You want a lead on your calendar, not just on your website.
I have found that live chat leads are some of the best leads. If you have not been getting them until now, start immediately. If you have a live chat now but are not using it the right way, you will find that these best practices can regularly get leads who are ready to transact.
NOTES
1 1. Alsudani, Farah, and Matthew Case. “The Effect of Aesthetics on Web Credibility.” September 1, 2009. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1671011.1671077.
2 2. Stanford. “Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility.” 2004. http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html.
3 3. Sillence, Elizabeth, and Pam Briggs, Lesley Fishwick, Peter Harris. “Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites.” In Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 25, 2004. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/985692.985776.
4 4. Lingaard, Gitte, and Gary Fernandes, Cathy Dudek, J. Brown. “Attention Web Designers: You Have 50 Milliseconds to Make a Good First Impression!” March 4, 2011. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01449290500330448.
5 5. Adobe. “State of Content.” October 2015. http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/max/2015/pdfs/state-of-content-oct.pdf.
6 6. Fessenden, Therese. “Scrolling and Attention.” Nielsen Norman Group. April 15, 2018. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/scrolling-and-attention/.
7 7. Smart Insights. “The Impact of Customer Reviews and Ratings on Conversion Rates.” October 4, 2011. https://www.smartinsights.com/conversion-optimisation/product-page-optimisation/reviews-conversion-rate-impact/.
8 8. Vocell, Jeffrey. “Personalized Calls to Action Perform 202% Better than Basic CTAs [New Data].” Hubspot. June 29, 2018. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/personalized-calls-to-action-convert-better-data.
9 9. Epsilon. “The Power of Me: The Impact of Personalization on Marketing Performance.” January 4, 2018. https://www.slideshare.net/EpsilonMktg/the-power-of-me-the-impact-of-personalization-on-marketing-performance/1.
10 10. Bold Software. “How Helpful Is Live Chat?” eMarketer. August 19, 2009. https://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Helpful-Live-Chat/1007235.
11 11. Saleh, Khalid. “The Importance of Live Chat Customer Support.” Invesp. October 11, 2017. https://www.invespcro.com/blog/live-chat-customer-support/.
12 12. Clarkson, Diane. “Making Proactive Chat Work.” Forrester. June 4, 2010. https://www.forrester.com/report/making-proactive-chat-work/RES57054.
Chapter 3 How to Build Landing Pages That Capture High-Quality Leads
In 2003, the IT department at Microsoft invented landing pages in response to poor online sales of their flagship business product, Office. Microsoft.com had become bloated with information, so they extracted the content about just Office and put it on its own dedicated page and URL. As legend has it, sales of Office immediately skyrocketed by 30%.
The reason landing pages are so effective for lead generation is simple: they are simple. They only have one goal. Compare that to your website, which may have dozens of navigation options or categories to choose from, and you can see why professional marketers use landing pages for any lead generation campaigns involving ad spend. Because as Wikipedia perfectly puts it, “The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads.”1
Unlike the website traffic that Google sends you through searches and ads, where the “preview” of the content is text-based, social media and email marketing allow you to be very visual and descriptive about the lead magnet they can access if they decide to click. This technique, called coupling, increases the conversion rate of the landing page you send them to because they head there with a crystal-clear expectation.
Before you start sending traffic to your landing pages, just like we did with your website's design, you probably need to clean up the landing pages you are already using. More likely, you need to start over and build new ones.
There are many proven best practices regarding landing page design that I will cover ahead. Keep in mind, though, even if you have no design or technical skill whatsoever, there are countless companies (like Leadpages and Unbounce) that make building an effective landing page a couple of clicks. Be sure to search their existing templates by keyword (e.g., “real estate”) to find prebuilt, industry-specific designs.
You could also head back over to Dribbble (or Behance or MarketerHire or Toptal or even *gasps* Fiverr) to hire a designer who will build them for you. The bottom line is that all the bells and whistles in the world on a website won't convert leads at a higher rate than a singularly focused, well-designed landing page will.
THE MICROWAVE MINDSET
People used to sit through two-minute commercials, and believe it or not, couldn't fast-forward them. They listened to the radio, and if an ad came on, they could only change the station to another one with ads. Today, thanks to our phone and social media addiction, our attention is everywhere, while simultaneously nowhere for very long.
Case in point, TikTok and Instagram Reels both exploded in popularity using 100% micro-videos. Even YouTube launched Shorts, vertical videos, all under one minute in length. This new condensed format is not going to go away.
Studies have shown that 58% of viewers watch business-related videos to the end if they're less than 60 seconds,2