How to convert traffic to leads - quickly and easily

We just finished our radio show (SocialMediaEdge). Todays topic was all about Traffic vs Conversion. During the show Ken had a great line…

Traffic = Expense

Conversion = Income

But remember this, conversion isn’t always somebody purchasing something from you. Conversion can also be an inquiry, a signup for a mailing list, a download of an ebook and many other forms. You can listen to the whole show HERE.

I was just reading the Zillow Pro Blog (in my feed reader) where Jay Thompson talks about converting contacts to clients.

In it, he quoted…

A study conducted by Harvard Business Review found:

Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later — and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.

The same Harvard study found that almost 25 percent of companies never responded to an Internet lead inquiry. It should go without saying that if you never respond to a lead, your chances of converting that lead rapidly approaches zero.

Let me break that down for you in a single sentence.

“Get back to ALL incoming inquiries ASAP – period”

Stop what you are doing, that smartphone is already sitting in your hand… call them right now. Don’t have a phone number? Email them. Not later. Do it right now.

My friend Clint Miller used to be in the lead generation business. His simplest instruction to converting leads that he constantly gave to his clients was this,

“Answer the Damn Phone!”

In his biz, leads came and were passed via email or phone. Leads that went to a voicemail din’t convert nearly as much as those that went straight to the Agent. From there you can memorize scripts that can better filter the leads (if you like) but the base of all this is the response time. Answering the phone is the shortest response time.

* that said, there are times when I am with a client and I give each of my clients 100% of my attention. As soon as I am done with them, the first thing I do is respond to inquiries.

What we didn’t have time to talk about today was targeted squeeze pages. Are driving traffic to the front page of your website and hoping they’ll see your call to action – or are you driving them to a targeted landing page designed for conversion? (like this one)

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Mike Mueller

VP of Happiness at AreWeConnected.com

A former professional hand model, Mike builds Custom WordPress Websites that rock!

He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and wants a really small one). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.