Article published in May 2007 Building Products Digest

You can get more qualified sales leads from your website’s current traffic than you are getting right now and it will cost you no more than whatever you pay your designer (who might be you) to make the changes.

Generating Leads from Your Website

Lead optimize your website to maximize the number of leads it generates from your current traffic. Doing so will make all of your future efforts to increase site traffic much more effective and decrease your cost per lead. Measure the lead generation rate of your current site by dividing the total number of leads you receive from the site (add phone, fax, email, contact forms, etc) by the total number of unique visitors. At a 5% lead generation rate from your website 1,000 unique visitors per day will produce 50 leads. Lead optimize to increase your site’s lead generation rate to 10% and then your 1,000 unique visitors will become 100 leads. Your site is now twice as effective and each incremental increase in traffic volume will be twice as effective as well.

Lead Optimize – Top Three Required Components

For the purpose of this article we are going to cover the top three components needed by every page on a website to maximize the number of sales leads it generates. Three components you need on every page to begin your lead optimization are:

1. Valuable Content
2. Benefits to the Reader
3. Contact Opportunities

Valuable Content

Content is king. This has become a search engine optimization (SEO) mantra but it applies to lead optimization as well. The fact is without quality content on each page of your website, your site visitors will leave before they even look for your contact information and even if they do reach it, who wants to call someone with nothing to say?

The content on your site should be:

• Valuable (saves or makes them money)
• Professional (but not robotic or scholastic)
• Concise (informative but to the point)
• Up-to-date (use dates (i.e., 2005) instead of periods (i.e., 2 years ago))
• Correct (check spelling, typos, grammar, and facts)

You are the expert in the products you sell and your site should reflect that fact. Define and understand your target customers and write your content to serve their needs. Do they need technical specifications, how-to knowledge, or safety regulations? The content of your website should supply your customers with information that is pertinent to what they are doing. Content is king!

Benefits to the Reader

Your page copy should display the benefits of your products or services. Copy too often lists only features. For instance, American Pole And Timber offers poles and timbers coated with 21 POLY, a protective polymer coating. That is a great feature but it is not very interesting and does not speak to the needs of most contractors or users. However, when site visitors read that pilings coated with 21 POLY come with a 25 year warranty against rot and decay from fungus and marine borers (benefit) they become more interested and start calling.

Always be mindful of why your visitors come to your website. Put yourself in their shoes. Understand what they want, what they are doing with your products or services, and how they feel about them (e.g., I see piers all the time whose pilings look like they are about to collapse from rot and barnacles). Identify with your visitors by displaying the benefits your products offer them. Display the benefits clearly and simply. Only get as technical as your target visitors need and don’t be too “salesy”. Speak to them about their needs and offer solutions for their problems. Once you have clearly displayed your benefits, make sure the opportunity to contact you is close at hand.

Contact Opportunity (a.k.a., Contact Information)

This seems obvious but every time I mention the importance of contact information to a site owner, I hear “But my phone number is on the pages and I have a “contact us” page.” A great exercise is to count how many times your contact information is displayed on each page of your site. It might be a real eye-opener (maybe not). Now, refine your attitude about contact information. Begin thinking in terms of contact opportunities. Give your visitors opportunities to contact you in at least 3 places on each page of your website. In each place, give two or more methods by which visitors can contact you such as your phone number and a link to your contact us page because some customers prefer to pick up the phone and call and others prefer the flexibility of email or contact forms.

American Pole and Timber does this effectively by displaying the “Project Information and Assistance” button on the left side of every page of www.AmericanPoleAndTimber.com in addition to lines such as “Contact us online (a link to the contact form page) or call us at (866) 397-3038 to discuss…” sprinkled throughout the pages and each there are almost always two contact methods given for every contact opportunity their carefully-designed online contact form. Efforts to lead optimize www.PoleAndTimber.com have resulted in a lead generation rate of about 10% and that is expected to increase with further lead optimize efforts.

Your site visitors are looking for information and solutions so give them what they are looking for offline and plenty of opportunities to contact you and the leads will start coming in. The rest is up to you and your sales people.

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