How to Convert Website Visitors Who Do Not Fill Out The Contact Form

If you are running a SaaS or consulting business which relies on your prospective customers to fill out a contact form, you know that about 97% of people who visit your site end up leaving without filling the contact form.  This may feel frustrating, you want them to contact you, you want to chat with them and figure out what they’re thinking. So how do you convert website visitors?

I’ve gotten many inquiries from companies I advise and consult about the best way to go after the 97% that leave your site without contacting you. Below are the four approaches I use to go after the people who visit and do not fill out a contact form, these have worked best for me. You can use these tactics to get more leads or even grow your email list.

Ready? Lets roll.

Feel free to navigate the steps defined in this article (and jump to one of them) using this clickable table of contents:

Use a Website Caller ID To Unmask Visitors And Email Them

This hands on approach is a good fit for companies which are selling a product or service costing at least a few hundred bucks a month (this is not a good fit if you’re selling a product that is a $15/mo). Here are the steps I take:

1. Figure out the name of company visiting your site

There are a LOT of websites which unmask anonymous web visitors, the one I like to use is VisiStat. This tool is pretty good at determining company name from IP address for every visitor who comes to your site who is browsing the web from their office. Once you install it and run it on the site for a while you will get a report such as this one below where you can see the name of the company visiting your site:

2. Find a Contact at the Company

To convert website visitors, do a search for the company on LinkedIn to see who you might know there. It’s interesting to just look at the list of people who work at the company as well. As you look through this list you are trying to figure out who the right person is to contact at the company, which one of these gals or guys might find your product or service interesting, which one of these folks might have been on your site.

3. Figure Out Their Email and Reach Out

Once you know who the person is it’s time to compose an email and reach out. The emails I send are pretty simple. I typically say that I noticed a spike in traffic from their site to mine, I checked out what they do and it sounds like there is some overlap in how both of us are trying changing the world. I tell them that I am reaching out to chat with someone at their company, ask for their feedback about my product or service and hear more about what they do. My emails are usually three sentences long.

There are a ton of email marketing tools out there you can use to guess their email address.  I like to use SellHack or another email warm up tool. This marketing tool hooks right into LinkedIn and gives you the correct email address for the person you’re trying to reach out to. All you need to do is click the “Hack In” button on the profile after you install the plugin:

If SellHack is not working I would use Toofr to guess the email. Another tool you could use for this approach is Data.com. With this, you can specify what type of contacts you’d like to find in a specific company such as “Marketing Execs at Intel”. Data.com will give you a list of names and emails.

That’s all for this tactic to convert website visitors. It’s an ongoing process so you’ll be doing this daily or at least every few days. This could get repetitive so I’ve seen folks build scripts to automate this process. This above is just a quick and dirty way to do this.

Use a Chat or Survey Feedback Tool to Convert Website Visitors

There are a lot of tools out there which let you install a live chat or feedback feature on your site. You might have seen these pop up in the lower right hand corner. Sometimes it’s a live chat, sometimes it’s a survey question which directs you to a page based on how you answer:

On average for the companies I’ve worked with I’ve seen conversion rates jump by 5%-10% by adding these types of tools to the site.

The two tools I recommend are Olark for live chat, and Qualaroo for targeted survey questions to convert website visitors.

I’d say test these tools out for a week or two. Record the conversions you were able to get while using them. Then reassess to see if the time and money you’re putting into these tools is worth it.

Use Retargeting

Retargeting has been the default solution many folks use these days to convert website visitors. It works by dropping a pixel on your visitors computer. Visitors who don’t convert see banner ads on all the sites they visit after yours until they sign up.

This works well and I’ve done this myself with AdRoll, ReTargeter, and Google. The main issue here is that you need to drop a pixel on a large group of site visitors to get started. From my personal experience you could blow through a lot of cash without a lot of conversions very fast with this approach. Be sure to have a good formula in place and monitor your conversions very closely when you do retargeting.

Use Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are typically ebooks or applications that is offered for free to your website visitors in exchange for their contact information. For example, if you run a real estate business, visitors to your website will be interested in downloading a document about property prices across various neighborhoods in their city. You may also capture visitor information by offering free tools to calculate mortgage or rental yields.

The effectiveness of this strategy depends to a great extent on the kind of business you run, your traffic acquisition strategy and the lead magnet itself. Lead magnets are effective when used in conjunction with content marketing. The document or application you build should be highly relevant to what your visitor is interested in. It is a good idea to experiment with different kinds of lead magnets and Calls To Action (CTA) to track conversions against each of these offerings. This way, you can maximize your conversion with a magnet that is highly relevant to your audience profile.

Converting leads is a science in itself. Woodpeckers academy is a great resource I’ve used to to improve my sales skills converting leads from a lead magnet to an actual demo call.

Conversion Optimization Tools

There are about a million tools out there to help you optimize conversion on your website. Some of the tools which have helped me improve conversions are below. Before using these tools, I sit down and define what exactly I’d like to accomplish. I also note down the specific end result I want to achieve. It’s very easy to squander tons of time and money on these tools without much outcome. That said if you have a specific goal in mind these will prove useful in driving conversions:

KISSMetrics – helps you understand why your visitors are not converting, where they are getting stuck.

UnBounce – helps you build highest converting landing pages for your site.

Optimizely – A/B Testing that is actually pretty simple to do.

And that’s all the ways you can convert website visitors who don’t fill out your form!

Questions, comments, issues – just holla! I’m here.