Justin Rondeau

Lead generation marketers are remarkably lucky. If your peers in ecommerce run a series of utterly brilliant A/B or multivariate tests for conversion optimization (CRO), the most they can expect is a 20-something sales lift. (Heavy testers like Dell are thrilled when a test wins single-digit additional sales.) But, lead generation marketers can expect a much higher impact.

In fact, the average lead generation CRO campaign results in a 40-something conversion lift.  As in 40% or more leads generated from the exact same traffic.   

You can optimize every aspect of your lead generation pages – however, we’ve noticed the highest response lift often comes when you tweak your form.

Forms aren’t sexy.Most marketers would prefer to focus on creative things like images or copy. Testing creative does help of course; but your form is where the real action is. 

Don’t let your IT team slap up a routine form on your lead generation landing pages, optimize it. 

Here are three Case Studies to give you ideas to get started:       

Overlays, screens that appear on top of a web page a visitor is browsing, are taking over as the most powerful way to gather email opt-ins from new visitors.

Thousands of sites use them, ranging from publishers such as The Motley Fool, to ecommerce sites like Joss & Main, and even Hilary Clinton’s last presidential campaign site. 

Generally, a site with an overlay garners up to 400% more email opt-ins than a site that relies on an in-line form will. 

To put that another way, if your site’s opt-in form gets a .5% opt-in rate now, adding an overlay could bring you a 4% opt-in rate or higher.

How can you make your overlays get an even better response rate? Happily, overlays are fairly easy to run A/B tests on. 

Here are three examples to inspire you…