Lately, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about marketing lead generation. For many companies, the economy has really caused slumping sales. Some are responding by stepping up their sales efforts, and the most intelligent companies are improving their web sites to generate more leads.
There’s one simple yet often overlooked step your company can take to generate more leads from your web site: include a contact form on key pages. On our site, key pages are the pages that talk about the web consulting services we offer and, not surprisingly, the contact page.
Companies typically have a single contact link or button at the top or bottom of their web sites. But why make your readers hunt for a place to contact you? By putting a short, simple lead generation form beside or at the bottom of your web pages, you’re giving people an easy way to make contact.
Many web designers will argue that you don’t need the form — that it “junks” up a design. If that’s the case, ask them to create a second version of a key web page (perhaps a whitepaper download, a sales page, a product page, etc.) with a form included and use a testing tool like Google’s Website Optimizer to test the page with the form against the page without. This head-to-head comparison will reveal which is more effective.
In nearly every case I’ve seen, the page with a form will generate more leads than a page without a form. There are exceptions, such as requiring that someone fill out a form before downloading, viewing or listening to content.
By placing lead generation forms on key pages of your company web site, you might just be able to thrive during this recession.
February 19th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Andrew says:
Love the challenge to designers: let the data decide.
Everybody has an opinion about how things should look (and professional designers may be more in tune with best practices and evolving style conventions) but in the end, results are the only thing that matter.
February 21st, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Amy Africa says:
Fantastic post Rick! I especially like your testing comment.
One of the things I have noticed over the past 15+ years online is how important it is to offer your prospects/customers lots of different ways to connect with you. Some folks will sign up for your FREE newsletter, some will fill out a survey or a poll, and others want to ask an expert or just plain contact you. You never know what works till you test it.
March 3rd, 2010 at 8:10 pm
wayn says:
Website design does help in the lead generation effort.As long as your site is friendly enough where prospects can easily find the information they are looking for,sales leads is not that hard to get.
March 15th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Rick Whittington says:
Thanks for your feedback, everyone.
Regarding Wayne’s comment, I think that successful lead generation goes deeper than just having a user-friendly web site. The important point is that a lead generation form on the page the person is reading lets them contact you without clicking to another page.
April 5th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
wayn says:
Thanks Rick for filling in the lacking point, certainly, a successful lead generation goes deeper than just having a user-friendly website.
July 28th, 2010 at 11:10 am
David Zemens says:
Good advice Rick. I see that your implementation of this technique involves having your contact form readily available in the sidebar. Great idea. Have your level of contacts improved since you implemented this change?
July 28th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Rick Whittington says:
David,
While we’ve always had contact forms on all pages, we’ve tested putting multiple contact links — and in fact, multiple contact forms — on pages with great success. Our business leads have improved, but you should know that clients have also seen a big lift in prospects by employing this technique.
One recent client had only a contact link in their site header. It appeared on every page, but they never had a prospect from their site in 4 years. Two weeks after we launched their new site, they had three prospects, and continue to get them regularly.
Here’s another tip: It’s easy to figure out if a contact form (or which contact form) is filled out using either PHP or Google Analytics event tracking.