Fact: Most websites aren’t geared up for lead generation; They are not high-performance websites.
You see websites full of content. Some of them are designed beautifully. Heck, check out any website featured on Awwwards, and we guarantee that you’ll love the designs.
The problem is this: “Likeability” and “pretty-looking” isn’t anywhere close to what a business really wants: profitability. Of course, high-performance websites need to come with a beautiful design, but that’s not what will make them profitable.
So you have the most beautiful website in the world but that’s not enough. Good design is important for branding and grabbing the user’s interest. What’s more important though is high performance. Here’s what that means:
- How many leads do you generate from your website every month?
- What volume of annual sales can you attribute to your website?
- Do you have at least one sales funnel in place working for you 24/7?
- Does your website load fast, ideally within 3 seconds or less?
Funny thing is that most businesses don’t have answers to these questions at all. If they do, the answers are vague. All that is because the entire approach to website design and set up has been wrong from the start.
Businesses focus on design, structure and content but they neglect elements and systems that would make a website perform best in turning traffic into buyers.
The right way to go about creating high-performance websites is this:
High-performance websites are built to convert
It doesn’t matter if you use a pure HTML/CSS or if you use WordPress to build your website. When you launch an e-commerce site, it won’t matter if you use Shopify or Magento. What really matters is whether or not your website gets you the results you seek.
For common types of business websites, the sought after results can look like this:
- Blog or online publication? Number of regular readers and email subscribers.
- Company blog? Number of leads generated and then sales attributed to those leads.
- SaaS application website: Number of free trials leading to monthly paid users with MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
It’s possible to generate results for any level of traffic that’s coming to your website. Even if you’re attracting only a couple of hundreds of visitors per month, you should be able to convert at least a small number of them into customers.
When you develop a website, develop it from a marketing angle. If not, don’t even bother building a website, only to have a web presence.
No matter the type of website, you need to have at least one sales funnel in place. In other words, you need to push random incoming visitors towards a path of actions, that you have planned in advance, with the ultimate goal of turning some of those random visitors into paying customers.
See the difference? Instead of just counting on luck, wishing website visitors would buy more of your product, you come prepared; You create a well-thought sales strategy, and all of the pages, elements and systems behind it, to facilitate sales on auto-pilot. This is just another way to describe a digital sales funnel.
Use lead-generation elements on web pages
In the short time that you have to make that good first impression to your visitors, it’s hard to get your visitors to give you a vote of confidence, to build trust, or to convince them to buy.
To enable sales you need more time. The only way to have more time with your web visitors is to get them to engage with your brand long-term. The best way to achieve that is to use email marketing. Using one or several sets of well-written autoresponder messages, you can nurture leads and convert them into sales.
But how do you even get email subscribers in the first place? You do that by creating lead-generation elements such as pop-ups, slide-ins, welcome gates, in-line opt-in forms, or opt-in forms on your blog’s sidebar. The purpose of these lead-generation elements is to grab the user’s email address, so you can contact them again.
How do you attract more email subscribers? Make a valuable offer. Give away something of value to help your visitors go one level up on your relationship, and further convince them that you have the solution to their problems.
Websites are hubs; Landing pages are for focused lead generation
Your website is a central hub with oodles of information to keep your visitors informed, engaged, and to help them make well-informed decisions. Websites can work as knowledge hubs where you offer content, blogs, resources, tools, and access to your primary products and services.
Make a sitewide, all-purpose offer on your website for all your visitors to see. This offer is usually your flagship offer and also an evergreen one so that you don’t have to keep making changes to that offer.
However, you need to use landing pages to present specific offers based on different criteria, such as:
- a person’s location or country,
- important referral sources, like Facebook, or
- topic-specific or interest-based offers for particular audiences.
Landing pages are focused and specific, and visitors dig that sort of relevance.
High-performance websites: Use analytics, for everything
Use Google Analytics to ensure that you have a way to track visitors to your website (and every single page within, including each of your blog posts).
When you track visitors, you also get a glimpse of their behavior, along with several other data points such as locations, devices, countries, bounce rates, time spent on your site, and website page loading time, etc.
Click here to register for an upcoming webinar where we’ll learn:
- how you can track visitor behavior and visualize web paths with the click of a button,
- what metrics you need to analyze and how you can get instant access to them, and
- how you can learn how to fix and optimize sales funnels using one dashboard.
One of the most popular tools, Google Analytics, gives you a wealth of data to let you know what digital marketing efforts contribute to acquiring leads and ultimately to generating sales. If you need more handy features, consider using Statly for bringing in very specific numbers pertaining to your sales funnels. Statly allows you to visualize complete sales funnels, and find funnel pages or elements that facilitate conversions.
Plus, you can use Hotjar or Mouseflow to also get access to video sessions of users, heatmaps, form analytics, and click behavior on your website and landing pages.
While you are at it, be sure to keep track of the right metrics, the ones that help reach informed business decisions.
Your website should be built for a reason. Whatever your reasons are, it’s certainly not for “looking good” or for satiating your ego. Make your website work!
If you need help setting up the right strategy for high-performance websites, if you need to get on a profitable path to digital marketing, sales funnels, and lead generation, get on a scheduled strategy session with us.