Nothing is more valuable to your business than growing great qualified prospects. The value you get from building an audience of people you get to talk to over and over again is the most undervalued asset in every company.

But what I see all the time is that most businesses are not good at capturing the people who come to their website. You see, it’s not enough just to get them to your website. You now need to capture their email so you can tell them your full story. But building an email list can be a challenge. You want to make sure you’re doing it the right way.

How do you increase traffic to your site?

The upside is that you have an established business that is already getting good organic traffic. If you want to increase that traffic, head over to our favorite place to network – LinkedIn. Focus on building connections on LinkedIn and putting out great insight-driven content to drive people back to your website as the centerpiece of all your marketing. We see over and over again that our clients get great results from focusing on these foundational elements.

Just ask for their email address

Now that you’ve brought a visitor to your website, my recommendation is to only ask for one thing on the form: the email address.

We’ve followed the data across hundreds of businesses. When you also ask for their name, it reduces conversion by 20%. Ask for a phone number and you reduce the conversion rate by at least 50%. Any additional field after that is further reducing conversion by an average of 8% each.

It’s much better to get the one thing you really need – the email address. Now you can send them a nurturing campaign, allow them to get to know your business, and then ask them for more information, later on, to turn them into a fully qualified lead by asking for more information, when they are ready to give it.

What is the best thing to offer to get an email address?

What is actually working and winning in the B2B world is giving away your most valuable information for free to everyone who comes to your website. The only reason people are going to be willing to give you their email address is because you’re giving them something that is equally valuable.

“The thing you don’t want to give away for free is exactly the thing you should give away.”

When you’re thinking about what makes sense to share as a reward, consider these questions:

  • What is the expertise that you’re sitting down to share with the CEO or decision-maker at your ideal prospective client?
  • What are the valuable key insights that you share with your ideal prospect?
  • What can you teach your ideal prospect?

Best Practices

Before you pay for anything, get all the low hanging fruit first. Make sure you have put all the marketing foundations into place:

  • Mobile-optimized Website – as the centerpiece of all your marketing
  • LinkedIn Profile and Connection Campaign – to build new audience
  • Email Marketing – to follow up with that audience and stay top of mind

Once you’ve put all of that into place – only then do you think about paying for traffic. The truth is many businesses that do this right never end up needing to pay for traffic.

Most of the time when we start working with a business, they’re capturing very little of the prospective clients who are visiting their website. If you’re capturing the emails of somewhere between 2% on the low end and 10% on the high end of visitors to your website, over time the value you get from that is incredible.

For most businesses, the results you want are just sitting there waiting for you to come get them. When you do things in the right way and in the right order (connect on LinkedIn > produce great content > direct to website > ask for email) it will save you time & money and make any future investment more effective.

Learn more by listening to our B2B Word of Mouth Marketing podcast episode, How to Build an Email List.

All the best,

Bill Bice
CEO

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