Website ROI: How to Generate Qualified Leads

Today we’re going to delve into what your website needs in order to generate the most qualified leads. Please note the word qualified; I’m not talking about random leads, I’m talking about a lead that actually wants your product and has the motivation and budget to make a purchase.

This is the second article in our 4-part series to answer the question: What is the ROI of my company website? If you haven’t read the first article, please do so as it will help you make the most of this, as well as the next two posts in the series.

Here are some ways in which you can generate qualified leads via your website.

Content

We all know content matters. We also know that more content is being generated than can be consumed.

So, where’s the happy medium?

It’s probably best to have some analytical data that shows how much your target audience reads per week, but if that’s not an option, refer to yourself:

How much leisure reading do you do per week?
How much work-related reading do you do per week?

That should get you started on how much and what type of blogging your company should be doing. And before you ask, yes, a blog generates leads but it isn’t the most important content on your site.

Well, if it’s not blogging, then what is the most important content on your website? The products and features page! The companies that succeed in writing excellent copy on this page usually generate the most leads.

Why?

If written well, the content on these pages is concise, gives readers exactly the kind of information they need, and each sentence has a purpose. Giving people highly relevant and useful information about your products and services? That’s got to work!

Design

Yes, the design of your website plays a role in whether or not it will generate leads. Mostly, we’re focusing on color schemes when thinking about lead generation (the ‘triangle’ and above-the-fold principles are also important). Every color has a meaning or action associated with it. For example, blue inspires confidence.

You’ll have to decide on the purpose of each page and accordingly assign colors to it. For instance, keep the company blog page aesthetically appealing. You don’t want to bombard your readers with striking colors here, because it will only distract them from the information you want to convey. Save your true reds (a color that entices an action) for CTAs or contact information — basically for content that needs to stand out.

Tools

There are various plug-ins that allow you to have a ‘live chat’ with visitors. A live chat is helpful, but should also be non-intrusive. This means no pop-ups in the middle of the screen. However, as we know from design principles, the last place someone is going to look at is the bottom right of the screen (this is where I see most live chat windows).

So, where do we place such an important plug-in? My suggestion: Code the tool so that as a visitor starts to scroll down on any page other than the home page, the live chat bar appears on the left side of the screen. Visitors are most likely to see it there and they won’t be annoyed by it getting in the way of what they’re doing.

Webinars/Online Events

Step one, stream live webinars and record them. Take the recorded version and include it in your resources page. Step two, make it extremely easy for them to be able to find when the next webinar is and create a seamless and short registration page for the purpose.

There’s no point in putting up a webinar if it takes users more than a minute to find when the next one is going to be held. Visitors have very short attention spans.

Please note: People are taking time out of their busy work days in order to attend your webinar so make it useful! Make the content something they can’t get by running a simple search on the matter. Also note, a popular tactic to get people to attend webinars is by giving away free stuff—but in doing so you dilute the number of viewers who are actually motivated to buy because their motivation instead is to get the free stuff.

As we did in the first installment of this series, I encourage you to take a look at what you’re already doing. Where can you improve? Are you already doing some of these things? Leave a comment and let me know!