There is a lot of talk about lead generation in our industry, but not much about the next step: lead capture. It’s one thing to generate traffic and bring internet browsers to your site, but how are you capturing your leads or prompting a response from them?
Without a lead capture technique in place all your hard work with lead generation simply won’t pay off. So what kind of techniques exist for lead capture on your website? The two most common types are forced registration or requested registration. The pros and cons of these is a topic for another post, but it is critical that you have some way of gathering your website visitors contact information so that you can start the process of turning them from leads into clients!
My preferred approach to lead capture is called a “soft sign-up” form which is more casual than most of the forms you’ll find. It can be intimidating for users to see a giant form asking for all their information and many people worry about where that info will end up. I use a mad-lib style sign up that asks for the minimum amount of information and is much more friendly. Users can even hit the Facebook button to sign up and by-pass the form all together.
I have found that this casual approach leads to a much higher capture rate (around 15%!) than standard forms and the more leads captured the more prospective clients I’m going to be in connect with!
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