I recently had the pleasure of hosting a webinar on lead generation strategies with the incredibly knowledgeable Tim Paige, Conversion Educator at LeadPages.
LeadPages is a dynamic software company headquartered in Minneapolis – and they’re growing fast. They just launched in 2012 and already have millions in revenue from over 30,000 customers. LeadPages hit a $ 3.5 million run rate nine months after launching and are now growing at a rate of about 20% each month.
Tim and I got together to share the lead generation strategies we’ve used to build our companies far quicker than most are able to achieve. My own company, WordStream, is now seven years old and has grown 677% in the last three years, to $ 6.6 million in annual revenue.
So how do you DO that?
Have a look at what LeadPages learned from processing over 4 million opt-ins a month and how WordStream used PPC to increase revenue and clients ten-fold in three years!
1. Create A LOT Of Opt-In Opportunities And Make Them Irresistible
Webinars, free reports, live demos… don’t stop at just one or two opt-ins. Turn every blog post into an opt-in page. You can give away recipes, PDFs of your blog posts, worksheets, resource guides and more.
Get the opt-in box out of the sidebar and make a pop-up. Force users to make a decision. Do you want this or not? It’s easier to say no when the option is just sitting there in the sidebar and saying no is as easy as ignoring it.
In testing, this increased conversion by 32%.
You can’t make them say yes, but you don’t have to make it so easy for people to say no.
2. Always Be Testing – But Test The Right Way
Getting great advice is a good thing, but it’s dangerous to think that because it worked for someone else, it’ll work equally well for you. That doesn’t mean you should ignore great advice, but that you need to test, test, test – and do it right.
Split test even where you think you don’t need to. Sometimes the results amongst your audience will seem counter-intuitive, but this is why testing is critical. In this test, for example, you might think the use of “my” or “your” would have little effect.
The treatment actually resulted in 24% fewer conversions!
Point of view can be impactful. In this test, changing “your” to “my” resulted in a 90% increase in conversions:
Other aspects you’ll want to test for are immediacy, concreteness, images, and more. Split test your headline, your button copy, and your background image. The results might surprise you, but you’ll be making better, more informed optimizations.
3. Make Landing Pages Clear And Easy To Take Action On
Tim shared their best-ever converting landing page; check it out:
Why is this so effective? Tim explained that it doesn’t require the user to process very much information, like a 3-minute video or a whole page of copy would. It outperforms a free report because a lot of people are feeling information overload and don’t want to download something even longer to read.
Video lead magnets have suffered an image problem lately, in part because of the proliferation of launches and lack of time. For these reasons, this landing page was a hot performer. It also helped that people genuinely want to know which tools other people are using and this fulfills that desire.
Anyone can do this – dentists, plumbers, architects, whoever. This type of page can be set up in under a half hour and is definitely worth trying out.
4. Write Better Ads!
I’ve been saying this for a long time and it’s still true – most ads just suck. They’re boring, they’re all the same, and one isn’t any more compelling than another.
Take a look at these ads:
If you’re the searcher, you really have no reason other than price to choose one over the other. This is what I call an AdWords Jackpot for an advertiser. When everything looks the same, there’s a huge opportunity to come in with something different and blow the competition away!
Writing better ads can raise your CTR above the expected average, giving your Quality Score a boost.
5. Give Better Offers
Unless you’re one of the very top advertisers, there’s a ton of room for conversion rate improvement. In fact, the top 10% of landing pages have conversion rates 3x to 5x the average. How do they do it?
One creative way is to give better offers. This is far more meaningful than your typical, run of the mill optimizations – changing button color, font type, spacing, etc.
Every software company offers a free trial. Every plastic surgeon offers a free consultation. What do you have to offer that is unique, compelling, and offers real value to the visitor?
For WordStream, it meant rethinking our standard free software trial offer. We decided to offer a free AdWords Grader, instead.
Conversions went through the roof! We had found something non-committal that people could actually use and weren’t asking them to take all the steps of downloading, installing, and then actually using our software. To date, this has proven to be one of our most effective lead generation strategies.
If your conversions are 2% or lower, you need to try something drastic like changing up your offer big time. Small optimizations will beget small results. The top 25% of advertisers have an average 5.31% conversion rate and the top 10% are hitting over 11%, on average! You have a ton of room to grow.
6. Go Nuts With Remarketing
Remarketing enables you to tag site visitors and get back in front of them as they go about their business around the web, checking their email, watching YouTube, searching Google, and even hanging out on Facebook.
It helps turns abandoners into leads, which is huge considering that 97% of people will leave your landing page without converting. Remarketing amplifies the effect of all of your other marketing activities – content marketing, social media marketing, etc. – by positioning you in front of your audience again.
Remarketing using the Google Display Network gives you 92% reach in the U.S., across millions of websites, videos, and devices. We’ve found that remarketing ads fatigue is about half the rate of regular ads, so be aggressive!
Rapid Growth Needs Serious Lead Generation Strategies
Tim and I have seen great success in our respective companies and at a far faster clip than average. If you want to grow and grow fast, you need to prioritize your lead generation strategies and use tactics like the ones we’ve recommended above to get as many qualified prospects as possible into your funnel.
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