SEO, paid search, social media, blogging—these
are all effective ways to increase traffic and generate leads. But even with an effective marketing plan to
optimize your web pages and create a strategic paid search campaign, there’s a
missing link here that can help businesses really capture quality leads: the
opt-in form.
People who land on your website and stick
around long enough to browse through a few pages may not be ready to place a
call to your business or order a product, but they may be willing to enter
their email address into an opt-in form. Placing an opt-in form on your
homepage or creating a landing page specifically to capture emails is a great
way to generate quality leads.
Before you log in to your website and slap a
form together, ask yourself a few questions first:
· Who are you targeting? Think about your primary and secondary
customer profile whom your business serves. These are the people you want to
serve via the opt-in form, and by gathering email addresses.
· What action do you want them to take? Most businesses create an opt-in form to
gather email address. Creating a separate landing page for the opt-in form is a
great way to isolate the call to action, or getting people to opt-in. However,
you can also locate the form on your primary web page, in the sidebar or
header. The opt-in landing page should generally be very clean, without a lot
of other information or buttons cluttering the page, and focused, with copy,
color and design those specifically direct users to take that one specific
action.
· What are you willing to give consumers? People will be less likely to type in their
email address into an opt-in form unless they’re getting something in return.
In exchange for the email address, you can offer customers a special report on
how to get a lower mortgage rate, a discount or coupon to use in your brick and
mortar store, or a video that talks about how your product solves a specific
problem.
So what should the opt-in form look like? The
primary elements you should feature include:
· A headline that instantly grabs attention and
draws readers in.
· The benefits that they’ll get by subscribing.
· A call to action that invites consumers to
sign-up in a very clear, direct way.
· The opt-in form, with slots for a name and
email address. (Some opt-in forms request more information. If you choose this
route, make the additional information optional. Customers tend to be
intimidated by long forms, and hesitant about providing too much personal
information, so the idea here is to ask for less to get more people to
sign-up.)
For optimal success, once you put an opt-in
form to work on your website to generate leads, split-test your form to gain
insight into your unique audience of consumers. The results of changing one or
two components on the form lets you know what’s working, and what’s not. Making
small but strategic changes to the font, form positioning, messaging, or design
can drive more people to your lead-generating opt-in form.
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