In our previous post, Is Your Website Generating the Leads that it should? Part 1, we started to look at factors which influence whether a website generates a good volume of Sales Leads or not. We looked at a post from Richard Foshee which covered 5 important aspects. We continue with his post here…
3. Who Are You Picturing?
Every homepage needs an image, and it’s clear that people are going to be your best bet: home pages depicting people tend to have nearly twice the lead generation as pages with images of nature or animals. Even more interestingly, they’d better be someone you know: data has indicated that images of real people tend to perform 95% better than stock photos for lead generation. The company who performed the study, Marketing Experiments, hypothesizes that it’s not so much about who’s pictured as how effectively the image can convey value and honesty. It looks like your leads are smart enough to tell that the stock photo of a smiling female with a phone isn’t actually working for you.
One company that uses realistic images of employees well is Hubspot, and their recently-launched new homepage has a picture of their actual blog manager, Pamela Vaughan:
Your website needs to communicate trustworthiness, and the data shows that using your actual employees is one of the best ways to kick up your lead generation.
4. Can You Take Them Where They Need?
Ideally, your website visitors won’t just stay on your homepage. They’ll click around, read about your employees and see what you’ve been blogging. A logical, clean navigation structure is a necessity for your home page. In fact, more than 3/4 of Internet Users surveyed say easy navigation is their top priority when visiting new websites.
The Mail Chimp website offers simple navigation that isn’t cluttered or confusing. The light color stands out well against the background. Visitors have easy access to information that corresponds with their top questions the first time they visit the website:
5. Can They Become Leads?
Chances are, your website visitors aren’t going to work especially hard to give you their business. You need clear, visible calls to action and great offers that have real value to visitors. Call to actions (CTAs) are a critical component of lead generation, and make sure yours stand out.
Remote project-management software Basecamp takes a very direct approach to lead generation on their website, offering first-time visitors an extremely simple form for a free trial. The small number of fields are perfectly mobile-optimized and the bright color of the CTA clearly stands out against the rest of the page:
We’ve said it before: first impressions have never mattered more than they do on the Internet. Your home page has between 2 to 10 seconds to convert a first-time visitor into someone who’s willing to stick around and become a lead. Put your website to the test and see if it can stand up to increasing your bottom line.
Here is the link to the original article by Richard Foshee on www.inboundmarketingagents.com
So there you have it. 5 simple tests for you to conduct on your own website to see what improvements can be made.
Your website should be a prime source of Leads for your business but it needs to be developed and “tuned” to do so.
Not generating the amount or kind of leads you should be? Give us a call at Get Sales Leads and learn how we can help.
