A Better Way to Qualify Prospects

When gathering data about recent visitors to your site, it's often helpful to ask about how they came to your site.  But as we're finding more and more, folks are growing tired of answering these sorts of qualifying questions.  So do keep them to an absolute minimum.  But that doesn't mean you can't learn something about how they came to you.  Here's what you do:  Create customized landing pages for your site visitors.
By creating a page upon which your visitors land that relates to the link they used to find you, you can accomplish a number of different things. First, of course, you can know where they came from.  An advert on espn.com?  A link from a blog posting?  All can be tailored, tweeked, and otherwise crafted to allow you to gain some insight into which entry points drive the best/most traffic.

Second, you can tailor the arrival message to better match the expectations created by the link that the prospect followed. That is, if you created an ad talking up a special deal on your product, then the first thing the prospect should see is information related to that offer.  This will do wonders to improve your conversion rate and reduce your bounce rate since the prospect is immediately provided with the information they came in search of.  Don't think for a minute that people will spend much time searching for the information you promised them.  Adding even one more click will have a double digit negative impact on conversion and bounce rate. 

Third, by minimizing the number of questions that don't directly lead to benefit for the prospect, they'll be more likely to provide reasonably good data for the questions that remain.  I don't know about you, but I've seen more than a few email addresses that belong to asdf@abc.com.  Make life easier and more value-laden for your visitors and you'll be more likely to find out that asdf is actually Tom D.  You're more likely to close the deal with Tom than with asdf.

Keep it short, keep it critical, and think how you can gather the information you really need from the prospect's behavior and you'll have taken an important step on the road to optimizing your site's performance.