Let me start by asking: Is your website a strong lead generator?
It’s hard enough designing a website, but many firms seem to have an especially difficult time making things prospect-friendly. Despite even the best efforts when trying to describe a product or justify its value, the information often gets lost in translation. Instead of being impressed by the website and the offering, prospects are often bewildered by the details they see. This is a real problem because, as a recent DemandBase whitepaper put it, “buyers are researching products and services before they engage with sellers, and are inviting sellers into the process much later in the cycle.” If they don’t find what they’re looking for on your site, it’s possible that you could lose a sale without even knowing it.
Regardless of when your site was designed or the way it currently performs, there’s probably some uncertainty gnawing at you. Perhaps it you or your marketing team that doesn’t like the site or maybe your executives it. The way to identify the answer to issues is Conversion Rate Optimization, which gives a step-by-step process for revealing the best way to convert visitors into prospects. Done right, after optimizing your site’s main pages, you can give prospects an at-a-glance view of your offering, twinned with a clear decision path that they can follow when they’re interested in actively considering a purchase and/or declaring themselves a lead.
A typical Conversion Rate Optimization Flow
Here are five common site issues that can be improved on with CRO:
- If you’re irritated by the large volume of visitors that reach your site, but then promptly “bounce-off” without going any further, test out changing the call to action.
- If you’re uncertain about how to convince visitors to give you their email address, test out the difference between using a Contact Us form and using a Lead Magnet. To test if offering content such as whitepapers, videos, newsletters, etc., is more effective at capturing email addresses.
- If you’re unsure it premium content should be gated or freely available, test it out by using two versions. The first version would be where premium content is gated behind a contact form and the second would be a version where it is freely available.
- If you’re unsure of whether to show pricing like your competition does, have a page where you show pricing and a version that insists they contact your sales team for more information.
- If you want to know whether the number of leads your website is too small or could be larger, change the contact forms. For example, if your form is lengthy, reduce the number of fields to the questions of the utmost importance. Then prospects won’t feel like they’re wasting too much time, or giving away too much information.
Hopefully these five ideas will get you started with A/B testing. If you’re currently dealing with any of these issues, try testing out out different versions of the pages to figure out what prospects relate to more. Learn more about Conversion Rate Optimization, by clicking below: