The Importance of Highlighting Calls to Action
When a software company attracts a prospect to their website, I originally thought that most prospects would not take the time to complete an online form, but would rather call or email the vendor directly.
However, when I recently surveyed many of our software companies - particularly ones that were doing a good job of converting visitors to leads, I discovered that in fact most (upwards of 95%) of their leads come from people completing an online form. Apparently, the key to getting visitors to submit their contact info is two-fold:
1) Highlight a clear call to action / free offer on every web page (case study, trial, etc.). When a user clicks on it, direct them to an online form.
2) Make the online form as brief as possible. Less is more. Simply obtain the name, company, email and phone - plenty of info to follow up to further qualify the lead.
Furthermore, by generating leads in this fashion, you are setup to easily track the referring campaign for each lead through the use of tagged URLs and cookies. By adding a tag such as ?source=capterra to the end of each of your ad links, your ability to identify the referrer increases substantially. (Web analytic tools fail to identify the referrer for 10-15% of your visitors.)
And once the referrer is identified you can create a cookie that will follow that visitor as they browse through your website and eventually complete an online form. So for every person that completes a form, the cookie enables your salesperson to know which campaign referred them. That way there is no reliance on the prospect to remember how they found your site since they usually forget and you will be positioned to accurately measure the ability of each campaign to generate leads.
However, when I recently surveyed many of our software companies - particularly ones that were doing a good job of converting visitors to leads, I discovered that in fact most (upwards of 95%) of their leads come from people completing an online form. Apparently, the key to getting visitors to submit their contact info is two-fold:
1) Highlight a clear call to action / free offer on every web page (case study, trial, etc.). When a user clicks on it, direct them to an online form.
2) Make the online form as brief as possible. Less is more. Simply obtain the name, company, email and phone - plenty of info to follow up to further qualify the lead.
Furthermore, by generating leads in this fashion, you are setup to easily track the referring campaign for each lead through the use of tagged URLs and cookies. By adding a tag such as ?source=capterra to the end of each of your ad links, your ability to identify the referrer increases substantially. (Web analytic tools fail to identify the referrer for 10-15% of your visitors.)
And once the referrer is identified you can create a cookie that will follow that visitor as they browse through your website and eventually complete an online form. So for every person that completes a form, the cookie enables your salesperson to know which campaign referred them. That way there is no reliance on the prospect to remember how they found your site since they usually forget and you will be positioned to accurately measure the ability of each campaign to generate leads.
1 Comments:
Another quick tip: it doesn't hurt to have text like "Welcome Capterra visitors" on the landing page either.
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