I’m part of an email marketing group on Linkedin, and a few weeks ago I posed the following question to the group:

Of the clients you’ve worked for, what increase in quality leads have you seen by implementing proper email capture on their sites? Meaning, the number of leads the website was generating before lead capture vs the number afterwards, what was the percentage increase/decrease?

I had 10 people respond, which I will admit doesn’t make this the most scientific study, but the results put the lowest number in the responses was 150%.

This comment was interesting:

“On average amongst my clients, the number of leads generated is more than double what they had previously. There’s one particular client, who actually did have lead capture on their site, but wasn’t converting at the numbers they wanted. We made a slight tweak to the offer they were presenting and within 6 months, they saw an increase of 451% in the number of leads generated.”

Taking all of the responses I had from the group, the average increase of quality leads generated for their clients was 337%.

Lead Capture Must Be a Focus

I want to stress how important lead capture is on a business website. Even if you’re site is designed for a sale, there must be elements in there to capture leads of people who are not ready to buy. By doing this, you’re capturing the information, and marketing to people who otherwise never would have bought from you and may have bought from one of your competitors instead.

I recommend taking the following steps,

1. Put up a lead capture form. In fact put up a few. The rule is that any place on your site that is not asking for a sale, should be asking for an email address. Give them an offer and put that offer everywhere you’re not asking for a sale, including a popup form.

2. Offer Something of Value focusing on Market Data. One major mistake most people make with lead generation is that they think the customer cares about their product. While you may think your product is amazing, the customer doesn’t, but they’re open to being shown what it will do for them. But to get as many people as possible to give their email address, consider the following headline:

Find Out What Our Product Can Do for You!

vs.

The 5 Trends Smart Manufacturers are Implementing to Increase Efficiency and Reduce Costs

Now let me ask you this, if you worked in manufacturing, which headline would entice you more? In the 2nd case the lead receives a report showing how smart manufacturers are using new technologies to achieve the desired benefits (Increased Efficiency and Reduced Costs), and guess which product is featured in the report – yours!

3. Use Email Autoresponders to Close the Sale. About 2 days after they download the report, they should begin receiving emails from your business offering them more information and help with the problem your product solves. Don’t focus on your product, focus on helping them solve the problem. Each email should end with a call to action, whether it’s to visit a page on your site or to contact you. They should receive a minimum of 7 emails over a 2 week period. Each email should be short contain one idea and be focused on the added call to action.

Each person who responds now has their status changed from “potential lead” to “quality lead.”

The beauty is that this is an automated lead generation system for your business, that generates quality leads for you. This is the system these marketers used for their clients to increase the number of leads generated from their site.

Follow the above steps to create this system for your own business, or see my marketing automation solutions to see how I can help you.