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How to Create a Direct Response Website

By Matthew Whitworth

Republish: EasyPublish™
Published: 03Oct2009
Word count: 860
Viewed: 238 time(s)

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The following suggestions for your website or landing page, are designed to produce more leads and sales for you, regardless of whether your business is geared towards products or services. The ideas shared can be implemented immediately with little or no cost.

Additionally, by following the design fundamentals indicated below, the extra leads and sales you enjoy will be a result of converting a greater number of the visitors from the traffic that you are already receiving.

So, the basics first:

1) Ensure your site is designed according to the theme of the products or services offered. I recommend your website design fall under the supervision of your marketing staff rather than your art department or IT department.

2) Secondly, design your site as an interactive lead generator, not a static brochure. Whether you are selling low-price or high-ticket products and/or services, it may be unlikely you’re going to convince your prospect to purchase your product and/or service during an initial visit to your site. Therefore, construct a site that will generate leads for you as well as sales. That way, you can follow up with these leads in order to turn them into customers in the future.

Depending on your business and types of clients, your prospects may visit your site, browse around, like what they see, but then leave the site. This does not mean that they did not like what they saw, just that they were not ready to take the next step in the purchasing process. So, one of the problems becomes, if you don’t have any way of capturing your visitors’ information, how are you going to ensure that they remember your company when they are ready to buy?

If the only way a prospect has to get in touch with you is a phone number or an email address, you are losing out on the ability to market to all of the prospects who aren’t quite ready to buy.

You’ve Worked Hard to Get That Traffic to Your Website – Don’t Go Wasting It!

Think of all of the activity you have put into attracting visitors to your site – you have either paid for the visitors via pay per click or advertising, or you have put in the time to perfect SEO, write articles, comment on forums etc. All of which are producing targeted traffic for you.

Think of the website as a funnel into which you pour the traffic. What happens to that traffic is entirely a function of the content of your website. You will either receive a sale, or a lead, with whom you can follow up later and hopefully turn into a customer.

So, what if you only get to interact with 5% of the total traffic to your site? How many of the other 95% of visitors could turn into leads and eventually sales? The rate at which you can convert your traffic into leads, will determine ultimately what revenue you can generate from your site.

So, how to do capture information from prospects who are just browsing? Simple really, but very few websites offer this kind of option:

Integrate different options onto your website with which your prospects can interact with you.

Some examples of the types of things you can incorporate are as follows:

1) downloadable report

2) downloadable coupon page

3) design guide, portfolio

4) instant chat help button

5) free consultation

6) newsletter mailing list

Anything that is of value to your prospective clients, but does not necessarily have to cost you much money is a good way of capturing further leads from your prospects.

A Real-World Example of The Power of This Simple Technique

I have been working with a small business involved in the service industry. Their particular market is super competitive. The company had a large Adwords spend of the order of $500/day – the leads that come from this were mostly emails and phone calls.

We set up a couple of different options on their website to attract visitors’ information:

1) Schedule request form – to schedule a visit for the service company

2) Contact us form – just to find out more information

3) Downloadable coupon – offering their current special (norm for this industry)

We then tracked the traffic to the site over a 1 year period and obtained the following results:

Contact Us: 6%

Schedule Appointment: 8%

Coupon Download: 86%

The coupon download generated over 86% of all of the leads. Now, of course, if the coupon download was not on the site, this does not mean that this company would not have received a call or schedule request instead. However, it does illustrate that if you offer something of value to a prospect on your site, they will sign up for it. Now, this particular company has a database of over 2000 leads that he can market to whenever he likes, offering specials, etc.

In summary, you need to recognize that a prospect’s first visit is generally not going to result in a sale for you, but that you should still take the opportunity to capture the prospect’s information. All you need to do is incorporate a brief lead capture form upon your site and offer something of value to your prospects.

By following the steps outlined in our FREE CD and our Small Business Internet Marketing Course, you should be able to see exponential improvements to your bottom line. To find out more, check out our free video which gives the #1 Secret to Marketing Your Small Business Online - Small Business Internet Marketing Secrets

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