Surprisingly simple yet effective way of lead capture that I came across

The best lead capture technique that i came across is the one that i thought was the easiest one.

“Business lead generation is the process of identifying new prospects, then utilizing a variety of tactics to turn those leads into new sales opportunities.”

After working on development of an ecommerce site, we always came across the same question — What is the best strategy to get more and more customers? Since this was a new entry in the space of already packed ecommerce sites, we went for online branding as much as possible. We went through paid Facebook Ads, Google Ads, gave ads on print media and even went offline by distributing flyers and stuff. We even experimented with bots. We started getting traffic to our website.

Thats’ Awesome. We got amazing number of likes on our Facebook page too.

People were visiting our site; registering on our site and purchasing stuffs on our site. Everything worked according to plan.

But then again, we needed more. So, the paid marketing continued; the offline marketing (flyers, and print ads) got discontinued. Purchase was steady. Since most of our users came from facebook, they visited our site and looked at the product. Some purchased the product and some left without looking for other products. That alarmed us.

Yes, the transaction was steady and everything. But that was not our sole focus. We wanted people to look at our other products. We offered great discount and free shipping, but failed to gather enough attention from the users. The users were pretty focused on gathering the information on other product for which they came to visit our site. Our site visit was good, but the bounce rate was worse.

We needed to do something to gather the attention.

We needed to tell them — Hey, do you know we DO NOT charge anything on shipping.

We needed to tell them — Do you know, there is 45% OFF on cosmetic items.

We knew popup was a great solution to gather people’s attention. But we did not want to show popup as soon as user visits our site. So, we thought, lets show popup when the users are about to leave the site. We knew lots of people were using these opt in popups for newsletter signups. We thought, lets refine that. Lets show our offers in optin popup but lets customize the message.

Enter a new and simple way of effective lead generation.

What we did was very simple. In fact, so simple that at first it almost felt that we are not thinking anything at all.

We created an opt-in kind of popup. But instead of asking user to signup to get newsletter delivered in their email, we asked them to preorder certain items.

Just leave your email address and save 45% on cosmetics items. 

You know what happened next? People were sending their email address. Even people who were on our site for just one product. They became curious. Just because of the popup message, people began to search for the cosmetic items; to find if they need anything and is on offer. Our bounce rate decreased and our leads increased.

So much that our bounce rate decreased from 68% to 25%. We started getting ~4 new leads per day and it is increasing everyday. Mission accomplished. We were happy.

Now, we needed a system to manage the leads. We are getting emails and phone number of leads, but we needed to put those data somewhere turn them to information. So, we built an entire lead management system. We fed these information on our system.

All our captured leads, their status, their information and even their interest.

Our team was able to track the users, be in touch regularly via call and email and re-market our products. Now, how the sales is closed? depended on us. Previously, we could only watch helplessly. Previously, we knew users are visiting our site but leaving, but now, at least we have the data of user who are genuinely in interested in purchasing from our site and may be a little hesitant and needs a little bit of convincing.

I am not saying it worked wonders. I am not saying our transaction increased 100%. All I am saying — By implementing such a simple thing, we captured leads, however small it was. And we turned those leads to Happy Customers.

Want to know more on how our lead system works in detail? I can be easily reached at sajat.shrestha@convergetree.com.