Turn Your Website Into a Lead-Generating Machine

Your website is often the first interface of your company that a potential customer encounters. This makes it very important that you integrate devices to make it easy for visitors to interact with your company so that you can later follow up and turn them into sales leads.

One technique is to plant some calls to action on your site. The Oxford Dictionary of Marketing defines a call to action as "an advertising phrase that attracts buyers or users to take immediate and explicit action. It is designed to be a single focused command to a potential customer, usually with an incentive to buy within a defined time frame."

Related: 10 Things Every Small-Business Website Needs

The following are some ways to integrate calls to action on your website that will net visitors' email addresses and help you generate more leads. Plus, your company website can be tweaked to make it easier for visitors to find your company's contact information and be in touch.

1. Invite visitors to click a button and subscribe to your blog. Offer consumers a subscription to the company's blog after they fill out a form or send an email with their address. As a result, they will receive a notification each time your blog adds a new post. This will serve to help to draw those users back to your blog multiple times.

This is a terrific way to capture the email addresses of people who could become marketing or sales leads.

You can also extend an offer to site visitors for hem to request special communications such as newsletters after they write with their email address. Just be certain to tell them exactly what they will receive in exchange for furnishing their email address. There is no need to try to trick anyone into providing an email address; be 100 percent transparent.

2. Ask visitors to request a free offer. Entice visitors to your site by asking them to write the company or click on a button to request a downloadable guide or packet of information of interest. This also allows you to collect their contact information.

The free offer you'd provide should be something appropriate to your industry or business. You could dispense ebooks, insider information, how-to guides or even research and studies.

3. Invite consumers to fill out a form to request a special savings offer. Tell website readers that they can visit a certain area of your website to receive special savings or coupon codes for your company's products or services. Make the discount code accessible only after visitors furnish their information. If the savings is enticing enough, it will result in a lot of sales or marketing leads; some individuals might not be ready to purchase right away.

By capturing site visitors' contact info, you can then market to them and eventually realize revenue as a result. You will notice that some sales leads captured this way rapidly become customers because the offer was appealing enough.

Related: These Website Mistakes Are Costing You Money (Infographic)

It can be quite frustrating for site visitors to try to search for a way to contact a company, so be sure they can easily be in touch with your company, through a variety of ways (email, phone, snail mail). Your website can incoporate the following devices to encourage visitors to more easily be in touch with your company:

4. Provide a contact page. Design a contact page that's visible and accessible from every page of your website. Many businesses make it nearly impossible to locate a contact page on their websites. The information is often found on a page hidden inside a submerged menu page or incorporated in very small text at the bottom of the site's home page.

5. Offer live chat. Even if your website prominently displays a contact phone number, a large percentage of visitors may resort to using the email contact form instead of picking up the phone. A live chat interface, though, will give consumers answers right away even if they don't use the phone. (Sometimes potential customers become discouraged if an answer isn't immediately available.)

Many live chat programs can be set up so that users will have to first provide a name and email address before sending a question to a chat representative. Popular chat programs can be integrated with most major instant-messaging platforms, making it simple to delegate the chat operator duty to a receptionist or a sales department staffer.

What other calls to action or communication devices do you find to be effective on your company's website? Let us know in the comments below.

Related: Market With an Eye to Engagement. Offer Value (Not Sheer Hype)