Have you ever wanted to set a room of marketers into a blazing argument? It’s easy, just ask them whether pop-up ads work. There is strong evidence that they can work, with certain sites reporting doubled email subscription rates and little to no impact on user engagement. However, users vocally dislike them, with 82.2% stating that they dislike pop-ups. 

It is difficult for marketers to square vocal user dissent with positive data and the reason lies in the troubled history of pop-ups.

Why web pop-ups have such a tumultuous reputation

Now let’s take a look at the history of pop-ups in order to better understand how best to use them. As commerce rose with the web — so did the associated marketing. You may remember the dark days when a slew of pop-ups were everywhere we went.

The source of this nuisance was Ethan Zuckerman and the website tripod.com in the 1990s. According to Zuckerman, the idea came to be when a major car company became concerned that its content was appearing on porn sites. The pop-up ad was designed to dissociate the advertisement from the content on the page and protect the advertiser’s brand. 

By 1997, the pop-up plague had spread to sites across the net, including Geocities, AOL, and The New York Times. Pop-up ads were more effective than traditional banner ads, and this quickly led to the proliferation of more nefarious variants. 

Adware (software built primarily to advertise to users) like Gator began to appear. Gator was normally installed along with other free applications. This allowed Gator to collect data on its users and deliver pop-up ads to match user “interests.” As pop-up ads became more obnoxious and invasive, efforts to block them stepped up. Now, most browsers include some kind of anti-pop-up ad features. 

Today, the pop-up ad has evolved into a more docile specimen. It is primarily used to encourage users to subscribe to newsletters or purchase one of the site’s products. Despite this evolution, most users still associate pop-up ads with the days of the early web, and it has proven difficult for marketers to shake that association. 

Should you use website pop-ups? 

Despite this troubled past, the pop-up plague might not be as virulent as users say it is. Like everything else, pop-ups have both pros and cons. 

The evidence shows that they still work 

The biggest pro, and probably the only one you will care about, is that pop-ups are one of the best lead acquisition tools out there. A 9% conversion rate means that you could get 90 new subscribers or sales for every 1,000 users.

The evidence consistently demonstrates that despite vocal complaints, users are engaging with pop-up ads. A study from Sumo found that the average conversion rate of a pop-up ad was 3%, the average of top-performing pop-ups was 9%, and that one particularly good pop-up ad had a 50% conversion rate. 

These findings have been corroborated time and again and the same message keeps coming up: Users say they hate them, but will consistently engage with well-designed pop-ups that add to, rather than distract from, the experience. 

They’re useful for promoting new or important content 

Pop-ups can also be used to take users to specific content on your website. This can be something like a base page that the user may need to see (eg, an FAQ or returns policy). The placement of these kinds of pop-ups can be difficult to determine. Analytics should help determine where visitors might get stuck and be open to a helpful pop-up.

More commonly, navigation-oriented pop-ups are used to highlight a new page or item for sale. This is particularly useful before search engines pick up new pages and display them in organic search results. For this purpose, the pop-ups should be placed on high-traffic pages.

Timing these pop-ups is critically important. See the section Timing is everything below for more about this.

Pop-up issues to avoid

There are some cons with pop-ups, however. The most obvious is that they can disrupt the flow of your site and may offend a small proportion of users enough that they no longer want to engage. This can be mitigated with best practices.

But arguably a bigger problem is that users acquired by pop-ups are not as engaged as those who signed up through landing pages. This issue too can be limited by designing the right pop-ups and targeting them correctly.

How to craft engaging and useful pop-ups

Pop-ups are an invaluable lead generation tool when used properly. But you need to avoid driving users away. Luckily there are a large number of studies into how users interact with pop-ups. By combining that with your own experiences you can build successful pop-ups. 

1. Design for your audience 

The first step to creating a great pop-up is to nail the content. To do this, you need to spend time understanding what works for your audience. But generally, a good starting point is to make sure that you have: 

• A catchy headline
• Bright Colors
• A unique offering
• A strong call to action (CTA).
• A catchy image.

You might not need all these things, but the key is to produce something that will catch attention without annoying your users. This means it needs to be understated (no flashing animations). Sometimes, just four words with an email capture field are enough. Other times, you’ll need to produce something more complicated. No matter what you do, make sure that you reduce friction by keeping the capture field simple. 

It’s also important to keep your unique value proposition in mind. The product is important but users are:

• 11.9% more likely to click on a pop-up if it offers a discount
• 4.8% more likely if they can win something 
• 4.4% more likely if they know they’ll get access to exclusive offers. 

If you can properly marry these elements, you have the foundation of your pop-up sorted. Just remember that design is only the first step. 

2. Timing is everything 

One of the key driving factors for any ad campaign, but particularly for pop-ups, is context. If a pop-up is served at the wrong moment it could do more harm than good. Given the right context, a pop-up can have a conversion rate of more than 40%. The wrong context can make it fail immediately. 

Let’s say that you have written a new e-book and want to encourage your customers to buy it. They need to first understand what it is your site offers, and why they should care about the ebook before you even mention it to them. In other words, they need context about your offer. 

In order to give context, you need to time your pop-ups perfectly. This will require some dialing in but there are some best practices:

• Never show a pop-up on entering the site, but don’t wait longer than 60 seconds or you risk losing users.
• In order to maximize engagement, you should time your pop-up to the moment when a user is connecting with your content. 

3. Don’t overuse pop-ups

What is the main complaint about pop-ups? Forty-five percent of users complain that they are everywhere. This problem becomes exacerbated if you are continuously bombarding your users with pop-ups. A further 19.2% of users are annoyed when they see the same pop-up every time they visit your website. 

If annoying your users wasn’t motivation enough, think about diminishing returns. There are some sites I love, for example, The Guardian, but I now completely ignore their requests for payments or for me to sign up because I have become numb to their pop-ups. 

Luckily, this is easy to rectify. In order for your pop-ups to be successful, you need to target them carefully. So don’t use blanket pop-ups across your site. Tailor them to the specific piece of content that your user is engaging with. Additionally, you should take advantage of cookies in order to avoid showing regular visitors pop-ups too often. 

TL;DR? Pop-ups are brilliant when they’re used correctly

Now is probably the best time to look into adding pop-ups to your website. Although the pandemic has generally been hard for businesses, There have been some bright spots. Some online business sectors surged, with conversions and revenue being driven by pop-ups. For example, business and finance sites, including news sites like Bloomberg.com, online brokers like Schwab, and broker review sites, have seen exponential surges in traffic and revenue.

The key takeaway here is that pop-ups are a valuable tool to add to your website. But they’re just one part of your arsenal. Without great content, a strong hook, and perfect timing, pop-ups won’t do much to help you.

If you plan your pop-up strategy correctly, then it can become one of the best ways for you to attract new sign-ups or leads, without hampering engagement. 

Getting a small business up and running is hard work—there’s no easy way to rake in profits. And lead generation can be time-consuming if you don’t know how to approach it.

Some small businesses struggle with lead generation because their level of effort and their desired outcomes aren’t aligned. Some entrepreneurs might think you just make a couple of calls, send a couple of emails, and poof—customers are trying to beat down your door.

But the truth is, like any other aspect of starting a business, you get out of lead generation only what you put into it. If you invest tons of thought, energy, and resources into your long-term sales and marketing strategies, such as content marketing and SEO, but you throw phone calls and emails at the wall as a short-term way to supplement your pipeline, you’re missing a huge revenue opportunity.

I get it: Not everyone has a dedicated employee or team who can anguish over the details of every outbound email or call script. For some organizations, that’s just not feasible. But every team, even a team of one, can spare the time to devote some degree of attention to these areas. Doing so will lead to a substantial increase in both your reply rates and your conversion rates.

Nurturing leads is key

Lead generation is especially important for small businesses because it’s a way to level the playing field. As HubSpot’s guide to lead generation suggests, lead generation options aside from cold emails and calls can include live events, online content, coupons, job applications, and blog posts.

Lead generation is a major priority for companies of all sizes. A Content Marketing Institute study found that 80 percent of respondents were prioritizing lead generation in their content marketing strategies. Additionally, companies that focus on nurturing their leads generate 50 percent more sales, but it costs them 33 percent less, according to Forrester research.

Sure, companies from large to small are using these tools, but those that wield them best are the ones that win. Even if your competitor has 10 times the people, software, and resources, any creative team has a chance to succeed. If you have an employee willing to take the time to prospect, engage, and nurture the right leads—or you’re ready to do it yourself—you’ll win every time.

Implementing a lead generation plan that can help your small business starts with four simple steps:

1. Build your buyer personas

Identifying and creating buyer or user personas doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out process. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer—your personal should have a name, a specific age and occupation, and a particular reason for being in your ideal target market.  

I highly recommend taking the time to build out detailed personas. Dozens of examples are waiting online. Data points like title, industry, revenue, challenges, and goals are great to have in your buyer personas.

If you’re not sure where to start, conduct an audit of your current clients. What industries do they focus on? What is the title of the decision maker who greenlit your contract? Identify the most frequently appearing industries, titles, and more, and use those as a foundation for building a persona. You can’t effectively create marketing messaging or content campaigns until you know exactly who it is you’re trying to attract. Similarly, you or your salesperson need to know what kind of leads you need to convert.

2. Obtain a small email list

Let’s say your buyer persona research gave you two clear winners: You sign more CEOs of SaaS companies and CTOs of logistics companies, for example, than any other customer segment. Consider how different messaging might appeal to each of these types of people before you launch your email campaign. Once you’ve determined what message your emails will contain, generate the list of people you’re contacting.

Ideally, your list will start out with 500 to 1,000 emails of relevant recipients. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of list resources out there. But if you don’t want to purchase a list, you can always look at your inbound marketing-qualified leads who are “stuck” in the pipeline. For whatever reason, sales conversations haven’t taken place with these people. They could use a push, and marketing content can be the perfect nudge in the right direction.

3. Write two email sequences

Write clear, relevant emails to your target audience. Start with an introduction. The sweet spot is between 90 and 120 words. The intro should serve as an introduction to your company and should compel recipients to respond. Follow up with two “bump” emails—that’s right, you’ll need multiple follow-up emails.

These should serve as a reminder that you and your company still exist. Your best strategy here is to use one or two lines to point the recipient back to your intro. Remember that all people, your email recipients included, would rather be talked to, not at. That’s why tailored emails lead to 58 percent of total revenue for certain businesses.

If you don’t receive a response, the fourth email should be used to reintroduce the reader to your company. Try a different value proposition than you used in your introduction. Your last message should concede that perhaps you haven’t reached the reader at the right time. Say that you’ll reach back out in a few months. The secret sixth step is that you actually do reach out in a few months. Your goal is to get a response—it’s important to keep trying until you get a clear answer.

4. Send email sequence A to half of your email list and email sequence B to the other half

Following our example of primary buyer personas above, let’s say that 250 to 500 of your emails go to CEOs of SaaS companies, and the other 250 to 500 go to CTOs of logistics companies. Monitor the results and field responses as they come in.

Monitor the right metrics

Once this campaign is complete, consider what worked and what didn’t. Did you have a low open rate? Try out a new subject line and different preview text. Did you have a low rate of replies? See whether a different value proposition offers more for your audience to resonate with.

Identify benchmarks and set goals

Some easy benchmarks to aim for are a 20 percent open rate and a 3 percent reply rate. If your results aren’t quite there, keep tweaking until they exceed these benchmarks. If your results are exceeding these thresholds, on the other hand, spend some time reverse-engineering what worked so well. While you don’t want to use the identical messaging in every campaign, having some underlying principles from the get-go will save you time and get you more leads in the future.

Dedicating time and energy to lead generation is one of the best ways for small companies to level the playing field. Like any good marketing strategy, lead generation is a long-term process; when done well, it brings about huge results. Use these four steps to implement a plan that helps your business keep up with—or even overtake—the competition.

Building trust among visitors to your landing page is just one of the solutions to overcome the “going for the jugular” flaw that was previously discussed. Not to double back on topics for the sake of rambling, but this point is just too important to not have its own post dedicated to it. It is mind boggling how many people don’t incorporate any element of trust or security into their landing pages. In fact, I did a quick Google images search for the phrase “landing page examples” and 60 percent of the first 20 results didn’t have any trust building elements on their landing page. Now this obviously isn’t an accurate portrayal of the whole World Wide Web, but it is just a brief eye opener.

Why is Building Trust Important?

Trust is ingrained in human nature. It forms the foundation of most successful (substantial) relationships in life both on a personal level and in business. Just think—how sturdy would your relationship be with your best friend or significant other if there was no trust? Not very! Now switch that into a business context. Would you want buy (or lease/finance) a car if you didn’t trust that the manufacturer delivered a product that you deemed trustworthy? Absolutely not.

Most people will agree that in any business relationship that lasts a significant amount of time there is a high level of trust involved. Yet as seen with my brief research, 60 percent of those landing pages didn’t incorporate any elements to build trust. This is detrimental to the success of a landing page and ultimately it impacts the overall internet marketing efforts of your company. Remember: You have less than 10 seconds to convince a first-time website visitor to give you their information, so that they become a lead.

There are a million studies conducted by Unbounce and other companies regarding the impact trust has on the conversions that take place on your landing page. But a metric that I have continually referred to is a study done by Tim Ash, the author of Landing Page Optimization, which states he was able to increase conversions by 20 to 40 percent simply by adding trust symbols to client websites. Now I know these numbers may be a bit extreme, and expecting your landing page to experience this type of increase will most likely leave you slighty frustrated. However, after reading all the posts in this series and following all of its advice, you should undoubtedly experience an increase in conversions.

How to Build Trust with Trust Symbols

The phrase trust symbol is very broad. I consider trust symbols to be any icon, element or piece of information that will build trust in your website visitor. To help get a feel for what I’m referring to check out the list below:

• Testimonials From Satisfied Clients: Testimonials from clients that are happy and thrilled about your product or service are vital for your landing page. Here’s a tip: Ask for the testimonial as soon as the client signs up and is happy with what they have received. You want to capitalize on this enthusiasm. Also, include a photo or video testimonial if at all possible.
• Reviews and Ratings: Seeing as there are tons of options where customers can review and/or rate your service or product, it should be easy to include these on your landing page. You can look on Yelp, Angie’s List, Google, etc. and pull them onto your site.
• Badges of Membership: Badges of membership to organizations specific to your industry are very important. For example, if you are a plumber it would be ideal if you displayed the badge of the state plumbers’ association. This would show you are legitimate and accredited with the right credentials to perform the job.
• Other Badges: Other badges such as “Money Back Garauntee”, “Doctor Approved”, etc. should be included whenever applicable. Just be honest and real with your customer. Don’t put 30 day money back guarantee when you know it is rare you will actually give it to them. If the customer finds out you are lying, that will have a very negative impact on your business.

How to Build Trust with Security

Website security is just as important as trust, especially among eCommerce websites or websites where personal information (e.g., bank accounts, social security numbers, etc.) is shared. If you don’t think security is important for your landing page (or website) consider that this study conducted by McAfee showed that one brand boasted an increase in sales conversions near 20 percent.

There are a number of ways to make your landing page appear and function in a more secure manner. These are a few of my favorite methods:

• Secure Socket Layer (SSL): A secure socket layer (SSL) is a way for your website’s identity to be verified by a third party company like Verisign. This will keep all highly personal information encrypted so it is only received by the customer and the merchant (business).
• Other Services: Services such as TrustGuard provide protection for the processing of credit cards to ensure all information is locked down from hackers. Another service is eTrust which will examine your website to determine if it is secure enough for eCommerce transactions.

All of the mentioned methods will give you the permission to display a badge (trust symbol) on your website for visitors to see, letting them know that your website has been verified as secure.

Trust Building Conclusion

It is obvious that trust is important in both life and business. Understanding this simple fact and putting it into action will not only benefit your landing page but also your business as a whole. I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid the flaw of an insecure, un-trustworthy at all costs. If you don’t have access to a web developer or graphic designer to help make improvements to your landing page, just focus on the changes you are able to make (i.e., a text-based testimonial in your website’s copy). Then as your business evolves you can build out that dream landing page to convert the highest number of website visitors possible.

Unbounce created an amazing 5 minute scorecard that allows you to score your current landing pages so you know where to improve. Some of the information may not apply to your business or it may contain more advanced material, but I highly recommend checking it out!

In the next post, we will be looking at landing page flaw #4: Faulty Structure, Design and Color Choices.

What I mean by “going for the jugular”

This is a rather aggressive phrase given the nature of the article and undoubtedly stirs up images of National Geographic safari documentaries with lions and wildebeests. Those vivid images are a stretch, but aren’t far from how quickly asking for personal information without preliminary questions or building trust from a prospect can kill the chance of them becoming a lead.

As a generalization, let’s assume that most landing pages are seeking to acquire some kind of information from you in order to qualify you as a lead. This information will vary by industry but will usually consist of one or all of the following:

• First/last name
• Email
• Phone number
• Home Address
• Name of work place
• Work phone number
• Salary
• Social security number
• And more

Many web surfers have become comfortable providing personal information online. They won’t even bat an eye when offering their name or email address via a strangers website. Other individuals have a problem with this concept and won’t provide you with any information. However, it is safe to say that when asking for more personal information (i.e. home address, salary, social security number, etc.) most people will be very, very reluctant unless they trust whomever is responsible for the landing page.

Examples of going for the jugular

As stated above, each industry is different and some fall victim to going for the jugular lead generation practices more than others. With the below examples, think to yourself whether or not you would actually fill out these lead generation forms:

Example #1: A subtle attack (the claw scratch)

In the example, you will notice the landing page is asking for first name, last name, zip, email and phone. Most of this information wouldn’t be considered too personal, but asking for zip and phone will most likely make people a bit more weary to fill out the form.

Example #2: A slightly more aggressive attack (the non-deadly bite)

This example is a bit more aggressive than the previous one because it asks for type of policy, policy amount, first name, last name, address and two different types of phone number. The policy information being asked for makes this form much more personal to those who are considering filling it out.

Example #3: An aggressive attack (the kill)

This is a full-fledged attack on the landing page visitor. In order to get the life quote being offered they have to enter a ton of personal information. Most notably, height, weight, date of birth, gender and nicotine use.

How to overcome going for the jugular

As I pointed out earlier, each industry is unique and requires different information to qualify a lead so there is no set formula. However, there are two main solutions that can help you avoid going for the jugular:

Solution #1: Building trust

Trust is one of the most important factors when trying to convert a website visitor into a lead. So much so that another leading authority in landing pages, Tim Ash, claims that adding trust symbols to your landing page can increase conversions by anywhere from 20-40 percent. Trust can be built in a number of ways:

• Testimonials from satisfied individuals who used your service (and assumingly filled out the form on your landing page)
• Badges of membership and security labels
• Privacy policy stating that you won’t use their information for anything other than what is being intended when filling out the form
• Logos from larger companies you have worked with or who use your product/service
• Video of yourself or about your company that shows legitimacy

Solution #2: The preliminary details

In each example above, you will notice that the forms ask for all of the required information at once. A website visitor is directed to your landing page, knows very little about you (AKA doesn’t trust you) and then is asked to provide personal information. This will naturally make people reluctant to fill out the form. However, there are two ways you can attempt to avoid going for the jugular aside from the trust symbols:

Qualifying upon arrival

This can be difficult at times for some people with limited resources, but if you are able to monitor and dictate how the traffic is going to your landing page it will enable you to ask a fewer number of personal questions. For example, you are offering free mortgage consultations and are running pay-per-click ads on Google Adwords. The ads are being triggered when someone searches for “Adjustable-rate mortgage”. When someone clicks that ad they are being directed to a specific page where they are presented with a form. This form doesn’t need to ask for a bunch of personal information to qualify them because you can already assume the type of mortgage loan they are looking for is an adjustable rate mortgage.

Asking preliminary questions

This is more technical, but if you have an in-house or a reliable developer you can easily make the form on your landing page have multiple steps that are triggered based on a series of preliminary questions. For example, you have a landing page that is offering home loan quotes. Instead of overwhelming your potential lead with personal questions right off the bat, you ease into it with questions like, what type of loan are you looking for? or what type of home do you own? Then from there, the next step in the form could be something like what is your zip code? You are basically holding their hand, building there trust one question at a time while walking them down your lead generation pipeline.

As mentioned previously, there is no defined rule on what is the right type of information to ask a potential lead. It depends entirely on your industry and personal preference. I always recommend doing A/B testing if you have the resources to determine what will work best. But as a rule of thumb, less personal information is always better. The goal is to do the best job qualifying a lead on the fewest number of questions of personal questions possible. The reason being, eliminating one unnecessary field from your lead capture form can increase conversions by 50 percent (this will be discussed in its own post in the coming weeks).

In the next post, Landing Page Flaw #3: Fill In The Blanks, I will be looking at the difference between using fill in the blanks on your landing page forms vs. other methods available.

A call-to-action is a statement that tells your audience exactly what you want them to do the second they get to your landing page. In most cases it is one or two sentences using urgent, active language to stimulate a response from your visitor. In certain instances, a call-to-action may be located within an advertisement or other area that stands out from the rest of the page.

What makes a weak call-to-action?

A weak call-to-action is exactly what it says: weak! According to Nielsen Norman Group, the bounce rate of a well-built landing page is 70-90 percent and a visitor won’t last more than 10-20 seconds on a site. So if a visitor is plopping down on your landing page and wondering what they are supposed to do, your call-to-action isn’t strong enough.

Most landing pages that are guilty of weak call-to-actions fall under four categories:

Information overload: too many call-to-actions

If your landing page has more than one, maybe two call-to-actions you have too many. The Internet is a barrage of information everywhere you go, but your landing page shouldn’t be. Below I pulled a snippet from the landing page of Lowe’s Home Improvement where you can see six call-to-actions:

The call-to-action that stands out the most is the disaster relief donate options. Although this is important, I don’t think it is the ideal action Lowe’s would like you to make when visiting this page.

Too much copy or text

This differs slightly from information overload because this focuses on the amount of text included in your call-to-action. Some landing pages will have the call-to-action be a headline statement with some bulletpoints supporting that claim. Others will toss everything about their product or service at you all at once. The latter is experienced when visiting LeadFormix, which, oddly enough, is a lead generation software.

There is so much text on this page your head will hurt, your eyes will sting, and you will leave not a customer. It is extremely difficult to read the text let alone find the call-to-action which should be directing you to enter their sales funnel.

Distracting design

Design can be extremely powerful when influencing people to make a decision. It can also go overboard very quickly and destroy a successful landing page by leaving visitors attention cluttered by images and not allowing them to focus on the purpose of the page. This was experienced when visiting the PagePlus x6 webpage for the first time.

You will notice they cram six images along the bottom that are accompanied with text and a link to the respective page for more information. This distracts visitors away from the main call-to-action which is small and pushed to the right hand side (look for the small green buttons).

Not enough information: What am I signing up for?

This is the rarest of the four categories because most people go wayyy over the top, but it still can occur occasionally. Some landing pages have little design elements to highlight the important pieces of the webpage like the sign up form or call-to-actions. As was the case with AtTask’s landing page following:

It appears the main call-to-action is “Try AtTask”, which isn’t too bad of an attention grabber. But the font size is small so it doesn’t garner any attention, the color doesn’t make it “pop” to your eyes, there is no explanation about what AtTask really does for you, and the image to support the call-to-action is so small you can barely read it. The list could go on, but I believe you get the gist.

Make Your Call-to-Action Stronger

It is safe to assume the above examples are all in need of some adjustments. If your landing page has a weak call-to-action that falls under one of these categories, don’t worry. Below are five ways to make your call-to-action statement much, much stronger:

1. Be direct and to the point: Everyone thinks they are busy even when they aren’t. So messages that focus directly on a point will be more effective. If you want a landing page visitor to sign up, tell them “Sign up here for your free trial.”
2. Cater to your audience: The key to an effective call-to-action is knowing your audience. The call-to-action statement should be tailored directly to the target audience of your landing page. If your audience likes fishing, a statement like “Become the biggest fish in the pond” will work. Insider jargon will be highly ineffective.
3. Keep it is simple: With simplicity comes success. If you bombard the brains of your landing page visitors with a ton of information all at once, they will fry out and leave. Making a call-to-action simple to understand will be most effective, especially since the human mind is already pre-programmed from past experiences. This can be done with phrases such as “sign up,” “learn more,” “get your,” and “become a …”
4. Make it pop: If your call-to-action doesn’t stand out, it is worthless. You need your call-to-action to stand out among the other content on your site. Some ways to do this are through differentiating the font size, the font color, and using contrasting colors to the landing pages background.
5. Add some urgency: People are complacent by nature and need to be persuaded to make a decision. This premise holds true on your landing page. Using a call-to-action statement that creates a sense of urgency will help overcome this complacency. Such phrases as “Limited time only,” “Act now,” “Sign up today,” will increase the chance your visitors convert.

There are many other ways you can make your call-to-action stronger, but some lie in the landing page design, development, and general functionality. For most people, who aren’t technical, these basic text based changes will have a huge impact.

In next weeks post I will be discussing landing page flaw #2, going for the jugular (aka asking for personal details too soon).

I’m a firm believer that everyone should do sales, including cold calling, at some point of their career. Before the days of the Internet, cold calling and going door-to-door was a common practice for lead generation. Nowadays, not so much. The paradigm has shifted completely. Sure, many companies still pound the pavement in the traditional sense and it works out very well for them. Others strictly hang in the clouds of the internet while relying on their website and other forms of advertising to generate online leads for them. There is no right or wrong (debatable) way to go about lead generation. It really depends on your product offering, customer, etc.

When discussing lead generation, there are four parts to consider as a general overview: the purpose, the medium, the message, and the gathering. Below is a further explanation of each part:

Start with a purpose

When you are sitting around with colleagues and decide to launch an online lead generation campaign, there must be a purpose or you wouldn’t be in this situation. What are you looking to accomplish? Are you simply looking to build brand awareness which will hopefully funnel leads into your company’s pipeline? Let’s call these marketing leads. Or, are you looking to gather contact information on the spot so you have a prospect to call/email shortly after? I’ll refer to these as sales leads. Once you define the purpose, it’s time to think about the next step.

Determine the best medium

When delivering your message, it is essential to define the best medium to use to tap your potential customer on the head. With online lead generation, you have a plethora of options at your disposal. You can choose to use banner advertisements on another website, paid advertisements on Google (the ads highlighted in yellow on the top and right hand side of search results), social media (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.), or another medium you find fitting. The key is to select a medium that is relevant to where your potential customers reside, gather, and spend a significant amount of time. This becomes a hotbed to reach your potential customers and serves as the outermost part of your online lead generation funnel (also known as a sales funnel). If you aren’t sure what I mean by an online lead generation funnel, check out the article 5 Steps to Create your Sales Funnel by Scott Taback to help explain this concept further.

Perfect your message

Given the short period of time you have the attention of your potential customer, your message is mission critical. The language of your message depends entirely on the individuals you are prospecting. Put yourself in their shoes: do they wear construction boots, dress shoes or high heels? Are they single mothers, working-class white males, etc? Dig deep into the details of your potential customers so you can gain a better understanding of who they are. Then you are more capable of crafting a message that hits closer to home and taps into their emotion. If you weren’t aware, consumers make decisions based on emotion rather than logic. Numerous studies show it is programmed in the cingulate cortex which is the part of the brain that handles analytical and emotional responses. If the message is spot on, the emotion is triggered If they trust in the validity of your offering, they should be ready for the next part.

Gather the data

This is it. The moment of truth. Where all of the hard work, convincing and effort you put into funneling a prospective customer is put to the test. At this point, they have made it to your landing page so you are halfway to the victory. Will you win or will you lose? It’s a delicate process when deciding on how much information to gather. As a rule of thumb remember this: always ask for the minimum amount of information to properly qualify that individual as a lead. If that doesn’t make sense, think about this, studies show that by eliminating one unnecessary field from your lead capture form, you increase conversions by 50%. That is a huge increase! Although each industry will require different information to qualify a prospect, you should always remember that statistic in the back of your mind. Once you commit to the number of questions you are going to use and the types of questions you are going to ask, see how the how your efforts perform. At this point, you can analyze the results and make adjustments moving forward to help you increase the number of qualified leads you obtain through your efforts.

These four-parts serve as a broad overview and are a great starting point when approaching online lead generation for your business. As with all business decisions, you need to act with the end goal in mind as was discussed in part one. Then put the pieces in place to help you achieve that goal. To help you with this and to reach optimal results with your online efforts, I am going to be discussing seven flaws that exist in online lead generation. Each flaw will be discussed in its own weekly post and I’ll highlight both good and bad examples, ways to improve, and some case studies to help paint a clearer picture so you get the most out of your online lead generation efforts. Below you will find the seven flaws that will be discussed:

1. A Weak Call-to-Action
2. Going for the Jugular (Aka, asking for personal details too early)
3. Fill in the Blanks
4. Wrong number of Questions
5. Scrolling
6. Hidden Forms
7. Too Much Information

I hope you enjoyed and tune in next week for the first flaw, a weak call-to-action. Special thanks to again to Andrew Pawlak. Please leave your comments and thoughts below. I love interaction!