Lead generation is always a top priority for Invesp and we’re always on the lookout for the latest and greatest ways to make sure that we utilize the most effective methods to generate the most leads. This is not only important to us as a business, but it’s one of the key components that we help our clients with in order for them to increase their conversion rates and overall revenue. Looking over our current methods as well as those of our competitors I’ve compiled the following list of the top 4 methods of generating leads. Try them out on your website, and you should see an instant increase in your leads.

1) Emphasize the solution that your product solves – if you don’t genuinely believe that by offering your product you are helping people reach a solution that they are looking for and demand; you’re probably in the wrong business. For the majority of us, we believe in our product and that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. To be successful at our jobs, we need to emphasize this to our site visitors so that when they click on that ppc ad and land on your landing page that there is a clear message and motivation of why they should utilize and benefit from your services.

2) Give your site visitors a reason to keep in touch – Why should these visitors leave there information on your site or be interested in more information on your business? Sometimes it’s difficult to convince someone of doing of giving you private information, but something that has always worked is offering a freebie. Who doesn’t love free stuff? We like to give out a beneficial book or CD that relates to our services, a whitepaper or free downloads too. However you must beware that your incentives are well-thought out so that you only get the leads that will make a difference to your business. What’s the point of offering something nifty but getting leads that only want the free stuff but will never consider your business? The point is that this will draw prospects in giving you an edge, offering them something beneficial, and at the same time hopefully helping you establish brand awareness and connections with people.Contests are always fun too, so don’t be afraid to be creative in finding legitimate ways to get access to potential clients’ contact info. Be weary of the contests you create as well, make sure they are targeted and will draw in the market you are after.

3) Follow-up – This is a key aspect in maintaining positive client relationships. It’s important how we use the information that the site visitors have given us. Collecting it and not using it is a big mistake. It’s crucial to follow-up immediately by providing the site visitors with the information they requested. Also, follow up doesn’t just pertain to prospects; following up with current clients is as, if not more important. I recommend the 2-2-2 rule. This means that after a current client or site visitor makes a purchase or submits an inquiry/information to your website, you must follow-up within the first 2 hours, then 2 days and then 2 weeks. This will show the prospect/client that they are important to us and it reinforces their trust and respect for our company.

4) Ask for referrals- I don’t know why companies get embarrassed to do this. Sometimes it doesn’t cross our clients’ minds to recommend our services unless we ask. Asking more than likely will spark a memory of a friend or business associate that might need the same services that we provide. It’s always nice to hear that the clients are happy with our services, and when we hear this our response should be something like “the biggest compliment you can give us is a referral!”

What are your thoughts? Do you have any ideas on how to get leads from your website?

Tags: increase-sales, Lead-generation
Posted in Sales & Marketing

Last week I attended a webinar held by elastic path’s Jason Billingsley with guest speaker Mellissa Burdon of Future Now. The topic was 7 ways to boost your holiday conversion rate. It’s always nice to hear the guys at Future Now talking about conversion, and I thought that this webinar was particularly interesting.

The webinar’s main goal was to present 7 solutions that can be easily implemented to improve conversion rate. I will list the 7 points and elaborate on my thoughts of each:

1. Product Images Tell a Story

Your products need to elaborate more on their details and features within the photographs or images representing them.So basically, when I see the dress I want to be online through several different angles, and encourages me a hundred times more to buy the item. Of course this is not always a simple task. If you’re an ecommerce site, going through and changing all your images will be a challenge. You need to decide which images truly need to be elaborated upon. And really, depending on the product you may only need one really good image.

2. Headlines

We’ve said this over and over again: you need to hook your readers with a great headline. The webinar explained 3 different ways you can write the headline. Other sites such as copyblogger and Jacob Nielsen have great tips about how to write the perfect headline.

3. Calls To Action

Again, it’s true that calls to action throughout your document, placed in the right positions will significantly boost conversion. The correct placement of calls to action will help walk your visitors through the conversion funnel.

Visitors are coming at different stages in the buying process, ESPECIALLY during the holiday season. People tend to shop around to find the best deals, etc. So what you need to do meet the buyer at which ever stage he/she may be.

4. Point of Action Assurances

If you want your visitors to buy, make sure you help them feel at ease to give out their personal information. Nobody wants to give out information to insecure site.

5. Make Contact Info Obvious

Maximize on your conversions, if you have a call center, by placing your number somewhere visible (like the top left corner of the webpage). Sometimes your visitors want to call to get some type of clarification on an item. Little changes can truly go a long way.

6. Don’t make your visitors wait

Sometimes your site is all flashy and fancy, and quite attractive, but in order for your visitors to see your images, it takes 1 minute to load! In this day in age, people hate waiting, ESPECIALLY internet users. Pages should load in less than 3 seconds.

7.    Relevant Scent

Don’t let the visitor figure out your site, you need to figure out what stage of the buying process they are in. Okay, so what now your buyers are similar to dogs! No silly!! Let me explain: Let’s take me for an example: I have a toddler and an infant, I’m on the go all the time. I am looking for a simple, light, and easy to use double baby stroller. It also needs to be durable and comfortable for both children in the various stages of their growth. So, I go online to search for the term “double baby stroller”.

I know what features I want, but I don’t have a clue which stroller presented is the best for my particular needs, unless the information is clearly stated (the scent).

Well, when I land on the site, I don’t want a page full of jogging strollers, and heavy strollers! I want an easy way to find the light, simple to use strollers. The idea is your visitor needs to be able to SNIFF their way through the buying process. So if I land on a site that presents a functionality that helps me find the stroller with the features of my choice, that’s a site I will buy from. I also like to read reviews, so if I find a site that has everything easily displayed, they are guiding me through the conversion process by presenting all the information I am looking for, and I want right under my nose.

In a nutshell, those are the 7 points, which are great to help boost conversion. I don’t know if they are all “quick fixes,” it takes time to figure out your buyer, and that is done through understanding your market and the creation of personas. But if you’re a site with no Calls to Action for example, placing a few here and there can boost your sales significantly. If you’re a site with flash and slow loading times, that’s an easy fix. Your headlines and crucial, and that may help you see people stay a bit longer on your site rather than exiting immediately! Some other ideas I have for to boost your conversion rates this holiday season are:

8. A clean site design

When I visit a site that looks unprofessional, I’m outta there faster than you can say wait! Your site design can easily be cleaned up by removing unnecessary images, using normal and toned down colors, and making sure the copy is free of grammatical errors or slang.

9. Adding testimonials and reviews

Your visitors need the assurance that you are someone they can trust. What better way than what other clients have said about you! Give your visitors easy access to the testimonials so they can see what others have to say about you. Additionally, like the above examples, reviews are essential to help buyers make the plunge. If I read a bad review, it does not mean that I will not purchase the item. It just means that I am aware of this issue that may come up and I will continue reading other reviews until I am fully satisfied (or dissatisfied) with the product. If I see an item with 0 reviews, I almost NEVER purchase it. Elastic Path actually also had a webinar about the power of reviews on e-commerce sites.

10. Incentive Offers

Well you’re up against thousand of ecommerce and retailers out there. What can you offer your visitor that’s going to give them that extra encouragement to go with you over the 10 other sites they’ve visited? Free delivery? 25% off of their order? You have to stand out amongst the competition, so know who and what you are up against, as well as understand what your buyers want!

Any other ideas on some things you can do to boost conversion rates?  Share your thoughts!!

Tags: increase-conversion-rate, increase-online-sales, increase-sales, increase-site-conversion-rate, online-marketing, online-sales, Personas
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Did you ever click on a PPC ad for Victoria’s Secret? You do not have to explain to me, I know that you wanted to get a gift for your wife or girlfriend . But how about clicking on that Victoria’s Secret ad again, but this time to do some research on increasing your landing page conversion rate?  Victoria Secret’s targets a specific gender with their landing page, and creating gender specific landing page is the latest trend in landing page design.

Let’s go back to that Victoria’s Secret ad. You’ll notice that the landing page is designed with the female audience in mind in order to entice them to make that purchase right then and there. But that’s obvious, right?  I mean Victoria’s Secret has a target market of women 18 – 34, so it’s no surprise that they cater mostly to that group. Gender specific targeting is not a novel idea in traditional advertising. Nivea is the first to profile clients on ATM machines to display specific gender related ads.   How can such an idea be accomplished with landing pages? And what implications would gender specific targeting have on a landing pages?

Are there companies that are trying to create online gender specific campaigns?

HP launched an e-mail campaign that personalized each ad for the individual that received it; male or female.  Other companies are turning towards giving their client’s the convenience to log in to the site and adjust the settings to meet their specific mood, gender, and preferences. 

Creating gender-specific landing pages is no different.  In order to capitalize on your target market, you must address their needs, wants, and preferences through the ads and landing pages you create. Gender specific targeting is taking your landing page to the next level. 

But there are a few considerations you need to keep in mind:

1. Know your market:  Invest the time necessary to understand the demographics of your market. Only when you do so will you be able create the landing page that will fit your market criteria.  Don’t blindly decide that 90% of your clients are males; and only address them.  If you do, you may be losing a lot of potential business.  Through market surveys and site analysis techniques do the research, understand the breakdown of your customers, and decide who you will be targeting through your landing pages.  Once you do so you can determine whether creating a gender specific landing page works for you.  Also, a great way is to test with various landing pages to see what works and what doesn’t.  So targeting a gender may be wise or a disaster for your business; but after thorough research and testing with a single landing page you can determine that without creating damage to your company.

2. Create Personas:  Once you’ve understood your target market,  you must develop personas that the target the most complex of your target customers.  This will help you develop landing pages that are more personalized in nature because you begin to envision the personas and sell to them rather than the masses.  So, if you are Bose, (Bose.com) selling high end sounds systems, you will most likely develop male personas for your site. If you are selling genealogy software on the other hand, then your personas will be predominantly woman. Disney trying to sell a family vacation on their site will most likely develop a male as well as a female persona for the father and mother in the family. Remember that you should always create a landing pages to satisfy your primary personas. These personas are created to make you visualize someone when creating every element of your site; a real-life representation of your clients. 

Company x may have a target market of predominately men.  They will create a landing page to satisfy John and Ronald; their primary personas. These personas were created with in order to envision someone when creating the website; a real-life user-interface experience.  Rather than marketing to the large masses of men and their distinct personalities out there.  John’s personality, lifestyle, life, ambitions, and goals are much different than Ronald’s.  They each represent the most complex of personalities that purchase from company x; if you satisfy them, you satisfy hundreds of men with less complex traits.  The commonality between John and Ronald is that they both like to purchase from company x.

3. Copy:  When creating copy, you need to begin to understand what language will appeal to your market.  If you are addressing a female in your copy, you need to use words that would appeal to her specific personality traits (that is determined through the persona you create) but also address the fact that she is a woman.  Woman generally like long copy. Men on the other hand generally like short copy pages.

It is probably true that on the whole, women are more collaborative, men more competitive. Women are more likely to engage with students in active learning, men more likely to keep a distance through lecturing.

What does that mean for your landing page? Generally, men are more competitive, so the landing page must answer questions such as: what is in this for me? Or how can you help me. Whereas, women are generally more humanistic in nature, so the landing page should answer questions such as: how did your product or service help others? How many clients do you have?

Remember, it’s not always the case that women are humanistic and men are competitive; you need to always refer back the personas created.  Although the persona you created may be a female, she may have characteristic traits that were found in many of your women customers such as competitiveness and spontaneity.

4. Design:  Similar to the copy, the design of the landing page must appeal to the target audience.  Victoria’s Secret targets females ages 18-34, although they do not all have the same personality traits and preferences, they are able to construct pages that will appeal to that entire age group. 

Remember, the entire purpose of personas is to create hypothetical individuals with complex personalities that encompass all the rest of your market.  Because by satisfying your personas; you can satisfy everyone.  So if you create a gender specific page targeting Jane, a 34 year-old stay-at-home mom and Hannah, a 50 year-old construction worker; your page needs to address them BOTH, and they are VERY different.  Although Hannah is a female, because of her profession and being around men constantly, she is and always has been tom boyish.  So, your site design needs to address this aspect.  Making a site filled with images may appeal to Jane, but not to Hannah; you need to find a middle ground.  But don’t dismiss Hannah’s femininity either; she’s still a woman.

5. A note about the ad:  In addition to constructing your gender-specific page, you also need to construct an ad that will appeal to your target market.  Remember that the content, picture, or headline of the ad must be echoed in your landing page to avoid confusing your potential client.

Tell me what do you think? Have you considered creating landing pages that target specific gender? What are some of the challenges in doing so?

Tags: increase-conversion-rate, increase-online-sales, increase-sales, Landing-Page, online-marketing, Personas, PPC
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

How long has it been since you added content to your website? A month? Two months? 6 months? A year? Wow. Are you kidding? Small business owners and managers commonly create websites and proceed to do absolutely nothing more with them. By not updating and adding to your website on a regular basis you are missing opportunities to improve your online offers, attract more visitors from search engines, and generate additional sales leads.

Updating Offerings

Your website should always stay updated, especially if you list “Upcoming Events” or “Recent Projects.” This seems obvious and redundant but I commonly see event notices starting with dates from last year and recent projects that were completed 3 years ago. In the very least, keep your website up to date with actual upcoming events, recent projects, and your newest products and services. If you are prone to forget about updating then at least design your site’s copy so it will not appear outdated. For example, use just “Projects” instead of “Recent Projects.” If part of your site is out of date, I am going to assume your services are out of date.

Updating your website is often unappreciated because you should be doing it anyway. It is like being in a grocery store where the shelves have not been “faced.” You might notice when they are messy but pay no attention when they are straight and tidy.

Additional benefit: Updating your site should also attract more attention from search engines, too.

Attract More Visitors

Adding content to your website increases the size of your online footprint and will bring your more visitors over time. You have probably heard about search engine optimization and how important it is but it seems too complex and tricky and you might be skeptical of hiring someone to do it for you.

Well, you should know that content is king in SEO (this is basically a cliche now) and you might be the very best person to add that content to your site. After all, you know your products and customers best and should be able to easily create new content on a variety of subjects that will directly add value for your customers.

There a variety of ways to add content to your site on a regular basis. Writing content under the headings of how-to, comparisons, or specifications are usually easy to write and use as value-adding embedded links (links in the text) in your existing pages. Adding a blog to your site makes it very easy to immediately publish each article without knowledge of html or other online coding.

Generating Sales Leads

Your additional content will attract more visitors from search engines and your updated site will invite people to stay who might have left your outdated one. The combination will bring your more sales leads.

Start a program of updating your site and generating new content on a regular basis and you will see an increase in traffic and sales leads. First start with one new article per week. Do this for at least eight weeks. By the end of the eight weeks you will probably start seeing a small increase in your traffic. I am confident you will want to continue adding new pages after that.

Tags: Copy Writing, increase-sales, online-marketing, online-sales
Posted in Business, Copy Writing, Sales & Marketing

Your website conversion rate is one of the most important indicators of how well your website is performing. Many website owners invest huge amounts of money and time to drive traffic to their website. And eventually, people start visiting and traffic jumps from hundreds to thousands. But then nothing happens. No new orders, no new subscriptions, no email opt-ins, and no RSS subscribers. I have seen clients invest 12 million dollars in a website, get 5,000 visitors in one hour but not a single order. That is sad. It’s not all about traffic. Increasing your site conversion is part art and part science.

Your website was created to encourage the visitor to take an action. So, whether you have an ecommerece website, a lead generation website, or even a blog, you will need to create a website that converts.

An 8-Step Tutorial to Increase Your Website Conversion

This tutorial is designed to take you through the basics of increasing online conversion rates. As you finish each post, try implementing the recommendations and begin seeing better results:

1. 31 quick points to instantly understand online conversion: Everything you need to know about online conversion
2. What is more important: increase traffic vs. convert traffic: Finally someone actually answers the question!
3. Compare your site conversion rate to ecommerce site averages
4. Discover the three essential design factors to improve online conversion rate
5. Get site visitors to become clients with these five tips: Learn how to create a customer focused site
6. Can I trust you? 13 quick tips to increase online conversion rate via building trust
7. I am confused, scared and out of here! Deal with your visitor first impressions when he lands on your site
8. I am Fudding: How to increase your conversion rate by 60%: Discover how to handle your visitor objections

The most important point to remember as you begin is that in order to increase your website conversion rate, you will need to invest the time and energy in creating a client-focused site. Let us know how your online conversion increased after implementing some of our strategies and techniques. Good luck!

Subscribe to The Invesp Blog to learn more about increasing your site conversion rate and online marketing.

Is your conversion rate less than 10%?

• Do you need help increasing your campaign or site conversion rates?
• Do you need landing page optimization services?
• Is your ecommerce website generating all the sales it should be generating?
• Is your site generating all the leads it can?

Our clients had an average conversion rate of 14.56% in 2007. If you would like to see results like these, contact us today!

Tags: increase-conversion-rate, increase-online-sales, increase-sales, increase-site-conversion-rate, online-marketing, sales-objections, site-conversion-rate
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Your site is always going to generate some weak leads. Even after all the sales lead optimization in the world your website will always generate some leads that are weak or maybe even completely out of your market. Whether you make the sale or not, I truly believe you can pull value out of almost all of your leads.

Salespeople should only be given valuable leads.  This helps build their trust in marketing efforts while minimizing wasted
follow-up efforts. With that, marketing should deal with weak leads but they can get a lot of excellent feedback from salespeople. Weak  leads can be handled in any number of ways, such as:

• Trash weak leads without contact (not good)
• Respond politely and suggest solutions elsewhere
• Forward the leads to a competitor or vendor
• Do any of the three above and keep the information for future marketing purposes

There’s Value in Them Leads

Even weak leads hold value for you. You have already paid for them so get whatever ROI you can from them. I commonly extract value from off-target leads in two ways. Both are simple and require very little no and certainly no money.

The first way I used weak sales leads is listed above- forward them to a competitor or vendor. Doing so builds goodwill with people/partners in your industry and they might return the favor with leads, referrals, better pricing, or (in the least) some kind words about your company. Contact companies to whom you would like to send leads. Tell them to expect some leads from you and that, although they are not obligated, you would appreciate the same courtesy in return. Follow up by sending them some information about what you do. This contact, in itself, is a value-creator. Some of those contacts might become your customers.

The second way, and the most valuable way, to use weak leads is for learning about products or services on the cusp of your current offerings that you should consider offering in the future. Doing so actually turns future leads you would have received anyway into valuable sales leads. That, by the way, will increase your site’s conversion rate. Lemons into lemonade and all that, right?

For instance, if you specialize in engineering bridges built with laminated beams and you continually get leads from people wanting bridges designed with trusses or natural timbers, spend some time finding out what you need to learn in order to offer those design services and how profitable you can make them. Alternatively, you can take the “shoot from the hip” approach and simply answer, “Yes, we can do  that.” and THEN learn how to do it.

Look Beyond Your Current Horizons

Sometimes the value in a lead is not directly tied to what you currently keep in stock. You probably spend a decent proportion of your marketing budget generating sales leads. Make sure you maximize the value of each for future returns.

Tags: increase-conversion-rate, increase-sales, online-marketing, sales-leads
Posted in Business, Sales & Marketing

Give you customers an incentive to join your mailing list or become a member of your forum or site. More and more consumers are reluctant to give out personal information without hesitation. Entice them with an offer they can’t refuse. Here are some opt-in offers your readers won’t be able to pass up.

• Offer a free book- eBooks are the rage these days. The book doesn’t have to be 100-200 pages long. On the other hand, it should be long enough to offer useful and beneficial information the reader visiting your site can use. It should also be information that they can’t find easily in other places on the internet. eBooks can help market your business in many different ways. You can encourage your readers to send your book to others, post the link in forums, or even use it in their own websites. News about your business will spread like wild fire on the internet, as well as, reaching an outstanding number of potential customers.
• Offer free downloadable articles- Providing short informative articles on your site is another good way to get customers to give you their contact information. If your site contains rich and informative content, providing free articles that readers must sign up to use is an excellent choice. However, your site as a whole must be well organized, cohesive, informative, and unique in order to convince that potential customers to fork over their e-mail addresses.
• Offer free online courses- Do you consider yourself an expert in your field? Use that for your business advantage. You can create multi-part online courses that incorporate text, images, video streams, and audio. Ask your readers to sign up or become a member to view the course. You can send the segments via e-mail to those who have subscribed.
• Offer other free stuff- Articles, books, and newsletters aren’t the only free downloads you can offer on your site. Depending on our business, you can offer free unique e-cards, screensavers, desktop backgrounds, or even document templates. Don’t forget that these items all must relate to your business’s product/service.
• Offer regular contests- If you sell a product or offer some kind of service, then you can offer online contests and quizzes online. Ask your customers to join in on the fun to receive a prize. Prizes can include free limited access to your services or a sample product.

Don’t forget to give your readers an action plan. Ask them join your mailing list, become a member of your site, or just ask them provide their e-mail and name when downloading your freebies. Also keep in mind that opt in offers must give your readers something different, relate to the person visiting your site, and give them a reason to come back for more or look forward to your weekly/monthly mailings. Not every method, however, is suitable for every business. Try out several different methods and choose the one that benefits your business most. Those that come to your site and have viewed your content are potential customers. It is no longer an uphill battle; they have met you half way. 

Tags: increase-sales
Posted in Sales & Marketing