Overcoming a prospect's fear of junk mail can be made easier and you can improve your lead generation rate on your website if you give your visitors help in choosing with feature and comparison charts.
One of the most important functions of your website is lead generation. You need visitors to sign up to receive additional information so you can push content out to them rather than wait for them to visit you again. Gathering a lead from your website can be as simple as asking for an email address, but you often need something extra to help the prospect give up that valuable information.
When you see a "sign up for our free newsletter" link or button, you might think "Great! I'll get this special information that I want." and then click through. However, when you're presented with multiple data entry boxes on a form requiring Name, Email address, Street address, Zip code, etc., you start thinking "these guys are going to send me junk mail. do I really want to give them my contact info? is it worth it?"
This is the obstacle you must overcome in order to make lead generation on your website a success. You have to do three things:
- Make it easy to give contact information
- Attractively depict the value they will receive in return for their info
- Make the decision so obvious they just carry though with the sign up
We cover the first two points elsewhere, but today we're making the decision obvious.
To give a vendor my contact info, I need to know I'll be getting good value, specifically for me, and I can't get that info anywhere else. You can leave the call to action as simply "sign up for our newsletter", but that won't entice everyone enough to overcome the junk mail fear.
When you clearly lay out the value the visitor gets by signing up for this newsletter or email list, you increase the likelihood that they will commit and join your mailing list.
The chart to the right is an example of describing the benefits or value a subscriber gets when they join the newsletter list. For this instance we have even created an additional newsletter, a premium or preferred list, that delivers even more value.
In simple, graphic terms, we've laid out what the public recieves (those who choose not to sign up) versus the tips and coupons one receives as a regular subscriber versus the added discounts and news our most-preferred club members receive.
The typical visitor will want the most value for the least price. In this case, we're just asking for an email address which is free as far as the visitor is concerned. They give us their email address which costs them only an occasional reading of our newsletter and we give them many benefits.
Most readers, seeing there is no cost difference, will choose the premium value. Now that we've created this premium they want, we'll need a little more information.
In our sign up for just the newsletter, we only ask for their email address. On the premium sign up form, we ask for the email address plus we require mailing address, full name, etc. The premium sign up form clearly shows the mandatory fields are only for the premium newsletter.
If the visitor doesn't want to give up more than their email address, they can obviously revert to the non-premium newsletter, but since we've created a premium service that they now want, we're more likely to get a completely-filled-out sign up form rather than just the minimal email data.
We've helped the visitor choose the best path for them (they get all the info they want) and we've eased their fear of giving us too much contact information. A fair trade, so long as we come through on our promise to deliver valuable information.