Marketing and Design Requirements for a Website to Gather Leads
Are you getting thousands of visitors to your website and not happy with the conversion rate? Among many reasons one of the most primary reasons of visitors not converting on your website is your website itself! Here’s a comprehensive list of things every modern website must have especially B2B to convert its visitors.
Modern Full-Width Website Design: I often come across websites that are still using the old 960px boxed format with an 11px font size. All modern websites are full-width and it’s time you get on the bandwagon too. Use high resolution and quality images to give a great first impression to your visitors.
Custom Website Search: I am not in favor of using custom search by search engines like Google and Bing. Some believe this is going to help them rank well in the search rankings which is NOT true. Using these search boxes may easily divert the attention of your hard earned visitor to external websites and in worse cases even to your competitors.
Collapsible and Content Tabs: They help pursue the idea of adding more content that covers less space and gets displayed in a way that doesn’t annoy your visitors.
Social Bookmarking: Adding social bookmarking icons like Google +1s, tweets and Facebook likes makes it easy for users to share content on the go.
Sticky Menu Bar: Many modern websites use sticky menu bar which makes the menu items scroll as the user scrolls the page. This is an important factor in making the website user friendly and also increases the overall click through rate.
Sticky Notification Bars: A pop up message or sticky notification massage allows website owners to easily announce important information about events, webinars, whitepapers and much more.
Live Chat: Some live chat softwares are really powerful and get you plenty of information about the visitor. For example the page on which the current user is in real time, the location of a user, the source from where the user came to the website and even the keyword the user entered to land on the website or landing page. All this information can come in very handy in instantly pitching the user to exactly what he was looking for.
Here are a few good live chat solutions for websites.
Recent or Popular Blog Posts: It will allow to feature your freshest or best-performing content, enticing visitors to stick around for more. This should be dynamically generated such that any new blog post automatically replaces the old ones.
Opt-In Pop Ups: Do you offer intermediary goals like whitepapers, live webinars, meetup registrations, e-book download or videos on demand? Opt-in popups can be very handy in making your visitors convert and gather leads.
Content Locking: It can be applied in various forms. For example
- Like, Tweet, +1 or Share on LinkedIn to access full content
- Leave a reply
- Submit Email
However if you ask for too many fields it may put off the user, so ideally content locking should be as simple and hassle free as possible. Make sure you lock your most valuable content, something that visitors might be interested enough to go that extra mile.
Related and Featured Content: Make sure to keep throwing related content to your visitors by adding featured content in between or at the end of your posts and pages.
Frequently Asked Questions: If you sell a product or service through your website it is important you keep a ‘Frequently Asked Question’ section where your prospecting buyers can easily get instant information about your product or service.
Here are a few ways to gather FAQs
- Make a list of questions that exiting or prospecting customers are actually asking!
- Asking customers what else they would like to know in the form of Newsletter, Feedback form, suggestion box on website, an online survey or just asking them verbally.
- Write FAQs in layman’s terms and don’t alienate users with a whole lot of high-tech mumbo jumbo.
- Creating individual sections for each topic e.g General FAQs, Pricing FAQs, Returns Policy FAQs and more.
Create Landing Pages: The primary purpose of using a landing page is to generate leads. Links on the landing page can distract a user from completing the desired action. It’s important that we limit exit points (in most case, hyperlinks) leaving our page. The first major difference between a normal website and a landing page is that landing pages shouldn’t have the usual site navigation. Instead, the only clickable links should be the call to action, and possibly a link to more information for those who are undecided.
