Three Most Important Words in Lead Generation: Convert, Convert, Convert

Recently, I had the pleasure of chatting with Jimmy Ellis the Director of Optimization Research at MarketingExperiments.com about their take on form optimization. I was pretty impressed.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on CTA and form optimization as I’ve been changing things up on oshyn.com. Of course, I didn’t want to change just for the sake of visual appeal – although that was a big part of my concern.

I’ve been reading different blogs and websites including my favorite MarketingProfs.com to find out the ‘best practices’ on forms that lead to conversions. We online marketers spend a lot of time, effort and money to get people to our websites, to forms, and it’s a terrible (yet preventable) loss when they fail to complete the form and convert to a lead. We often wonder, “WHY?”

It’s personal.

Often, when people arrive on your “landing page” with a form or CTA, they have arrived without knowing much about your company. They found you on Google, Twitter, Tumblr, a press release, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo, an

They don’t know much about your company, its reputation, how you will guard the information they supply in the form, whether you will bombard them with email follow-ups (aka SPAM to some) or phone calls. I recently completed a form on Gomez.com to download a research white paper to check the facts I was reading – and within the hour, “…I saw a note from my marketing team that you recently downloaded one of the Gomez white papers,” and while I appreciated the quick follow-up I felt a little like big brother was watching. I hadn’t yet had time to read what I downloaded!

Is it obvious?

So back to Jimmy Ellis. He showed me some case studies and explained the scientific methodology that MarketingExperiments.com uses to make forms and CTAs more effective. And (not in his exact words), as he put it, it’s not simply a matter of getting MORE leads so the marketing department can report a volume increase – it’s a matter of capturing the “right” leads. Oh Jimmy how your words were music to my ears. There’s something really frustrating about capturing a great volume of leads and realizing there is too high a percentage that can’t convert.

Why can’t they convert?

• They’re not a decision maker
• They’re a competitor (downloading your latest white paper)
• They’re just doing research
• They’re too big
• They’re too small
• They’re a partner

But sometimes….

They are a lead that can be nurtured. So it would help if you had a feature like Sitecore offers that allows you to ‘score’ leads to let your sales team know which lead to follow up on, or which approach to take.

Again back to Jimmy…

When you are designing your forms, there are many factors to take into consideration. So many that MarketingExperiments.com designed a scientific process for figuring this out for you. Their process seems to start with semiotics and user experience. When a visitor arrives on the landing page with the CTA or form – is it immediately obvious to them why they should continue and submit their information? Are you distracting the visitor with unnecessary clutter? Is it easy to learn more “About Us”? Is the information required in the form necessary and relevant? (You can ask for WAY too much information…and longer forms can deteriorate the frequency of completion.) Quite simply, does the form explain what benefit you will receive? Would it be better to split the form into two steps? And wait, before you go to your landing pages and start to attempt changes, stop and review your current analytics so you can TEST!

The last word (for now)

Forms and CTAs are crucial to your online lead generation success. But it is complex. It’s not just about visual appeal. It’s not just about copywriting. It’s not just about finding the magical numbers of fields in the form. It IS about understanding the nature of those finding your landing page and what motivates them to TRUST you and provide the (valid) information you are requesting.

I will be writing more in a future post….but in the meantime, check out MarketingExperiments.com – they’ve got some fantastic information about understanding optimization. http://www.marketingexperiments.com/

You can also follow them on Twitter.

And of course you can follow me too!

[Via http://breakingthemarketingrules.com]