We’ve long become accustomed to people loudly talking on the cell phones, firing off emails during a meeting, or twittering minute details of their lives, but sometimes it seems that behavior that was once considered rude is not only becoming acceptable but in many cases supersedes more personal communication.

In The Wall Street Journal Rachel Mardsen writes:

Too many people seem to be grasping for ways to connect with others while rarely actually connecting in a way that has true value or significance. What so many people end up with is something that looks like a connection from the outside as they text each other a million times a day, or sign notes with “much love.” Sadly, that’s the new standard of personal value in this technological era.

Last year there was a big push for business to use social media like Facebook and Twitter to communicate with prospects and existing customers. And, if done right, these sites can be great tools to connect with those interested in your product or service. But often when businesses use social media sites, they often mistake this form of communication for the personal touch that it often takes to get someone to enter the sales pipeline or become a customer.

To increase conversions this year, resolve to be more personal in your marketing efforts. Whether it’s picking up the phone, taking someone to lunch, or sending a personalized (not mass mailed) email, be sure your marketing and sales efforts includes efforts that let your prospects and customers know that their more than a Twitter follower or Facebook fans.

That added personal touch can go a long way to filling your sales pipeline and getting many more loyal customers. 

Install and Use Site-Wide, Conversion Centric Analytics

Most companies have analytics that provide lots of information about website visitors. However, making sense of all the data can be a nightmare. To boost your online conversion rate, it’s best to go with a conversion-centric analytics platform that 1) shows your website’s lead generation rate at a glance, 2) provides you with individual per-visitor, lead reports, and 3) generates macro behavior reports on visitor and website trends so you can recognize patters and make adjustments to your marketing efforts and website.

It’s also important that the analytics package lets you define what a conversion is.  Does the visitor buy your product? Enter your sales pipeline? Sign up for a free trial? Since the definition of a website conversion will differ from business to business, it’s important that your analytics tool is flexible enough that you can define the call to action as you see fit.

Build Trust by Touting Your Success

Anyone can throw together a website and claim their product and service the next big thing. In order to get quality leads into your sales pipeline, visitors have to trust your organization. The best way to build trust is through third-party validation. This can include positive media stories from websites and publications your audience cares about and customer-approved success stories.

If you don’t have anything right now, start by thinking of customers that have told you in the past they love your product or service.  Work with them to write a case study or put their logo on your website. Showing credibility and authority in a particular area is an important step to getting prospects to take that leap of faith and enter your sales pipeline.

Give Your Audience Something They’ll Value for FREE

A great way to entice prospects to enter your sales pipeline is by giving them something they’ll value for free. This involves knowing your audience well enough to understand what will lure them into your sales pipeline. A more tech-savvy audience might enjoy a well researched white paper while a more consumer audience may respond more favorably to a coupon. Some audiences might enjoy a podcast. Others an e-book. They key is to know what your audience values and give it to them in exchange for their contact information. The right giveaway can give you more qualified leads then you know what to do with.

Keep in mind that your giveaway should drive more qualified leads to your sales pipeline. Drawings for free prizes tend to generate a lot of leads but their overall quality tends to be poor. Offer free drawings only if you’re selling a broad-based consumer product. Even then, you’ll probably have to sift through a lot of coal to find the occasional diamond.

Deliver Information in Multiple Ways

Search engines may love the text on your website, but not every visitor enjoys reading. And let’s face it, some products and services are hard to describe with words alone.

When done right, images and multi-media presentation are great ways to clearly and concisely explain your offering and make visitors excited about your company. Many people who don’t want to read will take the time to watch what you have to offer if you can present it in an entertaining, relevant fashion. 

To make multi-media presentations successful, they must be short, punchy, and to the point. They should include a call to action and run no longer than three minutes. They should also be well produced. Your audience isn’t stupid. They’ll be able to tell how much effort you’ve put into them. A poorly made video or Flash presentation will lead visitors to think that your product or service isn’t that great.

Have a Prominent Call to Action on Every Page

How many times have you been to a company’s website, been interested in their product or service and had to search for a way to enter their sales pipeline? Businesses lose highly qualified prospects to the competition every day because visitors have a difficult time knowing what you want them to do.

Visit every page of your website and ask the following questions:

• Does this page have a clear call to action?
• Can visitors spot the call to action in 5 seconds or less?
• If a prospect wants to immediately contact your organization, is there an email address, phone number, or contact form prominently displayed?
• Does the visitor know what will happen once they heed your call to action? For example: will they get a free trial or consultation? Will someone be contacting them? Are they purchasing your product?

Having a prominent call to action on every page is good customer service.  It helps avoid confusion and helps turn visitors into customers.

Companies spend thousands of dollars on pay per click (PPC) advertising, SEO, PR, and other marketing initiatives attracting visitors to their website without seeing a significant increase in sales or leads. Filling your sales pipeline with high quality leads doesn’t have to be expensive. Most companies can see an immediate increase in high quality leads by implementing 5 proven online conversion practices into their website. Not only will these tips maximize the quantity and quality of leads in your sales pipeline, they’ll also help your organization where it matters most: the bottom line.

To learn more about these conversion practices, download our free lead generation guide here.

Webinar: 7 Key Elements of an Irresistible Offer
When: March 4, 2009
Time: 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific)

Register now. 

Tired of putting a lot of effort into your marketing campaigns and not seeing the lead generation and sales conversion you were hoping for?

There’s an easy solution: Make your target audience an offer worthy of their time and money.

At Sapha’s upcoming webinar, 7 Key Elements of an Irresistible Offer, you’ll learn how to create an offer so compelling no sane person who is interested in what you’re selling could walk away from it without feeling a sense of great regret.

Our main presenter, George Paiva, a.k.a The Copy Bully, will show you seven key elements that will transform your direct marketing campaigns into surefire success.

From George you’ll learn:

• How to create a solid value proposition
• How to make your audience an offer that makes them willing to take a chance on you and your product.
• How to create a powerful hook that plays to your audience’s emotions.
• How to effectively use psychological triggers to get people to take action.
• And more!

Whether you’re focus is B2B or B2C, you won’t want to miss a webinar that will help you accomplish your lead generation and sales conversion efforts.

Sign up before it’s too late. Register now.

About George Paiva
George has quickly earned a reputation as a direct response copywriter and marketing strategist who knows how to deliver maximum response and bring the money in.

He is obsessed with writing and putting together “head against windshield” campaigns that communicates his client’s core message and moves people to action. Just a few of George’s clients include Jay Abraham Group, Robert Allen Media, Prospercorp, Stephen Cooper Stock Investing, John Cummuta Transforming Debt into Wealth, Rasmussen College, Prime Visibility SEO and the Phoenix School of Law.

If done right, online forms are an effective way to turn a website visitor into a lead. However, most companies don’t put much thought into the information they ask for or how many fields they require a person to fill out.

As a rule of thumb, the more fields you have prospects fill out, the lower the lead generation rate. However, the quality of the leads tends to be higher. So if you ask for a name, email address, and phone number you may get more leads but the quality of leads will be lower than if you also ask for information like their title, number of employees, industry, annual revenue, etc.

Which approach is best? That depends on your audience, the product or service you’re trying to sell, and your sales cycle. If you don’t know what works, experiment with different forms and landing pages and find out. The one thing about conversion is that that a good analytics tool will give you an unbiased report of what worked and what didn’t. (And if you don’t have one, you’ll want to check out our conversion-centric analytics tool.) The more you know about your audience and their behavior, the easier it is to optimize your website and increase your overall conversion rates.

Marketing and sales professionals are realizing that PPC ads, SEO, and other methods of online advertising and promotion are worthless unless you’re able to calculate the ROI from your investment. Though it’s easy to track how many visitors came to your site from different marketing campaigns, it’s difficult to know whether or not these visitors enter your sales pipeline and what factors contributed to their conversion.

On January 26 Sapha is launching a conversion-centric analytics platform. One of its many features is a dashboard where you can see at a glance not only how Sapha tools are converting, but also the conversion rate of your entire website. By understanding your site’s conversion metrics, you can make better decisions regarding marketing efforts and see how website updates affect conversion rates – allowing you to get the most bang for your marketing and website dollars.

More than just a conversion overview, our conversion-centric analytics provides granular reporting so you can learn from the behavior of each visitor that comes to your site. What path did they take before becoming a lead? What information and documents have they gathered from your site? How did they interact with your HookTour? The answers to these questions will soon be available!

If you think it sounds cool, just wait until you see it reporting data from your website.

In 13 days, you can.