December 13th, 2010 → 4:29 am
@ James McLaughlin
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Emarketer.com
I just came across this research on eMarketer.com. A sample of small businesses were surveyed about their websites and what functions the websites performed. ONLY 35% had a lead capture functionality on their site! This really troubled me.
This is one of the most basic things to setup, just ask any web designer. If you read my book, Website Success Factors and follow the system you’ll know this is absolutely one of the most important factors of success on the web.
You can’t leave dead-ends on your website! A dead end is a product, service or other web page that has content about your company but doesn’t lead the visitor of your site anywhere. The content is simply presented and it ends without a call to action.
You need to make content actionable and present opportunities for you to provide more value to potential customers to contact you. For example, after describing a service your company offers you could say, “Let us give you a free personal consultation and customize a scheduled service plan that meets your needs. Contact us today and we’ll reach out to you within 24 hours. In the mean time we’ll send you the top 20 things customers fail to consider when planning to purchase our services. This way, you’ll have more time to research before your personal consultation. We look forward to talking with you!”
This provides them with clear expectations of how you will reach out to them and when. It also provides them more value by providing information to them that will help educate them and make them feel more equipped to make a decision.
If you are a small business owner with a website, you need to make sure to add a form to your website where you can generate new leads or sales for your business. If you don’t have a lead capture form then you most likely haven’t set any goals for your website. It has to be a primary goal for you to generate new customers through the site and a lead capture form is the way to draw them into your sales funnel.
If you are in the process of planning a small business website, then make this a requirement. And it shouldn’t just be a form that says contact us now. It’s great to have the form setup but it will only work for 1% of your visitors unless you follow these simple guidelines for forms-
- Make all of the pages on your site lead to your contact form. If you can integrate the form onto your landing pages and draw attention to them with an arrow for example this will work even better.
- Collect the minimum required information for you to be able to follow up with the customer. Consider a strategy where you only ask for a first name and email address. Then you can setup a series of auto responders that provides value to your customers over time and can ask them to “update their profile” to give you additional contact information. If you require it.
- Set expectations for how you will use (and will not use) their contact information and how you will follow up with them. Nobody likes to read a privacy policy but let them know in a fun and personal way you won’t spam them or share their personal information with a third party. For example I would say, “I respect your privacy and hate spam just as much as you. Your contact information will only be used to contact you regarding information on planning a successful website and for no other purpose”. This can be placed below the submit button on the form with some sort of trust logo to instue confidence.
- Make a clear call to action to your customer that adds value to them above the form. As I already stated above don’t just say contact us. Give them a compelling reason to contact you. For a services based business this should be a free consultation paired with some content that educates the potential customer. In my book and successful website planning system, Website Success Factors I show you 20 Killer content Ideas that sell. For example I would give the customer the Top 20 Mistakes Small Businesses make when launching a website as I do here on my blog. This helps you avoid those mistakes while helping strengthen our relationship and your confidence in me to coach you through launching a successful website.
