Find out how to make more money marketing by converting more potential leads into sales!
You have a killer product, an excellent SEO program with scores of landing pages, and your affiliate advertisers love you. But you’re still having trouble getting people who see your site to actually buy a product or even stay on the page long enough to register for a trial, and your SEO program’s getting expensive. You need to do something before the clock runs out.
I’ve been in online marketing for years so I’ve learned a thing or two about how to run a successful online marketing campaign based on the concept of the sales funnel, or sales process. I’m going to show you how to increase conversions in two points early on in the sales process.
Site acceleration
Site acceleration services host your website content in a special way. Essentially, instead of one server sending the website to anybody throughout the world regardless of their location, accelerated sites are hosted on multiple servers and the end user (the potential lead) receives the site’s content from whichever server is closest. As a result, people in New York don’t have to wait for a server in Russia or Los Angeles to send them the site content.
Keep your leads on your site
This is critical to making sure potential leads stay on your site after they’ve found it in a search engine because most potential leads are lost within the first eight seconds of visiting a site. With the widespread adoption of smartphones and the impending adoption of tablets, devices that both allow users to enter a “back” command with a simple swipe of the finger, this is even more true today than it was two years ago and it will become even more important further down the road when tablets become ubiquitous. Not only that, but Google rewards sites that load quickly by displaying them higher on search results so you’ll have more potential leads to work with if your site loads faster.
Choose the right service
Perhaps more important than deciding to accelerate your website is to choose a service that’s actually good at it. The best indicator I’ve found is how they treat video content. Good services like MaxCDN host video one separate super-fast servers and stream it into your site so that it doesn’t slow down your load times and penalize you with Google. Bad sites just throw all your content onto the same server, which could make your site almost as slow as it was before acceleration if you have a lot of videos.
Hook your leads
Once your site’s loaded, you need to make sure that people will stay on your site. As a general rule of thumb for text landing pages, you have to grab the potential lead’s interest (you already have their attention since they’ve just clicked a link to your site) in the headline and then hook them in the first paragraph.
Write a good first paragraph
Do you remember how you felt growing up when a friend told you “I have a secret!” and then wouldn’t tell you what the secret is? You were itching know, begging them to tell you, but they just smiled and shook their head, or told you that it’s a secret so you shouldn’t know. That feeling you felt is exactly how potential leads should feel after reading the first paragraph of your landing page. Once they’re hooked, you have a good chance of converting them into a lead or a sale.
About the author: David Henzel is the Vice President of Marketing at content delivery network and site acceleration services provider NetDNA.