How To Increase Leads & Conversion Rates w/o Spending More

If you’re looking for information on how to increase leads, lead flow and conversion rate WITHOUT actually spending more, this article is for you.

Keep reading and learn new techniques for internet lead generation, conversion rate optimization, benchmarking, and boosting ROI to new levels.

Benchmarking: Where it starts

How many leads are you generating? What is your conversion rate? Do you know how to calculate it?

It’s pretty easy, really. All the information you need should be available in your web analytics package.

You can deduce it by dividing the number of leads you get by the total number of visitors to that page.

Here’s a really simple conversion rate calculator you can use.

Optimization: Where are the leaks?

Now that you know your overall conversion rate, you’re probably alarmed by how low they are. Wondering what average conversion rates are? Here are a couple of good pieces by ClickZ that will give you more insight:

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1691779/benchmarking-average-conversion-rate

http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1718099/the-average-conversion-rate-is-it-myth

The main point? There’s probably lots of room to boost that ROI pretty significantly.

So here’s what you do

Always be testing. This is an old marketing adage that still rings just as true as it ever has. With the proliferation of free conversion rate optimization software platforms like Google’s Website Optimizer, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be testing ALL the time.

What should you test?

Well you should start by identifying your biggest opportunities. If you map out your entire sales and conversion funnel, track the number of visitors that enter, and identify the biggest leaks—that is, where most people drop-off or abandon, that will be your best starting point.

The easiest way to do this is by setting up goals & funnels in analytics. Assuming you use Google Analytics like most companies, here’s a good how-to on setting up Google Analytics goals & funnels.

The importance of this point can’t be stressed enough and should really be the start of your efforts. You don’t want to fix something that’s not broken. And you don’t want to ignore something that is a problem.

Here’s a good quick-start guide from SEOMoz

Also another one that you’ll like from Conversion Rate Experts

If you’re new to this, and feeling a bit overwhelmed, a quick way to learn how to increase leads, lead flow and conversion rates is to test headlines & forms.

By testing different headlines (the larger text on the page) and forms (you know what a form is!) we have been able to achieve the best ROI results in the quickest time.

If you’re a small business and you don’t have much traffic to your site (say, less than 5,000 visitors/month), don’t test too many variables at once. It will take a long time to get conclusive results.

I would just use a simple A-B test as opposed to the multivariate testing.

Want more information on how to increase leads & conversions? Drop us a quick note and we’ll teach you more.