If you run a website for a purpose, like a small business website or blog (see also: how to set up your company blog in 5 min), where the purpose is to drive more sales or educate your customers, ultimately resulting in higher profits, you MUST be focused on capturing leads for your website.

A lead is simply the contact information of a prospective customer or action taker.

Generally on the web, we capture leads using web forms, but you can also use a phone number to have people call in and grab their details that way. The contact information collected can be as simple as an email address, or as complex as someone who has gone through a 30 minute interview. But essentially it’s a way to further contact and market to a prospective customer, someone who may buy your goods or services in the future but has not yet.

80% of visitors to your site that don’t buy immediately, will buy from you or a competitor in the next 12 months

Capturing customer details allows you to continue to market to them as they move down your funnel, where you can educate, build trust and convert your visitors into customers.

Not capturing the lead means that visitor is probably lost forever.

Most websites focus on vanity metrics such as visitors, number of pages visited or bounce rate, not on the most important metric, leads.

Lead generation should be front and center of your website, it does not take long to realize this if you take a quick look around the internet.

Examples of Good Lead Capture

Take a look at some of these pages that put lead generation at the forefront of their website strategy.



Want more examples?

http://unbounce.com/landing-page-examples/your-landing-page-sucks/

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-examples-list

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/05/landing-page-examples

The Nitty Gritty

If you really want to get into the details, watch this video on the power of Lead Nurturing.

Lead Capture with Paid Traffic

Lead capture should also be the focus of your landing pages for paid traffic campaigns too. Do a bit of competitive research and you will see this in action. Below you can see I did a search for “Insurance New York” and the top ad from Progressive Insurance took me straight to a lead capture landing page.

Want more leads?

Want to generate more leads for your business? Check out our comprehensive guide on how to generate leads with content upgrades. Also, subscribe to the Process Street Blog and get articles on how to generate more leads and customers for your business using the internet. Click here to subscribe

Are you capturing leads on your website?