If you build it (your business website) they will call, right? Not true. The main ingredient for a website that gets leads is your call to action.
So what makes an effective call to action, and how can you put that to use on your site to generate those conversions?
An effective call to action is one that makes the customer pick up the phone and call right away, or give you their email. It’s crucial that your call to action is very strong, because you’re asking for information that’s become more and more private in modern times. People know about spam, they know about scams, and they’re hesitant to give out their email to just any site they find on the Internet. You have to overcome that initial hesitation and get them to give you their email. One way is to offer a special for providing information or calling now – like a big discount on a service.
However, that the way that works best is to provide a special report about something that will be very helpful to the consumer who found you by searching for ____________(insert target niche / business type here) in your area. Examples of this could be “Special Report: 3 critical things you need to know before ever hiring or calling an ____________(insert target niche / business type here)”, “5 things you need to know before hiring an ____________(insert target niche / business type here) “, or “3 myths you’ve been led to believe about ____________.” It’s important that these examples be specific to your practice; the more targeted your examples, the more likely it is that you’re going to get someone to sign up who’s interested in your area of practice.
You can even make it more targeted by making it local, for example “3 things you need to know before hiring an ______ in Akron, Ohio.” These examples could be strong enough to get someone to put in their email; they might say, “Hey, wow, what are those three things? I was ready to get moving and hire a ____________(insert target niche / business type here) tomorrow, but I better know this before I do anything” and then pop in their email and now you can quickly follow up with them (and even automate some of the follow-up).
This content is so important, that for my private clients, I write this report for them and place it on their website (after their review, of course). The titles above take a “consumer advocacy” approach, which I’ve found gets a lot more clients than much traditional advertising.
I also typically recommend that you not just ask for their email, but for their cell phone number as well. People are giving out their cell phone numbers quite readily now, more so than a few years ago, where it was very difficult to get someone’s mobile number. Many people nowadays use cell phones as their primary or even only phone number, and thus they’re more willing to give it out to people who ask if the reason is compelling enough.
If you follow all these steps, anyone who signs up their email or phone number will be a “warm” lead. A “warm” lead is someone who’s going to be very receptive to your business and much easier to convert into a client, since they’ve showed a great deal of interest in your services—they’ve pretty much done the hard part, which is getting in contact. You have to act on this, however; warm leads, like anything else warm, tend to cool over time, and if you don’t act quickly it’ll be that much harder to seal the deal. This leads us to our next item of interest: follow-up systems!
It’s important that you have some sort of follow-up system in place so that you can call a lead within five minutes of them entering a form. It’s vital that you have a stable, reliable follow-up system in place! If you can get them within 5 minutes, for example, you know they’re an extremely warm lead; you know they were on the website, you know they were interested, and you know they’re looking for business. This is a very warm lead, and much more so than someone who just happened to see your name in a direct mail piece or in a local flyer!
There are some automated follow-up systems in place that are used by many businesses; tools like Constant Contact, AWeber, iContact and Infusionsoft, among others. Depending on your area of expertise there are some services that even provide dozens of pre-written email templates that have proven to help convert email prospects into clients. If you want to use something like these, that’s perfectly fine, but make sure to put the call to action form on that all-important right-hand side first.