The second thing your website must do, is to capture the visitors coming to your page.
What I mean by that is that you need to have functionality in place on your website that captures the information of your visitor so that you now have the extra lead to communicate to in your further efforts.
You want to turn as many of the visitors to your website into leads.
There are some great tools for this available.
A very simple one, but effective one (and inexpensive) is Aweber. A more advanced and also more expensive solution is InfusionSoft. In between are several others.
You have seen these lead capture devices on many a website I’m sure, and it is the ones that says, something like “Sign Up For My Newsletter” or similar. Even more effective though these days are sign up forms that are somewhat disguised via what we in the marketing world Ethical Bribes.
With an Ethical Bribe, you actually offer the recipient or the visitor something (usually for free) in exchange for their email address (sometimes you may be asking fr more than the email address, such as the name, telephone number and more).
Often the ethical bribe is a free Ebook. A free video or video series. A free report or something. Something that is aligned with the general or specific topic area of what your website is all about. Something that the audience probably has a reasonable interest or curiosity in.
The higher the curiosity or interest they have for your free offer, the higher the likelihood of them opting in to get it and thereby giving you their email address.
At the time of writing this post, you can find on our front page of our website an ethical bribe in the form of a free report that we have called 7 Secrets To Website That Sell. Since most visitors to our site probably found us via some sort of search for marketing or online services, or heard of us via their interest for services and expertise we offer here, then the report is probably a pretty good fit. If you have something to sell or market, then you probably want to have a website (or already have one). In addition you probably want that website to deliver high performance in the form of sales for you. So a free report on secret to websites that sell, should be of reasonable interest.
The reason that your website MUST CAPTURE THE LEADS is that we all pretty much have what I call ADHD when we are online. We come to a website and even when said website is of value to us and even if we actually like the website and the people behind it etc., then we invariably never come back and even more seldom, do we bring out our credit cards just like that to purchase whatever is being offered there.
Even in the cases, when we say to ourselves something like “Oh, this site is excellent, I’ll be sure to come back for more information and perhaps even buy something from it..” then way too often we never will be coming back. As soon as we are off the site, we are off and the site is almost as good as forgotten. Getting back to the site requires conscious efforts (if we even remember how to find the site again).
Life shows up and we are distracted. Facebook comes in front of us on screen and we get sidetracked with other things – often non-important things.
That’s just the way things are.
As marketers, we need to understand that that’s just how it is and we need to put in place efforts that can help us limit the loss of potential leads.
We do this by the great value we place in front of our visitors and we do it by luring the visitor to take of ethical bribe so we now have at least their email address and now can speak to them again via emails.
We also need to understand that it takes somewhere between 7-12 times or points of touches for people to get to feel comfortable enough for them to buy from us. People lie to buy from people they know, like and trust. Building that kind of relationship can take a bit of time.
Since people often will not be coming back to your website unprovoked then we need to be able to communicate with them so we get the chance of building the relationship. Emails are a great way of getting that initial relationship going, especially when they have opted in for your ethical bribe. Once they have opted in, you now have a chance to follow up and even referencing the ethical bribe the recipient has a good chance of remembering who in fact you are.
This brings me to the quality of the ethical bribe. And yes, you’ve guessed it: The quality really needs to be great. It needs to have relevance for the visitor and it needs to be great. If the quality sucks, people are just as soon off your list again and they have unsubscribed from you. When the quality is great, you have a chance they’ll appreciate what you gave them and they might be interested in more of the information you may have for them.
Email series can then follow up and build upon that very initial relationship until a time when it seems appropriate that you can take it one step further and actually offer them something they can buy from you.
The best thing about the ethical bribe set up, is that it can be set up so that it all takes place automatically. Once set up, the bribe is in place for the visitor to snap up and the system will add their email to your “list”. The system of auto-responders will then commence the communication via emails automatically and can even send out an entire string of emails of the course of time that you feel is appropriate. Testing and tweaking it over time, and you will land at something that seems to bring decent results.
Ideally, as I mentioned above, the leads eventually will turn into some sales. We will get back to that in future posts.
I hope that you understand the importance of such a lead capture. Again you can have a wonderful site, but even when that site resonates well with your ideal client who happens to visit your site, they invariably will not be back and you might be completely off their radar, possibly even for good. If you can capture a way to continue to communicate to and with them, you will now have a chance to convert them into paying customers in due time.
If you wish to see our current Ethical Bribe, the 7 Secrets To Websites That Sell, you can grab it here.
Amazing Ideas, Inc. is a marketing agency that helps you get your website set up the correct way and installs the lead capture functions and helps you get set up for automated communication pieces to go out to the potential customers. The aim is to first capture the leads and then turn them into friends and ultimately turn them into paying customers. Call us at 888-988-2489 to discuss further or send us an email to info@amazingideasinc.com
To follow further along this series on the 3 Things Your Website Must do and to learn of The Third Thing Your Website Must Do, just sign up in the box below for further updates.
