Best Ways to Capture Leads on Your Website

If capturing leads on your website was as easy as clicking an "optimize now" button on your website builder, everyone would do it! Unfortunately, a lot of planning, analytics, and testing go into making your website a lead-generating machine.

Though the prospect may seem daunting, you can incorporate dozens of marketing, design, and even psychological strategies into your website to start churning leads out. The best way to start? Give users content that they're happy to consume! Add value to their lives and show (not tell) visitors why they need you!
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We've narrowed hundreds of marketing techniques down to 10 that we stand by to help you figure out how to capture leads from your website.

Optimize your landing pages

You may have heard it repeatedly, but optimizing your landing pages is one of the most efficient ways of securing leads. 
  
Firstly, identify your busiest, most effective, and longest-visited pages. Since these pages are already bringing traffic in, they have the best lead potential. 
  
HubSpot, one of the largest business marketing software companies, found that websites with over 30 landing pages produced seven times more leads than websites with less than ten landing pages.
 
Thank-you pages are also often overlooked. Imagine how customers might feel if they invested time, money, and effort into becoming a website lead capture to feel like another statistic on paper. Customers want to feel appreciated. Directing them to thank-you pages after a purchase, sign-up, or otherwise can be the differentiating factor if they come back to you versus the competition.

Add call-to-action forms to the pages that get the most traffic

A simple lead capture tactic is adding call-to-action forms throughout your website, including those high-traffic landing pages. Calls to action can be electronic mailing list prompts, discount codes, or short surveys. Adding lead generator pop-ups for your homepage and landing pages is a trivial yet very influential marketing tactic.
 
Some good practices for calls-to-action (CTAs) are:
Use strong verbs to communicate what you want a visitor to do clearly. Phrases like "sign up today," "checkout now," "fill out a one-minute survey," and "enter your email" are good starting points.
 
CTAs are also helpful in instigating FOMO (fear of missing out). If you prompt a visitor to "enter their email now to receive a 20% off coupon", they fear that if they don't give you their email, they'll miss out on the deal. 
 
You may or may not reuse the prompts; many websites will show you the same pop-up every time (or every "x" number of visits) you return to the page.

​Measure lead generator performance with KPIs to determine which strategies are working

How do you determine if all your effort is worth it? You may follow industry practices, use calls to action, and optimize your high-traffic landing pages with lead generators, but where's the value? Key performance indicators or KPIs are the magic statistics that make or break your marketing tactics.
 
While planning (or before you employ) lead-generating tools and strategies into your website, it's a good idea to determine what will make them successful. Will they increase traffic by 50%? Will they increase the time spent on the page by 5 seconds? 10 seconds? When will these performance metrics be met, and how often will you need to monitor them?
 
Develop S.M.A.R.T. goals for your lead generation ideas. Use them to determine if your plan to use google forms to collect email addresses is working or if it should get thrown in the "lead capture tool" recycle bin.

​Publish case studies, reviews, anecdotes, and success stories

Posting case studies and success stories are great ways to show results to viewers. Some studies show that adding real-customer reviews and success stories can improve conversion rates by up to 20%! However, if you have adverse reports, it's important to nurture those anecdotes, and you may be able to post redemption arcs for your brand. Most consumers respect transparent and honest brands.

Create specialty landing pages

Specialty landing pages are designed to host lead magnets—for example, a sign-up form for catered mailing lists for small businesses. CTAs, and buttons on the bottom of your website pages are as good as invisible to some customers. Specialty landing pages help increase actions taken by visitors.

Use interactive content at every stage of the buyer's journey

The Content Marketing Institute predicted that interactive content would be one of the most important aspects of lead generation in the coming years. They note it as one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and secure visitors as leads.
 
At each stage of the buyer's journey, the early stage (discovery), the middle stage (consideration), and the late stage (decision), there should constantly be a CTA, prompt, task, or activity for your potential lead to do. 
 
For example, at the discovery stage, The Content Marketing Institute determined that assessments, contests, games, interactive infographics, and quizzes had the highest conversion rates, with an average increase of over 60%!

Use live chat and connection forms

​It may seem trivially simple, but people like talking to people! Live chats are not only great lead generators, but they're great for customer service as well!
 
If you cannot dedicate resources to 24/7 support, investing in a chatbot that can handle basic queries is still a significant element to include on your website. Chatbots are so helpful; Salesforce recommends that you should use them for lead generation and even sales! They're a little more effective than adding an email, name, and address to a mailing list just for a user to unsubscribe from it!

Facebook leads

​For those that do not have a website but want a piece of the lead generation pie, Facebook offers a solution. Facebook leads don't automatically convert to email addresses. However, all these ad-viewers have to do is tap on the ad, and pre-populated forms appear.
 
These contact forms are automatically populated with users' information, making it incredibly easy for viewers to convert to leads. Facebook lead ads are a great way to get affordable marketing lists and quickly transfer them to your website!
 
You can embed Facebook posts on your website, so you don't need to stress about finding how to optimize leads to work on a blog page!

Make visitors feel a sense of urgency

Urgency and scarcity are marketing techniques as old as time. However, they're still highly relevant and valuable throughout countless industries today. A sense of urgency can come from our FOMO, a deadline, timer, or counting-down clock front-and-center on a CTA. 
 
Slight hints of pressure can be all it takes to convert a passerby to a strong lead. Some may dislike this marketing strategy but remember the last time you impulsively gave away your email address to secure a 25% off coupon for an online shop. What were you thinking at that moment?​

Nurture and cultivate leads

Once you secure a lead, ideally by making it easy for them to join your club, they can likely just as quickly leave. Keeping an email marketing database or a leads blog can maintain, preserve, and nurture the leads you've already gained and continue to enrich their lives.
 
Consumers love brands that make them feel like people rather than customers. They'll turn into free marketers, advertising your services whenever they go because they feel appreciated and valued. This is especially effective with business-to-business (B2B) lead generation and commercial email marketing. These industries, like many others, are tightly-knit, and networking is imperative to remain relevant.