In this episode of Simplify your online marketing strategy, I'll talk about how to convert a web site visitor into a lead.
From the moment a new visitor arrives on your web site, he will be evaluating whether or not to stay on that web site. And of course, as soon as he decides to leave, you've wasted all the money it took to get him there and squandered a chance to get a lead.
Before we discuss specific tactics, I want to cover a few statistics that you can use to see how well you're doing.
- Time on site - The amount of time a visitor stays on your site is a great indicator of how useful an average visitor finds your site.
The statistics from the site above are very good. The average visitor stays for 7 minutes, and only 37% of people leave in less than 30 seconds. If more than 50% of your visitors leave in under 30 seconds, something about your site makes them want to leave very quickly. - Percent visitors that become leads - This metric is another good "total" figure of web site quality. The higher the better! If you get 1000 visitors and get 50 leads, that's a 5% conversion rate, and is pretty good. Under 1% is bad; 2-4% is good, 4-8% is really good, and if you can do 8%+ that's quite impressive. You can use your own site statistics or a tool like Google Analytics to accurately calculate this information.
Now, here are a few tips on keeping visitors on your site long enough to become leads!
- BE RELEVANT - This doesn't mean include ANYTHING that someone might consider useful; it means matching the content you have on your site to the visitors that you try to attract. Pretend that you are a potential customer that's seen one of your ads leading to your web site; go to your site and think, "does this site look like it'd be useful to someone that responded to my ad?" Being relevant is as much about what you don't have as what you do.
- DO NOT REQUIRE REGISTRATION - People assume information on the internet is free. The earlier you "require" information, the quicker you'll drive away customers. You might get lots of leads but they will not be high-quality leads. If your site lets people access all of the information easily, they stay a while and come back often. Statistics show that 90% of customers use the first agent they contact, so you want to "be there" when they are finally ready to contact someone. And for goodness sakes follow up on leads immediately.
- PROPERTY SEARCH GENERATES LEADS - As an agent, you have the right to put IDX property search on your web site. Do it! Make sure that the site is easy to use, allows people to register to save a property search and get notified of new properties. This is an ideal way to generate a quality lead, and provides automatic "fresh" content to keep people coming back.
- HAVE FRESH CONTENT - People will only come back so often to look at the same thing. Make sure your site has fresh content in the form of blog posts, market info, featured deals, listings, rates, or other timely info to keep people happy with repeat visits.
- SIMPLIFY NAVIGATION -Cluttered sites confuse visitors and make them search for other sources of info. Life is confusing enough, keep it simple for your users!
- DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF - Most people see agents as all the same. This goes along with #1; make sure that people see why your services are most relevant for their real estate needs, whether your skills, experience, or personality.
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