Optimization of lead collection for the site accompanying the project

Hi, Habr! Our clients often ask questions about how to turn random visitors to the site into regular readers. If you have a website, you, too, probably thought about how to make its visitors follow you on social networks, subscribe to you via RSS or your newsletters. We answer these questions in a series of articles on optimization of lead collection . In today's post we will talk about the site that accompanies your project, to put it simply - almost any site related to a company, product or a group of people and not at the same time selling. So, how to make visitors of your site turn out to be regulars?


Sales funnel that hits right on target

Recall that turning a visitor into a lead consists of three stages:

1. Optimization of lead collection - in other words, techniques that encourage the visitor to leave you their contact information and, first of all, email.
2. Optimization of the sales funnel is the most important concept for a selling site, including the process of capturing customer data with tenacious legs and, at the end, enriching it with something useful that you want it to buy from you. Naturally, during this process, the client can go through a series of iterations, and there are two tasks for the optimizer: to reduce the number of iterations and to reduce the number of “jumpers”.
3. Chains of automatic distribution - the strategy of sending letters in the format x + 1, x + 7, x + 14. Where x = day of registration. A large industry of work for a smart marketer and an important component of the sales funnel, therefore, should be thought out in close contact with sales.

It must be said that the information resource is a close concept, to the term online collaboration. The concept is broad and includes at one pole - the banal cooperation over one document in Google, and at the other pole - lies the boundless ocean of project management (project management) with its solutions for large businesses. However, the essence remains the same and a textbook-facebook: gather together, inform, and then do something. So, what you need to make your site even smarter.
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Resource accompanying the project

Your goal is to support your project. It can be divided into several components:

1. Your business card and the opportunity to contact you.
2. Your portfolio
3. Informing about the current state of affairs
4. Uniting and attracting like-minded people
5. The direction of the general effort to perform certain activities

You can be: any institution that does not deal with e-commerce. This is the so-called brick and mortar company. How best to explain this term? You can call this "offline business". True, this is not the best translation. It can be said that this is “the opposite of e-commerce”, although this is not the best explanation. But in fact it is this and that. This can include almost anything, but first of all:

1. Schools, universities, trainings
2. Sites of small businesses
3. Sites startups, projects at the initial level
4. Sites of various organizations and associations (earlier it was called "circles of interest").

Lead collection optimization for you

Unlike other sites, living through advertising (informational) or through sales (selling), you do not “eat” leads. Most likely, your resource has grown out of the offline community, and therefore, most likely, you are not very interested at the moment to expand and allow “alien” to yourself. Therefore, optimizing the lead collection for you is rather “anti-optimization”, that is, not a desire to increase the circle of users, but to keep it within certain limits.

1. Invites Generally speaking, it is a powerful marketing tool and it operates according to the principle of the "forbidden fruit is sweet." There are a number of resources in the same runet that actively use this - they already want to get on them. Our task is not in it, therefore we will not pour words. Let's call it easier - give a certain access key to the registration to those users with whom you contact offline on issues that you highlight on your resource. For example, with the same school or university, you can create a community of students or seminar participants. Thus, you can stimulate their communication both online (a forum on a good engine) and offline - announcements about upcoming meetings and events can be either published on the site or sent in the form of letters.
2. Placing useful information on the resource itself - authorization is required to access it. Let us return to the school example: in this case, the resource will store programs, timetables, charts, maps, textbooks, and visual aids. You hardly want them to just crawl on the Internet. On the contrary, your students and teachers will certainly
   as relevant. However, access to the materials requires authorization, implemented through an invitation.
3. Easy to register. Its relevance remains for any resource. Of course, in the case of the resource accompanying the project, the user's motivation is higher, and he may even go through 1-2 circles of hell and a poorly configured authorization process. But from our previous posts you already know how to make it beautiful.
4. Reliable protection of the entrance - for example, even a captcha. A small resource in a good way is not needed by anyone and it can only be ruined for the sake of Hochma. However, you need to think about the protection of the resource along with the birth of the resource itself.

Sales Funnel Optimization

Entirely and completely not relevant for this type of resource, since the offline business sells sales "bypassing" the site, and the goal of your site, roughly speaking, in this case is “tusovka”. Therefore, you need to optimize the "get-together". To do this, stimulate communication by all means:

1. Share necessary and useful content, constantly update and update it. Write about the history of what you do, tell professional secrets and subtleties (take an example from our blog :)
2. Stimulate discussion and discussion.
3. Get pages dedicated to upcoming meetings, where, later, post photos and exchange views on how the meeting took place.
4. Get a forum thread dedicated to selling and exchanging related to your activity: textbooks and notes for school and training, equipment for the photographerfo site, camouflage for the site of tourists or paintball fans.
5. Talk about upcoming changes, request ideas for changes from users. Transform a resource and report changes.

In a word, lead a full-fledged accompaniment of your public life and do it continuously - here is the key word. Because it is not an easy task to re-assemble users who have left your resource, “weaned” away from it.

Automated Chains

1. Registration letter and associated with it - see the post "How to organize the subscription process."
2. Every two weeks or every month - what's new on the resource. Refrain from automatically generating such a letter like an linkedin or facebook, because it is tiring. Write such a review letter on behalf of the director or coordinator, or resource publisher.
3. Regularly send invitations to new meetings.
4. Do not share with shipments.
5. Stimulate interest - the same ordinary news can be formulated in such an entertaining way as not to break away.

Success is measured offline

Does your resource perform its function - support of the project? This can be seen by the result of its existence brings in offline activity. Do all school students have textbooks, notes and cheat sheets in a timely manner? Do all the participants of the section get the equipment conveniently? Is everyone who wanted to attend the meeting - learned about it in time? Did those who were at the previous meeting come to the next meeting? Do people come back to you after, for example, having completed one course of study, or once went on a campaign with you, or went to a competition? If this is the case, then you successfully implement the tips outlined above.

At the end of the post, we allow ourselves a moment for the curious. As you noticed, we really hardly picked up words to describe brick and mortar in Russian. How would you translate this phrase? And the second question - can you give examples of successful resources accompanying the project? Thanks in advance for your comments.

Always yours, UniSender team.