Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

On LinkedIn,  Simran Gupta asked about strategies to increase conversion rates on a website. Unfortunately, when you ask the question this way, people start thinking about eBooks, opt-in forms, email marketing, and all the other tactics that live in the world of online marketing.

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Serve Your Prospects to Increase Conversion

What I see all the time, is that effective online lead generation isn't about the tactics - Chat panels, inquiry forms, or any of the web widgets you might put on your site.

Instead, focus on your prospects. What are they really looking for? How do they define their problem? Show that you care and are available to help and the opt-ins will flow in.

Steps to Increase Conversion Rates

1. Develop a persona that personalizes and describes your ideal prospect. Give your persona a name and a personality.
2. Research keywords to have a great idea what keywords your target persona would use when searching for a solution.
3. Create valuable web content that educates your target persona, and helps them solve their problems. Blogging is an excellent way to create content and get found on the Internet.
4. Create relevant offers for your visitors - Report downloads, eBooks, etc. The important thing is not the tactic of having a PDF download. What is important is having valuable and relevant information to download.
5. Add relevant Call To Action opt-in buttons to your content so your visitors can provide their email address and learn more.
6. Continue to follow-up to add value and educate.

Takeaways

• Add value and help your prospects and the opt-ins will follow.
• Focus on knowing your prospects and helping them solve their problems.
• Don't worry about the specific technologies

Do you agree or disagree? Leave a comment and let me know.

SEO Crash Course: Get Found to Generate Leads & Sales (GF102)

SEO is the most important marketing strategy to generate leads and conversions. By making your site more search engine friendly, it will rank higher in search results – meaning, better visibility and better results.

Get found through the words you use

Keywords are the words that exist in the minds of your target audience. Which words are they most likely to use when searching for your product or service? Coming up with solid keywords requires getting to know the needs of your audience well. In order to rank high in search results, you need keywords that are relevant – words that best describe what you have to offer. Optimize your content for the keywords you target. Remember, keywords matter…a lot!     

Search engine friendly sites are easy to find

You can’t make it easy for customers to find your products unless your content can be found easily by search engines. Web crawlers index text, so you must use results-driven keywords in your content. Add fresh content regularly to reinforce your keyword vocabulary. Site architecture is also important. Search engines can find you more easily if your site structure is logical and easy to navigate. To drive traffic to your site, you need to demonstrate to search engines that your site receives good search results.   

Links, links, and more links!  

To boost your search engine rankings, you need lots of strong inbound links. A strong link is one that ranks high in search results. One of the most effective ways to attract links is to create remarkable content and promote it on social networks. If people find your content useful, they will link to you. Schmoozing with the big boys pays off – affiliation with reputable links will do wonders for your rankings!       

How does your site perform?

Optimize your site by monitoring its performance over time using analytics. It’s useful to pay attention to several key performance indicators. Some important ones include number of indexed pages, rankings, quality and quantity of inbound links, social media traffic, and conversions. You want to maintain a positive user experience on your site – if visitors run into crawling errors, they’re likely to become frustrated and move on to another site.       

Professor: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing

Now, I know business isn't exactly the same as dating. Still, there are some interesting comparisons!

According to the video, to be more attractive, you should use:

• Aromatherapy - Well, at least for now, web browsers don't support aroma. That's probably a good thing as some business websites stink!
• Smiles - "We're biologically primed to prefer people who seem to be interested in us." Is your site about your customers and prospects, or all about you?
• Eye Contact - Are you really interested in serving your customers and prospects? They can tell!
• Hand Gestures - Is your content interesting and compelling? Why should anyone care?
• White Teeth - Do you care enough to take care of the small things? Do you have readable text and good grammer?
• Good Posture - Is your site structured so that search engines can find you? Can your visitors easily find information?
• Name Dropping - Are you focused on the needs and questions of your customers and prospects? Do you really know who your customers and prospects are?
• Red Clothes [Optional] - Color and design do matter on the web, but having remarkable content and good readability matters more.

For Lead Conversion, you don't need a pretty website! You just need to be Attractive.

What do you think?

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

It IS possible to send SMS text messages as part of a follow-up sequence from Infusionsoft!

There are a couple of tricks, though.

• You have to buy an external SMS text messaging service like Clickatell.

• Set the To address for the template to: sms@messaging.clickatell.com, and all messages get sent to this address.

• In the body of the message, embed a custom field with the contact’s SMS phone number. The number should be unformatted to match Clickatell’s requirements.

You can't use one of Infusionsoft's phone number fields because it automatically formats the number and Clickatell won't work right! But, if you just use a Custom field, then everything will be OK.

I made this work with Clickatell's SMTP API, by sending an email template like this:

user:xxxxx   {Your specific Clickatell info}
password:xxxxx   {Your specific Clickatell info}
api_id:xxxxx    {Your specific Clickatell info}
to: 448311234567  {Insert the custom field data here}
reply:youremail@yourdomain.com
text:Meet me at home {This is the message you want to send}

I hope this helps. There's also more on the Infusionsoft Blog.

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

Infusionsoft is great for managing your customers and opportunities. And it automates the follow-up process that is frequently broken in small companies!

Still, some of the tracking and reporting functions could be better. I know Infusionsoft is working on some improvements, but in the meantime, here's a way to use Google Analytics to track user responses. Here's what you do:

1. Create a "Trackable Link" in Infusionsoft. (You probably already know how, but if not, enter a question and I'll do a post on it!)
2. In the Trackable Link, add Google Analytics tags to the URL like this:http://www.InboundTeam.com?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=tracking
3. Merge the Trackable Link into your eMail follow-up messages.

Your eMail audience will receive a message with the Infusionsoft link. When they click, Infusionsoft will forward them to the link and include the Google Analytics tags. Then, inside Google Analytics, you can see how many people clicked the link, where they went on your site, etc. Even better, Google Analytics stores the tags in a cookie, and can report on conversions and transactions based on the tracking tags!

Google provides a handy URL Builder tool that makes it easier to create the URL. Really, all you need to decide is what information you want to track. Typically, you might have:

• utm_medium: This says how the message got to the user. For an email message, you might just set this to email.

• utm_source: This indicates who the user is. You might set it to the name of one of your segments.

• utm_campaign: This indicates the campaign or follow-up sequence the message belongs to.

One more thing. When you create the Trackable Link in Infusionsoft, you will often want to add an action to tag the person.That way, you can see who is interested in which topics. This is how you can actually automate the process of getting to know your customers.

For an example of how all this works, go to InboundTeam-Infusionsoft.  Enter your information and click Download. Don't worry about a flood of spam, you'll get a message asking how frequently you want to hear from us again. And one option is to not send more information!

Behind the scenes, each of the links is trackable and assigns a tag. Each link also has the Google Analytics tracking.

Happy Tracking!

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

In the 19th century, there wasn't that much mechanization, and it was difficult to move large heavy things around.

The logging industry had an answer. They built roads of wooden tracks that were used to haul trees from the forrest. The wooden tracks were called "skids" and they soon discovered that everything worked much better if they greased the skids with oil. The logs would then slide smoothly down the road.

For many businesses, there isn't that much mechanization used to attract prospects and turn them into paying customers! That's why Greased Skid Marketing is here. To help small businesses grease the skids and smoothly move leads down the road to prospects and prospects smoothly down the road to customers.

Check this blog frequently as we will be providing free education on how to grease your customer acquisition process. Or, leave a comment on what you'd like to know!