Building Your Online Membership Lead Generation and Conversion System

In my last post, I noted the importance of building a mechanism to capture leads that come to your website through SEO, SEM, social media, third party links, or online ads.

The vast majority of visitors are not going to join the organization on their first visit to the website. However, an attractive offer of free additional information related to their search can be enticing.

Therefore, the initial goal is to get an opt-in from the visitor for future communications. This list building function can often be done by having these web searchers directed to a microsite specifically designed to capture an opt-in.

The next question is what to do with these leads and how to maximize the effectiveness of the conversion system.

One way to look at this lead to paid member conversion system is as a funnel. Each stage can be monitored and measured for optimization.

A good system might look something like this.

Responses and effectiveness can be measured at each stage of the funnel:

• What online ads, pay per click, or co-registration sites are the best sources for leads?
• What offers – free articles, newsletters, discounts, event notifications -- produce the highest opt-in rate?
• What cultivation efforts -- email, mail, phone follow-up -- produce the highest click through rates and membership sales rates?

Many membership groups make huge investments in their websites, but do not fully take advantage of the traffic that the site may produce. Adding a lead generation and conversion system to an attractive website helps maximize the economic value of the site.

Please let me know if you would like to talk more about setting up this type of program and how to optimize it.