How Many Leads Are You Losing?

Leads cost you dearly, so you need to be confident that you make the most of each one.

Do you know how many of your leads are leaking away? Or where they are leaking from?

Fixing your leaking lead channels is the best way to increase your bottom line.

Good Website Design

Your website is still your first point of contact with prospects. You need to use every aspect of your site to let readers know about the problems you solve and how you can help them. People are looking for clarity and transparency.

Targeted Design

Is your website optimized for people in your target group? No, you cannot optimize for everyone.

Different people have different preferences regarding font size, video, colors, and layout. When you make your site perfect for those in your target profile, you alienate others. But the people you turn off were never prospects in any event, so forget about them and concentrate your thinking on those your real prospects.

Speed

Website speed affects your leads in two ways:

  1. Slower speeds mean unhappy users, which means fewer conversions
  2. Increased time to first byte (TTFB) loaded affects Google’s ranking, which means fewer people see your site

You can improve your site’s TTFB by using a content delivery network (CDN) and using faster web servers.

Good Landing Page Design

Your landing page design is crucial, and this is where visitors form their first impression of your business. Are you a good match? Are you too aggressive? Does it look good?

Each person who hits your landing page is judging you based on what they see. You cannot make everyone happy, but you must please those who fit your target profile.

Using the Right Colors

Colors affect how we feel, and eliciting emotions in prospects is a vital part of marketing. Every big brand spends a lot of time considering its color choice and how its users relate to different hues.

Nothing is straightforward and research shows that our favorite colors depend on age, gender, culture and sexual orientation.

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When you take the two charts above into account, it becomes easy to see why most landing pages and websites use blue as their primary color.

All of the data you find online relating to color preference is generic, and your prospects may well differ from the norm, so testing is essential and this is where landing page software such as OptinMonster stands out from DIY design. Good software makes A/B testing simple, allows you to use different layouts for different screen sizes and integrates with email software.

Mobile-Friendly

Landing pages that are designed for mobile use have larger text and buttons for links which make it easier to use on a small screen. Research shows that 48% of mobile users who encounter non-mobile friendly web pages become annoyed. These people are highly unlikely to become leads.

Lead Capture Form Design

The only way to work out the perfect design for your lead capture form is by continuous A/B testing. If you run two versions of your web form and discard the lower performing option, then you are left with the stronger version and will capture more leads.

Continuous testing lets you tweak elements of the more successful form and comparing the changed version to the previous one. Each iteration will improve on the prior best-converting form, so you get more leads.

Excellent Communication Systems

First-time visitors to your website or landing page are not prospects. It takes at least seven ‘touches’ to convert a lead into a prospect, so you have a lot of work to do.

A good solution would  be the GetResponse’s Email marketing platform that allows you to set up automatic email sequences that are optimized for desktop and mobile devices. These emails have better deliverability statistics than those sent from your own web server, and you have tracking analytics that will tell you when your email has been opened or when the reader has clicked on a link.

Social media communications are an additional communications channel that you need to use to build familiarity and trust. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram all have a role to play in converting your lead into a prospect.

Fixing Your Lost Leads Problem

It’s hard to measure how many leads you’re wasting, but you can see the percentage of visitors who sign up to your email list or fill in your web form. This gives you a baseline against which you can measure the effects of any changes you make.

Each change in your website, landing page or email communication will only have a small effect on your conversion figure. The cumulative effects of continuous A/B testing each aspect will reduce the number of leads you lose before they become prospects.