As an inbound marketing and sales consultant, each day I have the opportunity to work with clients to make recommendations that help them improve their conversion rates and generate additional leads. It’s difficult to not get excited about how helpful this can be to clients since it directly impacts their revenue and is proof that the recommendations I make are truly working. Most of the recommendations that I make for clients work across industries and, for the most part, can be used by other companies to replicate the same success. This is one of the reasons I enjoy writing about the recommendations that are implemented and produce amazing results.
Several months ago, I wrote a blog post about how to optimize a website’s contact page to increase the number of leads it creates and to improve upon tracking contacts. Little did I know that the client that I had specifically recommended this approach to would have almost three-hundred new leads over a five month period from this new contact page.
The simple change we made was to remove the “email us at contact@company.com” message and replace it with a simple contact form that would be tracked with the leads added to their CRM. In the past, the emails went to inbox and were then followed up on by various salespeople and the progress was never tracked or reported. Now we know exactly how many contacts are filling out the contact form, what their questions or concerns are, and which office they are located near so we can have the appropriate salesperson follow up with them. It’s not only streamlined the process, but also created a more trackable and measurable process.
For many businesses, especially ones that are operating with a high level of efficiency, finding a new source of leads or improving your lead flow from conducting A/B testing or other means can mean a tremendous deal to the company. If your company has a 1% conversion rate of visitors to leads and you can increase that to 2%, that in effect doubles the number of leads you are receiving. Even a change from a 10% conversion to 11% is a substantial increase when you are looking at conversion rates and visitor-to-lead ratios. It’s a pretty simple mathematical equation: the more traffic you get to your landing pages and the higher the conversion rate, the more leads you get. For this reason, both sales and marketing managers should both be attuned to what their conversion rates are since they mean so much to many businesses.
I can’t guarantee that by making small changes to your website or landing pages that it will add three- to four-hundred leads to your database over the course of a few months like it did this one client. But what I can guarantee you is that if your competitors are conducting A/B testing and experimenting with making their landing pages more effective, you will soon be playing catch up and needing to spend more money on advertising and other paid efforts to catch up to them.
Every business has to choose whether they will be the innovators within an industry or the followers. Companies that are willing to look for the 1% increase here and there throughout all aspects of their business, will certainly win in the long run. Those companies that don’t take a hard look at their metrics or conversion rates will surely fall behind. The choice is easy to make but difficult to implement. But that’s why we are here. If you want to get a good assessment of the areas where you company’s website could perform better and capture more leads, we are happy to provide a brief analysis and recommendations for improvement.