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So first off is about making sure that you capture your current customers and the people who are buying from you, making sure that you capture their email addresses. There are many businesses that are running online that forget to get permission from the user to contact them with subsequent emails when they buy something. Now obviously the people that are buying from you are the warmest leads for subsequent sales so it’s really important that when someone buys from you that you get their permission to email market to them again.

The second thing is to make sure that your sign up form is really as short as possible. So there is lots of evidence out there that supports the fact that if you put lots of different lines and ask for lots of different information from users, it puts them off and it makes them give up. And actually, as you cut each line out, the number of people that complete the form goes up. So the ideal form would just include two things. It would include the person’s name and their email address and that is all that you need. So try to aim for that with your sign up forms. The other thing to think about as well is don’t make people hunt out the sign up form. If you’re being aggressive, you could think about putting it in a consistent place on every page. And of course don’t forget if your form is really small, just two fields and a submit button, then that actually is something that you can put on almost every page of your website.

So the third thing is to offer something in return for people signing up. Don’t expect that people are going to willing give up their email address to you. We are all sick of getting emails from companies that we don’t think are relevant to us. I certainly do this, I’m sure you do too, I delete about half of the emails I get, simply because they’re not providing any value to me. I don’t recall signing up to them in the first place and if I do, they don’t seem able to understand what I want to read about. So try to offer someone something of value in return for signing up. So that might be that they get access to extra content from you, it might be that they get access to a demonstration of your product. It might be that you send them something for free afterwards. But don’t expect them to give up their email address for nothing, try to offer something of value.

So the fourth thing to try to generate more leads is consider using a popup on your site. Now popups have a really bad reputation. They were all the rage in the 00s and the 90s and from a usability point of view they are usually a massive no-no. But you can put popups in certain areas on your site and particularly on your blog that subtly draws the attention of the user and gives them a chance to sign up for more information. So I’m not saying hit the user as soon as they arrive with a massive overlay or popup that demands their signing up before they can go any further. But if you’ve got someone that looks like their reading a bit of your content, it looks like they’re engaging with you a little bit, then put a popup in the corner asking if they want to get more information or if they want to get a free service or demo from you, as I said in my early point, that they can subscribe to your email list.

The fifth thing, that I’ve just alluded to just there, is to make sure that you’re using your blog to generate extra members of your mailing list. So there’s lots of small businesses that just focus on one particular area to generate leads for their business. They focus on their products and they ask people to sign up if they’re interested in their products. But actually, anyone who’s engaging with your website, anyone who’s engaging with your brand is a potential customer, or someone who might refer you to a potential customer. And the blog is usually where a small business is able to get the most engagement from users, because you’re providing, or you should be writing something of interest to the user. So use the blog and consider launching a popup subtly on the blog in order to generate lists and emails of people that are reading that content. The other thing about it of course is that if you’re marketing yourself on social media, it might be your blog posts that you’re actually promoting so your blog might be the only thing that people come to look at. So make sure that you take the opportunity and get their attention.

And then the sixth thing to do is to make them feel comfortable about signing up by showing them how many other people have decided to do exactly the same thing, or by providing some kind of testimonial or social proof. So if you’re trying to generate sign-ups for a newsletter, for example, tell them how many other people have already signed up for that newsletter. If you’re trying to generate an email list for potential sales, make it clear how many other customers you look after that are similar to this potential customer. So just reassure them, make them know that they’re not the only person who has decided to sign up and that it’s generally a good idea to do it.

Ok, that was the 123-reg Swift Six on how to generate more leads from your website. I’ll see you next time.