How to Generate Leads Through Website

Originally published: May 07, 2020 01:15:48 AM, updated: October 16, 2024 08:00:45 AM

When you invite people to your home for dinner, you wouldn’t invite them to cluttered house and then not feed them. The same is for your website.

In today’s digital world, having a non-conversion-oriented website will result to lose potential customers when they land on your web pages. You only have a short amount of time to win a visitors attention.

According to a research made by experts, website visitors will likely read 20% of the words on a page. This means, if your website doesn’t deliver the right message in a short amount of time, visitors will leave it immediately.

So, creating an eye-catching, conversion-oriented and professional website design should be your focus point in today’s digital world in order to make it the ideal profit center for your business.

Key Principles to Instantly Generate Leads through Your Website

1. Put Your Call-To-Action Inside a Container

Your website visitor becomes a lead when he/she click Call-To-Action button and fill out the contact form. So, putting your Call-To-Action inside a container will help visitor to distinguish it from other page elements. In fact, other page elements like text and images are just elements to encourage visitor to make action.

For example, if the visitor land on a web page that sells Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and one of the page elements like image is not related to this item, he/she will definitely exit the website and go to search for another provider. A high bounce rate or exit rate is a big indication that your website is non-conversion-oriented and still needs a lot of work to convert visitors to leads.

Your Call-To-Action buttons are the most important elements of your website, so you need to carefully select the best CTA for each single web page. A great CTA button can direct your website visitors to take a desired action, boost conversion rate, and win leads.

Best Practices for Using Call-To-Action

• Use Action-Packed Text: Avoid using the boring words like “Submit” and “Enter”. Instead, use the action words that encourage visitors to click your offer like “Reserve Your Seat Now”, “Try Our Free Trial”, “Download eBook”, etc.
• The colors: Colors play a major impact on Call-To-Action. According to your website design, you need to test the color that can work well. Generally speaking, Red, Orange and Green colors are reported to perform best.
• Call-To-Action Button Shapes: Button shape is an important role in Call-To-Action and you need to carefully use what works better for your business. The common button shapes are rounded button shape and a button with square edges.
• Use Large Text: Use a large font size that can perform well, but not so large that it looks obnoxious.
• Don’t Stretch Your Button Text: Ideally, you can use 2 or 5 words in your button text.
• Go With 1st Person Speech: A research shows that changing the Call-To-Action button text from second person (“Download YOUR free eBook”) to the first person (“Download MY free eBook”) resulted in a 90% increase in clicks.
• Construct a Sense of Urgency: Creating a sense of urgency in your Call-To-Action buttons can help to increase clicks. For example, to encourage visitor to buy your products, you can use “Sign Up and Get 30% Off Today Only!”. Also, you can use the word “Now” – “Register for the Ultimate SEO Webinar Now!”
• Keep CTA Above the Fold: Keeping Call-To-Action button above the fold increase clicks.
• Natural Hierarchy: If your web page has other non-CTA buttons, you will need to make them less attention-grabbing than your main CTA button. Your main CTA should be the biggest and brightest.
• Use Enticing Words: Using enticing words like “Free” (ex. “Download My Free eBook.”) in your Call-To-Action button will emphasize your offer and increase clicks.
• Use Graphics in Your Call-To-Action Button: Graphics can positively affect CTR.
• Bonus Button Text: In some situations you may need to add some extra text within your Call-To-Action button text - This is common with free trial Call-To-Action buttons.
• Minimize the CTA Button Choices: In case of multiple Call-To-Action button choices, a fewer choices will make users happy.
• Utilize Your Whitespace: Putting your Call-To-Action button on whitespace has a positive impact on CTR – don’t make your visitor to spend more time searching for Call-To-Action button.
• Test, Test, Test: Testing Call-To-Action is absolutely vital.

2. Add a Contact Number

Adding a contact number to your website will give visitor a trust to deal with you. Here are some places on your website where you can use to add your phone number:

• Header: A research shows that putting phone number in the header area is powerful and can quickly build trust – Make the phone number BIG. You also can use different colors for the phone number, and the red color is the best choice because it’s very popular color for Call-To-Action.
• Footer: A research shows that a lot of website visitors check footer for the phone number by default. Also, footer is the best place to put your company’s name, address and phone number (NAP) – it’s good for local SEO.
• Call-To-Action: Including your phone number and a Call-To-Action somewhere within your content can help to convert visitor to lead.
• Contact Page: A traditional way, and I might delete it.

3. Choose an Appropriate Color Combination

Choosing the appropriate color combination in the website design process, especially in Call-To-Action buttons is an important part to generate a positive impact, make the victory stay longer, and increase your website conversion rate.

Best Practices for Using Color Theory

Determine the service / product you are offering. If you are offering environmental or green products, it would be better to use green color. Here is a list of colors that are commonly used.

• Red: The red color is attractive and works well for websites that offer products for children. Also, it can be effectively used with action buttons such as Reserve Now and Book Now.
• Orange: The orange color works well for websites that offer food products. The color also works for younger generation and technical companies.
• Yellow: It would go well for children and websites that offer leisure products.
• Green: It‘s commonly used in tourism and nature websites.
• Blue: This color is appropriate for websites that offer high-tech and diet products.
• Black: It’s suitable for photography and art websites.
• Purple: Is commonly used in religious websites.

Use what your target audience love. If you are targeting elderly people, you need to choose the appropriate color combination that can make them stay longer. The same with teens and younger generations.

Use black color for text. People love reading black text because it’s the easiest on the eye.

4. Add Lead Generation Form on Every Web Page

Having a lead generation form on every page will increase the chance to win leads. But, you need to use fewer form fields – The recommended number of form fields is between 3 and 5 fields.

Best Practices for Using the Lead Generation Forms

• Add a Privacy Policy: Having a privacy policy is a must to reassure visitors that their information will be safe and not used by third parties. The best practice for using the privacy policy is to link it within the form.
• Use a Smart CAPTCHA, or No CAPTCHA at All: Having a CAPTCHA is a good option to stop spam, but you need to carefully integrate the smart and easy CAPTCHA.
• Put the Form Above the Fold: The best place for the form is in the upper right hand corner of the web page.
• Use Fewer Form Fields: This will encourage visitors to fill out the form.

5. Add Testimonials

Testimonials are a powerful marketing tool for increasing the conversion rate. Including photos or videos in your testimonials can positively affect the lead generation.

Best Practices for Using Testimonials

• Add Personal Testimonials: Use people’s names, job titles, locations and company name in your testimonials.
• Use Targeted Testimonials: If your business offers financial consulting services, you need to target customers on the same field and ask them for testimonials.
• Add Beneficial Testimonials: Don’t use testimonials that say “This company is the best ever,” instead, select testimonials that discuss benefits such as how your company helped their business.
• Add Photos or Videos: Including photos or videos can increase the conversion rate.
• Test Testimonials: You need always to test the testimonials you use including, testimonial’s location, length, fonts and colors – Use A/B testing.

6. Photos of Key Team Members

Add photos of your key team members with links to their detailed profile pages. This will help to build trust and encourage potential clients to contact you.

Best Practices for Using Team Members Photos

• Add a Brief BIO: Having a brief BIO about key members is a great way to build employee’s personality.
• Add Contact Information: This will help make communication easier and faster – you can link to their downloadable vCard.
• Add Social Media Links: Linking to social media profiles such as LinkedIn and Twitter can be a great way for potential clients to connect with team members.

7. Perform a Conversion Audit

You need to audit your landing pages from time to time in order to find the strengths and weaknesses points. Optimizing the conversion rate is essential to convert traffic to leads.

A Few Key Terms

• A/B or Split Testing: In A/B testing, only one page element is tested at a time. For example, you can test the CTA button to know what color that can perform better – according to a research, red CTA button measured in effectiveness to a green CTA button.
• Multivariate Testing (MVT): In MVT, different page elements are tested at a time. For example, you can test many variations of the images, copy and CTA used on the page in many combinations to know what works well for converting traffic to leads.

8. Use a Dynamic (Interactive) Content

Static content will not encourage website’s visitors to engage with your content or they may not return if they receive the same digital experience repeatedly. So, to win a repeated traffic and a high conversion rate you need to consider using a dynamic content. For example, if a visitor returned back to any specific landing page, it’s a good practice to change the content in a way that encourage him to take action such as changing the content according to his past behavior on this page.

Here are some areas to consider:

• Forms
• Calls to Action
• Product Recommendations
• Dynamic content fields that can be customized based on previously given information such as visitor name, company name, phone number, email address, location, interests, past purchases, opinions, etc.

From the above practices we can understand that generating leads through website is not an easy task and need a lot of effort. Also, there are several practices that should be considered such as:

• Tracking calls
• Identifying where visitors are scrolling to and clicking
• Analyzing Google Analytics data
• Implementing live chat
• Using an exit popup window
• Keyword-focused header

Here is a link for the best tech website designs.