If done right, exit-intent popups and landing pages can be immensely powerful tools for generating leads.
So, what is lead generation?
To put it simply, it’s the process of compiling a list of customers who have shown interest in your product or services at one point and who might be willing to buy from you.
What we want from our visitors is their contact information; in most cases, that’s their emails or their phone numbers, so that we could make a subscribers’ list and later direct our marketing efforts toward this list of people.
We want their contact information because when customers find you, they may not be inclined to buy from you straight away… and why would they? They don’t know you; they don’t know if you’re actually capable of helping them achieve their goals or if you’re even worthy of their money and their time.
In that case, you have to make sure that you have everything in place that will alleviate the customers’ concerns and make them willing to share their contact information with you. And you alleviate these concerns by creating great content or giving them an offer they cannot refuse.
Let’s illustrate that. You have devised an amazing fitness plan that you believe can help others achieve great results, but you would also like to make some money out of it.
You can create a case study of how you managed to help other people, along with their testimonials. Also, you need to give these potential clients a ton of useful information about their topic of interest – staying fit, weight loss, you name it. And, in exchange for all of this information, all you ask of your visitors is to leave their name and their email address.
So what we have done here is, we have provided some useful content, given our visitors enough information, and shown them that we can in fact do as we claim. Plus, we now have their contact information, which we can now use to send them more useful content, and further position ourselves as experts and to establish a positive connection with our potential buyers.
Now, you have to work on growing that subscriber list because you need to nurture these leads if you want any of them to convert into paying customers, or members. You get the picture. I’m going ahead of myself with this talk of lead nurturing, but we’ll talk that a bit later.
And content lead generation options are numerous, to say the least. We have blog posts, case studies, webinars, different types of reports and guides, checklists, cheat sheets, etc.
However, you need to have the lead generation tools put in place that would do all this automatically for you.
And some of the best lead generation tools to deliver your content and ask for visitors’ contact information are exit-intent popups and landing pages.
As you can deduce from the name itself, exit-intent popups are shown when visitors want to leave your website. And to prevent them from doing that without ever coming back, you can try to hook them in with one last offer. If they aren’t interested in that offer either, then you know that they most likely have no intention of buying from you and you can now focus on other visitors.
Your website “knows” when to trigger the exit intent popup by using Javascript and the movements that it detects from your browser. And if you start moving your pointer to the “x” (close) button, that’s when the popup is initiated.
So, what can you offer as a lead magnet?
You can choose to offer your content that would solve some of their problems, or you can ask them to enter into a contest that you’re currently running because you’ll be giving away some free stuff, or maybe they would get a discount for some of your services or products. There are many options, but it all boils down to what your product or your service is.
Some of your visitors are seasoned online buyers and even though they’re more than interested in buying your product, they are waiting for you to offer them a discount before they make a purchase.
However, no matter what you might be offering, you have to consider context. By context, I mean that you need to pay special attention to whom you’ll be showing this popup, and what you’ll be offering to that visitor.
For example, if visitors have added some products to the shopping cart, but haven’t proceeded to the checkout, the absolutely worst thing that you could do is try to offer them a free e-book on that popup. It is completely out of context for that part of your website.
Offering an e-book would work if the visitors have decided to abandon your blog page, but when they’re planning to abandon your cart, offering them a discount or a chance to save the contents of the cart for later would be a better option.
In the case of a discount, that extra 10, 15, 20% discount that you offer may be the thing that sways them to your side, even if they decided against the purchase in the first place.
Being moderate with the use of exit-intent popups is incredibly important. Sometimes, these popups can be triggered even when a visitor didn’t really have the intention of leaving, but they’ve unwittingly moved their pointer close to the “x” button.
You don’t want to cause irritation with the number of popups your visitors see.
You can limit the number of times these popups appear for a particular user regardless of whether they’ve signed up or not. And depending on the popup tool you’re using, you can decide when you’ll let these popups show up again, or if they should show up at all.
This selective approach is possible due to the use of cookies that your website places into your visitor’s browser. Your website can recognize it every time a visitor returns, and based on that particular user’s behaviour, your website can choose what to show and what not to show to that particular visitor.
For this reason, you need to have various popups in place if you want to make full use of their amazing lead generating and conversion potential.
The other extremely important thing when it comes to exit-intent popups is design. It’s no secret that people tend to judge the quality of the service and product based on its design. I have noticed it with myself too. When the design is soothing, I’m more likely to pay attention and actually read what that exit intent popup is all about. If it’s not pleasing to the eye, I just won’t bother.
And this is true for most of your visitors. They are bombarded with popups wherever they go. If your popups look average or even below average, not only will they ignore it, but they’ll also be pretty annoyed.
First and foremost, you need to make sure that the design of the popup complements the overall look and feel of the website. For example, if you have a fitness website that caters mainly to men, then having a popup with an airy and bubbly design would just be off-putting to them.
The design of your popups needs to reflect the rest of the website and its message. If you choose to have images on your popups, they need to be professionally constructed and of the highest resolution possible. If that’s not the case, your popups may cause more damage than good.
And, when it comes to the copy on these popups, you need to be extremely careful. Nobody’s going to subscribe to your mailing list just because you ask them to. You need to promise real benefits in exchange for their email address and walk the fine line between giving all the right information and keeping it short. If it’s too long, nobody’s going to bother to read it. Visitors just skim for information nowadays, and you need to accommodate that.
Be short, be precise and be appealing.
How landing pages can boost your lead generation.
A little while ago, when people would say landing page, they would mean the first page the visitor lands on when visiting your website. Most often than not, this is what home pages were.
However, the definition of a landing page has changed drastically over the past couple of years. Now, this is a page on your website that is excluded from the navigational panel, and the general idea is that it cannot be found by visitors. The purpose of these landing pages is predetermined by each campaign that you run. The way they are created is by making sure they block out every other distraction, and only show information pertinent to the campaign that you’re running.
For example, you are running a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign for your special weight loss program. The special offer is one month of free access to your program… What happens when they click on your ad? Where are they sent? Is your homepage the first thing that they see? There’s nothing there about the one month they get for free, the very reason they’d clicked on your ad, right? Well, this is usually when your visitors get annoyed and leave. Without a proper landing page, the only thing that you’ve successfully managed to do is waste your marketing budget. Your impact…. zero.
How do we address this? Well, we make a specially designed landing page for the purpose of this PPC campaign. Like I said, visitors won’t be able to see this page on your website, unless they’ve clicked on the ad.
The first rule when writing a landing page is that the copy needs to match the referrer, or in this case, the ad.
If you’ve promised a weight loss program, plus one month of free access, you need to deliver. Present some main features of the program, try to anticipate every single question they might have about the offer, but don’t make it too long. Also, show a clear call-to-action that promises a month of free access.
Make that CTA prominent and make it dominate the landing page. Use some colour that will make it pop. Green or orange are the most common ones, but you need to take into account the look of your website and choose a colour that matches it.
You also want to remove any distractions that might take their attention away from clicking on that CTA button. That means removing the navigation panels and anything else, for that matter, that is irrelevant to the offer at hand.
Don’t include any additional links that will tempt visitors to click on them and end up somewhere else on your website. You paid for that visitor to come to that specific landing page, and you want them right there, clicking on the CTA button. Make it count.
Make sure that everything important that the visitor needs to know straight away is shown first. Don’t make them scroll for information.
Again, when it comes to design, you want to show uniformity with the rest of your website. The last thing you want to do is make them feel as if they’re on the wrong website. It should be sleek, functional and easy on the eyes.
If, on the other hand, you’re asking for visitors’ contact information, make sure that you ask for essentials only; usually, that includes name and email address. Visitors are put off if you ask them to give away too much personal information, and they might end up leaving without filling out the details.
You can also include an explainer video that will be some sort of orientation to visitors who are interested in the product. This can be really effective because you can add multimedia elements, but you’re also addressing those users who would rather watch a video and learn more about the product then just plainly read.
Remember, design and copy are your strongest allies when it comes to landing pages, so use them wisely.
To your success.
Lee Rekman
Director
Let’s work together!
Would you like to discuss setting up your own landing page conversion strategy, simply contact Lethal today.
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