Engagement Drives Leads and Customers

(Need to read Part 1 of “10 Rules of Engagement for Turning Visitors into Customers” ?)

You’ve heard you need this “engagement” thing, haven’t you? It’s really the individual steps you might take to turn more website and blog and social media visitors into customers. And that’s the whole bottom-line reason to consider “engagement.” Here are Rules 6-10 . . .

6. Engage by Moving the Sales Process Forward

Are you relying on “Contact Us” to generate leads? 98% of visitors to websites never leave a trace. So if you’re waiting for visitors to contact you to take the next step, you’re probably missing a lot of leads. If visitors can’t take a low-commitment next step on your website, most will just go to a competitor website.

What is the next logical step in your sales process? Do you need to generate an estimate or a proposal or an ROI analysis? Could that process be replicated online — so the potential customer gets an immediate response — and is moved through the sales process faster?

On Autocrib.com, we built an online tool to “find out what machines you need” (see part 1 of “10 Rules of Engagement”). Once prospects have located the right machines, they want to know the cost — they need a price quote and ROI analysis. Before these online tools existed, visitors might click “Contact Us’, and then wait for a sales rep to prepare a price quote and ROI analysis and email it back to the prospect.

Now, visitors can prepare their own ROI analysis and get all the information they need (before ever considering visiting a competitive site).

7. Ask for the Action

If you have a blog or a Facebook page, you may be wondering, “why don’t we get many comments?” Have you given your audience a specific REASON to engage with you?

On your BLOG: always end every blog post by asking a question of your readers. Post something interesting — but fairly easy to respond to. Ask them if they’ve run into this situation and what they did, or if you forgot anything in your list of “X ways to . . .”.

Here’s what McDonalds was doing to drive engagement on their FACEBOOK page . . . getting their customers to talk about their food, and enticing others to feel hungry for a Big Mac as well . . .

8. What’s the Offer?

Once you have visitors on your website, how are you going to capture their contact information — so you can educate them over time and convert them into customers? Why not offer something of value that educates or furthers the sales process — in exchange for contact information?

I noticed that on one particular blog, they end every post with an offer to download a white paper or ebook on a related topic:

9. Re-package or Re-format to Create Value

Would some of the information on your website be more useful — and more appealing — in another format? Could you take some paragraphs on how to compare products in your industry and turn them into a checklist? Could you take several blog posts on a topic, and package them into an ebook?

We took some copy we had in our “About Us” section — and reformatted it into something more useful and compelling — a “Response Roadmap“:

10. Inject Some “Gamification” Fun

Could you inject some fun into your website, blog, or social media page by borrowing some ideas from games?

When Adobe released a new version of Photoshop, they wanted artists and designers to check out the new features. They created a series of “missions” as a game, and promoted each one by email. Each “mission” had the user complete certain tasks to demonstrate the new features — which earned the user a badge they could share on Facebook.
People like to accomplish things. Could you create a series of mini-lessons useful to your target audience, and when they finish each one, they can click on a Twitter link to “tweet that you finished Lesson 4 on Bloggging.”
Or give them access to exclusive content as a “Reward” for completing some tasks — like reading something and answering 3 questions?
How about creating a “Leader Board“? Linked In does this by displaying the total number of your Best Answers for those who participate in Linked In Answers:

We created a weekly quiz on one of our Facebook pages. Once you select an answer, the correct answer is displayed — along with what percentage of visitors voted for each answer. And there’s a link to a blog post that explains the answer.