How many leads did you lose last month?
Trick question. It’s hard to tell the opportunity cost when those leads never went your way to begin with.
But there is a type of lead that companies too often ignore: the potential leads that for some never became full-blown leads for your company. This can happen for a few reasons:
- Leads might jump into an order form and fill up a “shopping cart” only to abandon the cart and close out the window.
- Some leads may come to the cusp of signing up for a newsletter, only to decide at the last minute that they’d rather keep surfing the web.
- Other leads might bookmark your lead page for later—only to never return.
In each case, you’re capturing potential leads, but for some reason or another you’re not keeping them as genuine leads for your business. Here’s a guide for rectifying that situation:
Evaluating Your Current Lead Strategy
The first step is to better understand what your current lead strategy is—and how well it might be working out for you. Here are a few tools to help in that process:
- Use a tool like Website Grader to get a sense of how you’re currently doing with potential leads. This will yield you insights like your page size, page speed, and mobile responsiveness to ensure that you’re not turning away leads before they ever happen.
- Supplement your Google Analytics with tools like Leadfeeder or Ahrefs. Leadfeeder gives you more insight about who’s visiting your website, which helps you craft a strategy for capturing these leads more specifically. With Ahrefs, you’ll get more insights as to the strategies your competition is using to capture more data-driven leads.
- Integrate A/B testing into your lead strategy. If you have multiple ways of capturing leads, it only makes sense that you’ll want to test which ones need optimization and which ones are delivering the kind of performance you need. For example, you might start with multiple versions of a “contact us” page to see which one tends to yield more results. The key to testing effectively is that you’ll identify the “invisible” leads you could have captured with a better lead form, but never knew because you never tested alternative pages.
Optimizing Your Website to Point Your Audience Toward Lead Conversion
Once you have a sense of where your opportunities may be lost, it’s time to create new strategies to capture the leads you’ve been missing. Here are a few to consider:
Create more landing pages.
According to HubSpot, companies with 30+ landing pages tended to generate about 7 times as many leads as companies with only 1 to 5 landing pages. This doesn’t mean that more is necessarily always better, but it does suggest that the companies that are actively creating landing pages and testing them for specific purposes are finding better results. If you only have one landing page that you never test, now’s your wakeup call.
Consider integrating live chat.
Live chat (42%) is beginning to outpace even email (23%) and social media (16%) as the “leading digital content method.” That means that it’s also expressing its potential to drive visitors to transform into leads. As visitors ask questions and explore the live chat feature, they can easily be swayed toward a landing page of the company’s choice—preferably one that’s already been optimized for someone asking those same questions.
Give your leads something to do.
Evaluate your site from the audience’s perspective. Live chat (see above) works because it gives customers something to do. But there are other ways to encourage people to move through your lead funnel, including:
- Download incentives. One of the most popular lead capture tools in the world is to create a factsheet worth downloading and encourage people to trade their email address in exchange. Download incentives are popular for a reason: they work.
- Create valuable content. Whether that valuable content comes in the form of an insightful blog post or an online tool visitors can use for free, it doesn’t matter. What’s key is that you create something that people will find worthwhile and use that content to drive their attention toward your lead generation funnel.
Add a personal touch.
With personalized calls-to-action converting some 42% more people than the basic CTA, one thing is clear: we like the sound of our own name. That’s one reason that personalized email headlines tend to do better, even if we already know as the recipients that it was an electronic form that enabled that level of personalization.
How to Retarget Leads that Never Became Leads
Sometimes, you’ll just lose out on leads. It happens. You may not have any explanation for it. Heck, even your leads may not be able to explain why they clicked away.
In that case, you can use a strategy of retargeting to influence how many of these leads you retain.
For example, Google Adwords Remarketing allows you to create advertising for very specific cases. You can create advertisements tailored to those who might have browsed your website but never fully made a decision one way or the other.
You can also use Custom Audiences on Facebook to reach out to highly specific customer segments. By implementing a Facebook pixel on your site, you can even create a custom audience of people who have already visited your website. As is the case with Google Adwords Remarketing, you can then construct advertisements specifically tailored to those who didn’t pull the trigger on an order.
Retaining More of the Leads You Worked Hard to Create
Before you go out and spend money on advertising or SEO, you should focus on making your site a better place for the people already visiting it. Retarget your customers, increase the personal touch, and begin testing your lead funnel solutions to ensure that you retain more of your visitors and turn more of them into leads. Then, the next time you spend a dollar on advertising, you’ll be confident that your site has what it takes to generate a worthy ROI.
