25 Ways to Increase Sales and Lead Generation

Want to increase your company’s profitability from your website? Generating traffic is only half the battle. You can spend months focusing on doubling traffic to your website, but if you don’t have compelling offers, effective calls-to-action, and convincing lead nurturing campaigns, you won’t have a way to turn that traffic into leads and ultimately profits.  

Here are 25 ways you can increase website conversions, not only to the point of becoming a lead, but to the point of becoming a qualified lead.

Calls-to-action do best “above the fold” - the space of your webpage viewable to the user without having to scroll down.  According to heat map analysis, anything “below the fold” will only be viewed by 50% of people who view your page. Doubling impressions on your CTAs can significantly increase your website leads. 

Be crystal clear about what the offer is in your CTA. And be specific. If you’re giving away a free guide, say “Download our FREE guide to X”. If you’re hosting a free webinar, say “Register for our FREE webinar on X.” X should clearly convey a compelling benefit of receiving the offer. This is much more effective than “Download Now” or “Get a Free Article.” These simply aren’t specific enough.

Images stand out on a webpage more than text does, and get a lot more attention, as proven by the heat map study. Additionally, using an image will allow you to show off the offer in a way you can’t necessarily convey using text alone.

Your web designer might kick and scream about this, but if your call-to-action blends in too much with your site design, it won’t stand out as much. You want as many eyeballs to land on that call-to-action as possible, so use contrasting colors to make the CTA stand out.

You’d be surprised by how many times I’ve seen calls-to-action that aren’t links. Whether intentional or a matter of forgetfulness, the lack of a link will make it much harder for visitors to find out how to get the offer, and they’ll likely give up. So double, triple, and quadruple check to make sure all of your CTAs link to their corresponding landing pages.

CTAs shouldn’t be one size fits all. If your company offers various products or services, you may want to consider creating a different offer for each. Then you can place CTAs linking to each offer on the website pages that are most relevant to that offer.

Whenever you create a new blog content, choose an offer that’s the most relevant to that blog post. Then add a call-to-action to the bottom of that blog post linking to the landing page for that offer. Informational offers such as ebooks, guides, and webinars do very well in this space, because people reading your blog would likely be eager to get more free information from you.

Keep your messaging consistent on both your CTA and the headline of the landing page. If people click a link for a free offer and then find out there’s a catch on the landing page, you’ll instantly lose their trust. Similarly, if the headline reads differently than the CTA, it might lead to confusion, and the user might wonder of the CTA linked to the wrong page.

This is the biggest mistake I see in landing pages. People often try to be too clever or witty in the headline, and it’s not clear what the offer actually is. Again, if you’re giving away a free guide, say “Download our FREE Guide to Improving X”. Plain and simple.

Just like you want to have your call-to-action above the fold, it’s ideal for the form to be above the fold as well. This way, there can’t be any confusion as to what’s expected from the viewer on this page: they need to fill out the form to get what you’re offering. 

“Simple” does not always mean “short.” What you ask for on a form should match the information your sales team needs from your leads to make the sale. For top of the buying cycle folks at the beginning of their research process, name and email address might suffice. For more committed prospects at the bottom of the buying cycle, you might want to ask for some qualifiers like job title or city/state, and perhaps ask for a phone number. Just try not to ask for more than what’s necessary.

Your landing page doesn’t have a visual masterpiece, but it should show what your offer is all about. If your business is something a bit more abstract, just take a screenshot of your guide/whitepaper/eBook/etc. and add the image to your landing page. You can use freeware like Jing to easily capture and save screenshots.

Be brief and to the point; it’s the offer where you give the prospect more information. In addition to your headline, have a brief paragraph explaining what the offer is, followed by a few bullet points outlining what the offer consists of and what the benefits are.

Make it clear in your brief paragraph and/or bullet points what the benefits of the offer are. It’s more than just listing what the offer is comprised of; it takes a bit of spin. Instead of “Includes specifications of product XYZ,” say something like “Find out how XYZ can increase productivity 50%.” 

When a prospect reaches your landing page, you’re just a few keystrokes away from getting their contact information. So don’t distract them with links that will take them further away from your goal of getting a lead. The thank you page, shown after a prospect fills out a form and becomes a lead, will give you the opportunity to return the navigation and links. 

When creating a thank you page, not only can you give back the navigation, but you can provide other links to keep the lead engaged. You can provide call to actions to the next step in the buying cycle, link them to your blog, encourage them to follow you on Twitter, ask them to subscribe to your newsletter, and more. You can do more with your thank you pages than just adding tracking code!

Your offer should answer the question: “What’s in it for me?” Things like pricing brochures, specs, and self-promotional videos are not compelling offers, because they do not answer that question. Informational items like whitepapers, guides, and webinars are compelling offers because they do. See the difference?

Although lead nurturing is a very powerful tool, provide a way for your leads to find you again besides through email; especially if they are more inclined to ignore email from people they don’t know. If they enjoyed your whitepaper (which is remarkable, so of course they did!), make it easy for them to remember where they got the whitepaper from by linking to your site on your cover page.

Just like your forms might vary for each phase of the buying cycle, your offers should as well. Someone at the top of the buying cycle may be more interested in an informational piece like a guide or ebook, whereas someone more committed at the bottom of the cycle might be more interested in a free trial or demo. You don’t need to pick and choose; create offers for each phase, and include a primary and secondary CTA to these offers on various pages throughout your site.

I’m being repetitive about this for a reason: I’ve seen this mistake made too many times, and it’s such an easy fix. Always be crystal clear about what you are offering. Keep your email short and sweet. Instead of prefacing your offer with two paragraphs about your company’s background, get to the point. What are the tips you want to share with your prospects? How can they benefit from subscribing to your blog? Why should they care what new offer you have on your site? 

It’s awfully hard to measure the success of your lead nurturing emails by the unsubscribe rate alone. Include links back to your site so that you can test variations, and measure what works and what doesn’t. These links don’t have to be CTAs leading to landing pages. You can link to more free information on your blog, encourage people to follow you on Twitter, etc.

People don’t want to read dense paragraphs of text in their email. Just like your landing pages, have a brief paragraph with a free bit of information, a few bullet points of tips or guide steps, and a link back to your site to find out more information. Save the actual bottom-of-the-cycle-offer CTA for one of your later lead nurturing emails, so it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to sell sell sell right out of the gate.

The subject line is arguably the most important part of a lead nurturing campaign. Without an attention-grabbing title, people won’t open your email to read everything else you have to say. Clearly state how the recipient will benefit from reading your email. 

Text-only lead nurturing emails are successful for a number of reasons. Not only do they reduce the risk of your email being sent directly to the SPAM folder, but emails seem more personal if they are written as though they could have been written for the individual reader, rather than a newsletter template that’s been sent to thousands of people. 

Everything on your site can be tweaked and tested in order to improve conversion rates. After a CTA has been on your homepage for a month, vary the messaging or swap out an entirely new CTA and after another month, and measure which has performed best. If your offer CTA is in your 2nd lead nurturing email, move it to the 3rd and see if click-through rates increase. If landing page conversions are low, move the form above the fold and measure the results. Don’t be afraid to test different variations; you can always switch back if the old version worked better. It will be worth it when you’ve found a combination that increases your site conversions.

What are some of the tweaks you've made to your website to increase conversions and sales? Share your tips in the comments below!

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13 Business Blogging Mistakes and Their Easy Fixes [Ebook]

HubSpot makes closed-loop internet marketing software that integrates your sales and marketing activities. It's simple really.

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New Chart: Most Effective Email Marketing Objectives for 2011

In my last post on email, I talked about email marketing challenges. Today, I’d like to focus on email marketing objectives.

There are many good reasons for email marketing. Send out a well thought out and timed email and you can see sales jump. Unfortunately, many companies get addicted to email sends that produce instant sales, and when the numbers decrease, they wonder why.

That’s why it’s so important to set your objective for your email marketing. What do you want and expect from your email sends? Once you figure that out you can measure the effectiveness of these objectives.

So which objectives are most effective?

This should not be a surprise since with emails you want people to click to your landing pages or website.

But the number 2, according to MarketingSherpa, may come as a bit of a surprise – building brand awareness.

People often overlook the value of email as a brand awareness tool – but think about it for a moment, and you can see why.

To begin with, most business emails are not opened. According to eMarketer, the average open rate for a marketing email is 19.1%. That leaves 80% of your sends not being opened. However, there is a better chance that your prospect saw either your company’s name in the “from” line and read your subject line, but chose not to open your email.  Each time your email arrives in an inbox means you’re making your prospect aware of you. That’s why it’s so important to create a consistency with your subject line, because each subject line builds a little more brand awareness and identity.

And, when your email is opened (and read), it’s important that you provide them with information they expect from your brand.

The number 3 most effective objective is increasing sales revenue. That’s easier said than done, and requires coordination between the email, the offer and the landing page. One of the best ways to learn how to do this effectively is to read up on case studies. At MarketingSherpa’s upcoming Email Summit 2011, there are a number of sessions that deal directly with increasing sales through email. One is a panel how to develop content for specific buying stages and another is a case study on turning innovation into new revenues. 

Do you agree with these email marketing objectives?  What will you concentrate on during 2011?

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New Chart: Biggest Challenges Facing Email Marketing in 2011

Email marketing is tied to inbound marketing: inbound brings in the leads, email nurtures them and sends them back to the website or landing page which, in turn, offers valuable content that helps convert the lead into a sale.

This lead generating and nurturing cycle relies on every piece of the marketing puzzle working to its fullest. That’s why every inbound marketer needs to understand the challenges that go with email marketing and what works best in order to leverage it effectively. Let’s start with the biggest challenge to email marketing effectiveness.

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, the #1 challenge to email marketing effectiveness is targeting your prospects and customers with highly relevant content.

 What’s interesting about these findings is that the one thing a company can control is the relevance of its content.

The issue is that the more targeted your email campaigns, the more content is required.  According to MarketingSherpa, a reason for this challenge is that “developing a sufficient amount of content is a time-intensive process that many marketers do not have the resources to produce.”

Key to creating relevant content in email is to make sure your email messages:

Provide an offer that is connected to the initial requestOffer content that fits the needs of the recipientAre sent at the right time and with the right frequency

To accomplish these tactics, you need a well segmented database so that you can better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages - content, offers, as well as timing.

Like landing pages which need to be tested and tweaked to improve conversions, email should also be tested for open, click-through, and conversion rates.

Things to test include:

Subject lineHeadlinesCalls-to-action OffersHTML vs. TextLength of copy

One of the reasons relevant content is so critical is that the minute an email recipient starts to feel like your emails are no longer relevant, they’ll stop reading them. You don’t get too many second chances these days.

What I find helpful is to read as many case studies as I can, to find out what’s working in the real world. At MarketingSherpa’s upcoming Email Summit 2011, there are a number of sessions that deal directly with crafting effective email messages, as well as a session from HubSpot’s Mike Volpe on how to integrate your inbound marketing with your email marketing.

In my next post on email marketing, I will be talking about the most effective email marketing objectives for 2011.

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blekko: The Search Engine for SEOs

Have you heard about blekko yet? I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t. It just launched a few days ago. Most people outside of the tech space probably wont know about blekko for a very long time, if ever. However, for those of us who spend a substantial amount of our business life online, blekko is worth taking a look at.

blekko, often referred to as the slashtag search engine, is the newest contender to come into the highly competitive search space. It’s a full-fledged search engine with it’s own search index. What blekko has done to try and set itself apart from the other search engines is introduce /slashtags. Slashtags make it easy for anyone to create a vertical search engine around any topic. One of the neatest features of slashtags is customizing your searches to only show you results from a particular viewpoint. For instance, to see websites from a liberal point of view you would use the built-in /liberal slashtag. But, since there are plenty of other posts from around the web discussing that, I’ll dive right into what I’m interested most which is their webmaster and SEO tools.

Using blekko’s webmaster tools is a snap. You don’t even have to be logged in. Simply do a normal search around any topic or website you like and links to the available tools will appear right below the title of each listing.

By default only a few result links appear, but you can easily change your preferences to show the links you’re most interested in. My example above shows all available result links; tag, seo, dup, rss, links, cache, source, ip, site, similar, chatter and spam. I did find a bug, however. Whenever I changed my logged-in preferences it would reset to default after I deleted my cookies.

Let’s take a look at the seo data by clicking on the “seo” link or by typing “http://www.seorankings.com/ /seo” in the search box.

That pulls up some stats on the page including a description which is actually your title tag. Domain / URL Host Rank, Inbound Links and Site Pages which can all be expanded. There are also a couple of link location pie graphs which I find somewhat useless. And, a number of other tabs and hyperlinks pointing to additional data too.

All in all there is a lot of free data provided here which you can use in addition to other tools you are already using. Like most of the tools available the data provided is only a small sample of what is really going on on the web. I’ve read some reports claiming blekko has an index of around 3 billion documents, whereas Google and Bing are reported to have 10+ billion pages in their indices. So you definitely don’t want to rely on this data alone to make assumptions about why a particular website is ranking the way it is in any of the other major search engines.

One of the most disappointing things I found was even with all of the great link data provided, they failed to tell you which links were dofollow and nofollow back links. I know it’s supposed to be a search engine first, but considering everything that has been provided it seems like a waste because analyzing link data isn’t very helpful when those details aren’t readily available. Hopefully they’ll consider adding that information in the near future. Update: Rich left me a comment below letting me know the nofollow data is actually available now, but a little hard to find. See http://blekko.com/ws/http:%2F%2Fwww.seorankings.com%2F+/urlseo#inbound_tab.

Another miss was that Google faired better for most of the searches I performed. Especially last night when I was looking for the latest Washington state senate results. I couldn’t find anything immediately helpful in blekko, whereas Google showed me the latest results right within the SERP as well as several other up-to-the-minute listings. In blekko’s defense, Google has been at this game for several years now.

Either way, blekko provides some of the best free SEO data available for analyzing the competition, which makes it worth taking a look at. And it also shows some potential as a search engine.

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Look Ma, No Toolbar! Tips For Quality Link Building Without PR

The following is a guest post by M.-J. Taylor of Cyber-Key.com.

Years ago when Google regularly pushed PageRank (PR) data to its toolbar, figuring out the value of a potential link was pretty simple. The more PageRank, the fewer outbound links, the more valuable. Today, the toolbar isn’t even updated quarterly and webmasters have to do a little more analysis to assess the value of a link.

Where do you start? Look for quality and relevance. We might not be able to see the current PR of a page, but we do know that PageRank affects crawl rate, so it’s logical to conclude that a quality page will be cached recently. A page that has not been crawled within the past month is probably not pushing much link power.

Is the content relevant to your target page? Are the other outbound links relevant? What’s the quality of the other websites the pages links to? In other words, what sort of a neighborhood are you joining? Will the anchor text benefit your site?

Sometimes the page may not yet have the value you’d like, but if you know it’s a new page, you can look at the other similar pages on the site to determine whether that page will carry value in the future. For example, you might want to decide between two article directories. Examine other pages in your niche to see what sort of crawl rate they seem to be getting; look to see whether older pages have toolbar PR. Who else is writing for the directory? What’s the quality of their content?

Some websites are just gimmes! That is, you know a link from them is worthwhile – .edu and .gov sites if you can get them – and when they are relevant. Links from your industry association or from your local chamber of commerce. Charitable websites or links from any organization you sponsor.

New SEOs frequently ask, what about link exchanges? Link exchanges still have value when they are highly relevant. Let’s say you have a restaurant in a popular tourist destination. It makes sense that you would exchange links with your vendors, and perhaps with websites for accommodations or attractions in your area. You might even feel comfortable exchanging links with some other restaurants in your area. After all, most visitors and locals will patronize more than one place.

The key is always relevance and usability. Ask yourself: am I helping the visitor to my website? If the answer is yes, the link is likely to drive traffic between the two sites, and that alone makes the exchange is worthwhile. The important thing to remember about exchanges is that they should only be a small part of your overall link profile. You want as many links as possible to be one way.

Ready for more? Read this article on link building 101 for more tips and techniques to get the backlinks you need.

M.-J. Taylor is the founder of Cyber Key, Inc., an SEO web design firm based in Key West, Florida and Asheville, North Carolina. M.-J. is a marketing consultant and SEO copywriter. In her spare time she enjoys being a forum moderator on WebProWorld, V7n and SEOworkers.

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Is Your Google Maps Listing Up to Date?

I don’t know if I should be calling it Google Maps, Google Places, or Google Local; because when you submit your site to Google Places you’ll show up in Google Maps. Anyway, I prefer to just call it Google Maps to help avoid any confusion. But that’s not really the point of this post….

What is really important is for you to get your Google Maps listing up-to-date if it’s not already, because Google is making major SERP changes that could affect you.

Have you seen some of the latest local search results?

I wasn’t able to show you the entire page, but organic / map integrated listings took up the first 8 organic search results. Between that and the sponsored listings that only left two 100% organic listings for most of the local searches I tested.

From looking at my past and current clients it appears the organic listing is more heavily weighted than the maps listing when it comes to your rankings. However, the updated map listings with some reviews, stars and Google tags definitely stood out.

As Google continues to try and further monetize their search results you can see the direction Google is going and how important it is for you to stay on top of your local listing.

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