Tag Archive for: Website Conversion

Your Crash Course to Offering a Crash Course

Your Crash Course to Offering a Crash CourseConverting visitors often requires giving away something of value. An excellent way to convert visitors, as well as maintain relationships and grow your subscriber base, is to provide a crash course. This method ties in well with making an offer when a customer tries to exit a page. Encourage the visitor to sign up for a crash course by piquing their interest. Clearly, the visitor had at least some passing interest in what you have to offer to have been on that page in the first place. There can be many reasons why a visitor might choose to exit a page, but before they go, make an offer they cannot refuse with a crash course.

Why Offer a Crash Course?

Doing so gives you the opportunity to convert your website visitors by capturing their name as well as email address. With that information, you then have the chance to market to that lead in the future. The person becomes a prospect in your system, and a part of your company’s most valuable asset – your database! In the future, you can segment your database to easily target people that took your crash course.

Designing a Crash Course for Prospects

To be effective, crash courses should be brief in nature. The ideal length of time to offer a crash course is around two weeks. Make sure you do not inundate prospects with too many emails. Furthermore, all emails should be kept short and be educational in nature. Avoid the temptation to make your emails promotional and too salesy.

Make Sure You Have the Right Tools

The chief reason that many website owners do not take advantage of the opportunity to offer a crash course is that they feel they simply do not have the time to do so. Others sometimes feel intimidated at the prospect of offering even a short two-week course.

Tools such as SiteEngage™ can help make this process easier through automation. By creating an automation for a series of emails that are spread out over time, you can provide your visitors with a crash course to maintain their interest and nurture the relationship, all without expending a lot of time or resources.

Offering a crash course at the right time can provide you with an excellent opportunity to engage and convert visitors.

What Are Email Gates and How to Use Them to Convert

What Are Email Gates and How to Use Them to ConvertAre you giving away all of your content? Learn what are email gates to convert more visitors. Today, such a large amount of content is available and given away for free that many business owners believe their leads will turn to their competition if they do not give away content. While this line of thinking has become commonplace, it does not take a number of factors into consideration. Certainly not all content should be gated, but your highly valuable content should always be gated.

What Is Gated Content?

What exactly is gated content? What are email gates? Gated content refers to any content that a visitor must provide an email address in order to receive something valuable in exchange. The key to using gated content is to encourage visitors to enter an email address to receive the content they want the most. Different types of content can be gated, including case studies, testimonials, datasheets, brochures, and more. Basically, anything you can convert into a word document or PDF. Videos can also be gated, when using providers like Wistia and their turnstyle feature. Web pages can also be gated by using engagement popups with solutions like Lead Liaison’s SiteEngage™. Your marketing automation provider will help you gate all of your valuable content. First, start by creating a marketing content map to take inventory on what’s valuable, which you’ll inevitably gate.

When Should You Use Gated Content?

Not all content should be gated. It is particularly important to make certain the content at the top of your sales funnel remains open. You want people to find your business and your products/services to be interesting. This content often serves as an effective icebreaker to encourage visitors to take the next step. There is a time and place to use email gates, and you must ascertain the correct time to position those gates based on what is best for your business.

Throwing up email gates on all of your content will usually have the exact opposite effect that you desire. While you might get a lead by having a visitor enter his or her email, if the customer is not yet ready to buy, you still won’t get the sale. The last thing you want is to bombard leads with emails they do not want. This is why it is essential to determine the best time and place to use email gates. The goal is to make the determination between those leads that are ready to receive your emails and those leads that would be alienated by your emails. Doing so can help you achieve the desired balance between whetting the appetite of a lead and converting those leads that are ready to buy.

Video Marketing: Your Key to Converting More Visitors

Video Marketing: Your Key to Converting More CustomersAll marketers know about email marketing, direct mail, etc. But, what about video marketing for converting more visitors? Doesn’t that just play videos and push information, one-way, to visitors or can it be interactive? It can be interactive, and there are ways you can use video marketing to to begin converting more visitors.

Adding video to your website is an effective way to convert more visitors into customers. Among the most frequent reasons people do not add video to their website is that producing a video can be expensive. With that said, video production does not have to blow your entire marketing budget. In fact, you might be surprised to discover that you get a quality video produced for far less than you might expect. Ask us too! We’ve done video marketing on a budget. We’ve had multiple video explainers created for less than $1,000 USD each. That’s quite a bargain. But buyer beware. Videos can cost upwards of $15,000 to $20,000 if you need a voice over, storyboard, script, and more.

Types of Videos to Produce that Convert Visitors

Another common question among business owners that consider adding video to their website is what type of video should I use to start converting more visitors. Numerous options are available, including testimonials, solution instructions, marketing, and more. The addition of videos can help to increase both conversions and sales by discussing how a product works, the benefits of using a product, and even how a product can resolve certain issues. Along with explaining how to use a product, you could also use videos to answer frequently asked questions. With the addition of a video, you can transform your site into a sales rep for your business that offers help to the leads as they browse your website. Rather than just seeing a product on your website, customers can learn about your products by watching a video.

What Video Hosting Providers Convert More Visitors?

You will also need to have a place to host your videos. Your choice of hosting service should not be taken lightly. YouTube might be the first place to come to mind for hosting your videos. For businesses, Wistia is often a better choice. With Wistia as the hosting service, you can benefit from lead conversion tools and analytics—tools that are not available with Vimeo or YouTube. You can also exercise complete control over both your video and viewers. For instance, you can protect your viewers from advertisements, commercials, and even potentially dangerous redirects that might ultimately send your leads to your competitors.

The addition of video to your website can make it more powerful and effective, giving your leads the information they need to make a more informed decision.

Too Many Website Visitors Leaving Your Site? Show an Offer

Too Many Exiting Customers - Show an Offer

Stop those Visitors Leaving Your Site!

Do you have too many visitors leaving your site before you even have a chance to convert them? It’s a common phenomenon that most website owners have no idea how to correct. They simply notice a trend when reviewing their analytics, but feel powerless to do anything to correct the problem. When visitors lose interest in what they see on your website, whether they are simply closing the browser tab, typing in another URL, or hitting the back button, you need to take action right away. Showing an offer, also known as presenting an engagement window, can help you to do that.

Pop-Ups versus Engagement Windows

You might be thinking…”hey, this sounds like a pop-up”. While a pop-up has a negative connotation and can be intrusive to the user’s experience, an engagement window is not intrusive. Engagement windows are designed to show the right message to the right user, at the right time. This is accomplished through the use of personalized content, such as the user’s name, his or her location, etc. These engaging tactics can absolutely stop visitors leaving your site.

The key to making this system work for you is to ensure you have the right marketing automation provider. Unfortunately, not all marketing automation providers offer this type of service. To be effective, you need to be able to detect user behavior at the right time in order to determine when a user is about to exit your website and provide a compelling offer to capture the visitor’s attention and interests. Without this type of behavior-detection system in place, you run the risk of alienating visitors by displaying an offer at the wrong time. The goal is to capture a visitor’s attention and encourage him or her to stick around and take you up on your offer rather than leaving.

Your offer should also be carefully crafted to be enticing enough that the visitor is encouraged to take action right then. Oftentimes, this means presenting a limited-time offer that the visitor must take action on right away in order to avoid losing.