buy or contact you on their first visit. Once you have permission to market to your visitors they become real prospects. Only then does the process of converting prospects to leads and sales start.

To gain this permission to market, you must have forms on your site to collect contact information. You can learn from our considerable experience designing the forms which kinds of forms will work. Certain types work better than others, certain numbers of forms are essential to capturing the most number of visitors.

The key point to understand is that you must exchange of value for contact information. There is a perceived risk on the part of the visitor in giving you their contact information – how will you overcome that fear? What sort of value can you offer that will be greater than the perceived risk in communicating with you?

Compelling offers
What other kinds of compelling offers can you make? If it’s appropriate can you offer a downloadable coupon? A time-limited offer based on the time they visited your web site? With some creative thinking and experience in what has worked for others there will be many offers you can implement – no matter what business you are in.

e-Mail capture system
Once you capture your contact information you must have a convenient method of storing this information so you can use it for manual and automated follow up. Certain leads should be routed to sales-reps immediately. Others should be triggered into your automated follow up system. What system will you use? Ask us about our specialized tools that make email list management, lead routing and automated follow up a breeze.

Web Analytics
The best web sites are changed frequently. If you do nothing but test different offers, different content and headlines, you will far out-perform the person who thinks they got it right the first time.

Tag based web analytics is essential to understanding what is really happening on your web site – what is working and what needs to be improved. Iterative web site design based on tag based web analytics is key to designing the ultimate lead generating web site.

Next, learn how to convert prospects to qualified leads and sales