Just like a physical business, and online business is also dependent on leads; visitors who might one day become customers. The acquisition of leads can prove to be a difficult task, especially if one hasn't have had any previous experience with it. Where do you go from launching a business website, to acquiring potential customers? It would clearly be a more popular choice to start an online business if the task was as easy as that.
In my own experience, I have worked with countless numbers of companies and startups within the web developer field, and it has always come back to the ability to be of valuable service to these startups in order to acquire them as my own customers, leads. I have used several methods of acquiring leads before, including email, content marketing, and referral programs.
As with anything online, a few of the business tasks can be automated, or at least turned into much better opportunities than by leaving them all by themselves. This is where my following list of tools/platforms come into place, that I have used for generating leads and increasing my conversion rates. Happy to hear about your own favorites in the comments!
Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange is a complete suite of tools for total website optimization and usability analysis. Using Lucky Orange, you can understand visitor behaviors, diagnose trouble areas in your conversion funnel, causes of abandonment; & then evaluate your website optimizations to measure successes. Tools include: Real Time analytics, Visitor Recordings, Heatmap suite, Conversion Funnels, Chat system, User Polling and Form Analytics.
Lucky Orange has been a great Google Analytics alternative in terms of being able to learn more about my visitors and their behaviors on different parts of my websites.
Bounce Exchange
Bounce Exchange has been great help in understanding my visitors and their reasons for abandoning and leaving pages such as checkout and signup forms. The Bounce Exchange platform reports back insights such as the mouse movements of your visitors, so you know where exactly someone is losing their interest in your pages and why. They've also got an amazing exit-intent technology plugin available, to help you capture those leads who perhaps didn't have a chance to take a look at your most valued content.
Marketizator
Marketizator is a 3 in 1 conversion rate optimization platform, the first one specifically built for e-commerce & SaaS websites. It covers 3 key-areas:
- Surveys: to get precious insights about what keeps specific segments of visitors to convert.
- A/B Testing with a WYSISYG editor: change any text, image, or colours without technical skills.
- Real time interactions:> prompt the visitors with persuasive messages in key-moments (when they start leaving the website) in order to make them convert. Based on their insights with the first 3000 accounts, they are focusing on providing ready2use widgets in order to use the power of web personalization without any technical and design efforts.
Qualaroo
Qualaroo surveys lets you target questions to visitors anywhere on your website, within your product or deep in your conversion funnel. When you understand the intent of your website visitors and customers you can more effectively address the concerns and issues that are preventing them from achieving their goals.
Surveys can often be the most rewarding way of learning more about your visitors and what exactly they're looking to get out of your products the most, it can also steer your business in new and interesting directions that perhaps were overlooked at first.
SlideShare
The last platform I have been taking advantage off might seem unusual, but is actually one of the most rewarding ways of generating leads out there, especially if you consider yourself somewhat of an expert in any particular field.
SlideShare allows you to share your learned lessons and valuable insights in compact slides that anyone on the web is able to access, more often than not -- truly insightful content is going to be picked up by major publications and bloggers that will instantly drive hundreds, even thousands of visitors to your slides; giving you the leverage of being able to promote your business for free.