Is your website
a lead-generation machine?

Your headline is often your first impression. It should answer "WHAT". As in, "what do you offer customers that will make their lives better."

But it should do so as succinctly as the average newspaper headline. Slack's headline, for example, is "Welcome to your new HQ"

Too many options can confuse and frustrate visitors. If you have too many menu options, first, see how you can group all of your pages into 3-4 categories. Make these the main categories you feature in your main nav. All other pages can be nested inside the main categories.

CTA buttons shouldn't be coy or cute. They should explain in 1-4 words what happens when a web visitor clicks that button. Add to cart. Sign up. Purchase tickets. A good tip is to remember that prospects ready to convert are saying "I want to ..." just as they click a CTA button. Your CTA button should fill in the blank.

We all need validation and proof to make a decision. Social proofs like short testimonials and customer reviews are incredibly powerful here to convert.

This is closely aligned to simplifying your main navigation. Every page should have a singular purpose and focus. If you have several products, create one page per product. The more choices you give a web visitor, the less likely they'll know which choice to make. A good approach to simplifying your page content is to create a short headline that explains what you're about to talk about. Then, keep the rest of the page focused on that one idea.

Transparency is critical these days. If you hide your pricing, or make it hard to find, your visitors won't trust you enough to convert. Remember, it is incredibly easy for them to leave your site and find a competitor. Rather than hide from your pricing, stand by it. If you're more expensive than competitors, tout your better quality. You'd much rather scare people away earlier in the process, when you've invested less time in them, than later down the road.

Not every visitor is ready to convert. That's OK. With the right online experiences, you can take a hands-off approach to nurturing these leads. Perhaps a web visitor wants to know how you compare to your main competitor. Imagine, then, if you had a white paper that breaks down each of your features — web visitors have to provide their email to get it. Then, you can reach out to them with a nurture drip email campaign that pushes them toward (eventual) conversion.

Sometimes the pop-up feature will help drive conversions. More times it will not. In fact, they often do more harm than good by disrupting a visitor's natural journey and experience. When you first land on a website, have you even received a pop-up and you quickly had to close because it's interrupting you? Well-crafted web pages, focused on singular topics and kept concise and clear, will convert more than any other tactic.

Many businesses have chatbots and they treat it as a live chat or a very simple form to capture contact information. That is not how to use a chatbot. Users come to your websitre for different reasons, like looking for information, customer suport, booking an appointments or to have a conversation with a real person. The modern chatbot has articificial intelligence and workflows to create a great customer experience.

People are always looking for reasons not to convert. The more steps you require, the more likely they'll bounce out. If you can't simplify your checkout or conversion process, here's a simple tip: ask for personal information at the end of the process (like name, email address). People are very protective of their personal information. But, the further along the process users get, the more committed they feel to finishing the experience.