Start capturing leads even while your site isn’t published

Whatever your motivation for starting a website may be, chances are that one of your primary goals is to attract potential customers and ultimately - keep in touch with them and convert them into customers.

In the marketing world, we call this process of obtaining data from an interested prospect lead capturing.

As a cornerstone of sales and growth, leads are the secret sauce to growing your customer base and increasing your business profit. Simply put, leads are potential customers that could be interested in your product or service. There are multiple ways in which you can generate and capture leads, and they are a crucial part of the sales funnel. Therefore, it’s no wonder that lead pages require extra attention and that each detail is a piece of a bigger puzzle.

With lead pages resulting in conversions and increased customer base, the interest in setting up a lead page vs a home page has skyrocketed, too. After lead pages have shown significantly better results than home pages in terms of capturing leads, many marketers have now switched to devising lead sites almost exclusively. 

Most website owners set up intricate ways of generating leads once their website is up. However, what many seem to forget is that you can start capturing leads even before the launch! In this article, we will present some of the techniques that you can use to kickstart your lead generating process even while you don’t have a page ready yet. 

Set up a Coming Soon page to capture leads

The trick to capturing leads without an actual lead page is in developing a “Coming Soon” page that will ignite the interest of visitors and provide you with highly qualified leads. 

While you’re working on making your website spectacular, you can set up a coming soon page that will let your visitors know that you’re working on something, even if you have just reset your site.

This can be a great transition period between the start of your development and the actual launch of your homepage. A Coming Soon page also has many other potential benefits that will help to establish trust between you and your early visitors and spark an interest in your brand in early stages of development. 

With the Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugin, you can set any of the templates so that your website continues to work wonders for your marketing even when it’s not up yet.

Set up lead-capturing forms

If your goal is to collect data from persons and businesses that might benefit from your services, a call-to-action form to sign up is the best way to start.

Make sure you include how the user will benefit if they share their personal data. This can be in the form of a discount for email subscribers, for example.

On a Coming Soon page, you can choose from some of the templates that contain a lead-capturing form. You won’t need any specific technical knowledge to do this and you will be able to quickly transfer your leads to whichever CRM platform you’re using. 

Test out different modes of lead capturing

A Coming Soon page is a great way to test out the performance of a call-to-action page or a lead page, without burdening your brand and reputation with too much experiments and uncertainty. 

Just like with all things related to website performance, the number 1 thing to do to know that you’re going in the right direction is to perform A/B or multivariate testing of different form options. You can do this by using Google’s Optimize tool and see what option works best with your visitors. 

After one of the 2 or more options proves to be more successful, you can automatically clone it to your new lead-capturing page. 

Play around with different channels

Most website owners tend to rely on email newsletter sign up forms as the safest bet for hot leads. However, there are many other unique and fresh ways that you can come into contact with your visitors and customers and turn them into qualified leads.

Some of the most popular ones include:

• Chat communication. If you run a website where it’s crucial to communicate with your customers on a personal basis, you can manage your live chat manually or hire customer support staff. In other cases, where it’s important to approach your visitor and capture their info whatever it takes, you can use AI chatbots that will lead the conversation straight to your CRM program.

• Special offers. Regardless of whether you’re selling goods or services, there are always interesting treats that you can offer to your visitors. If you provide a discount or a bonus code for visitors who fill out your form and sign up for your newsletter, you will surely grab the attention of a wider audience.

• Offer free perks. Many marketers agree that offering a free service such as an eBook or a short skill course can skyrocket your chances of successfully capturing leads. Depending on the business you’re in, you can easily find a perk that will present a taste of what the users might expect when they sign up with you. Remember to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes and ask yourself whether you would be interested if you were them.

• Organize a raffle. Even though raffles with prizes are no novelty to the social media scene and eCommerce pages, there are actually not that many lead pages that provoke attention and interest using a prize raffle. If you want tons of emails, phone numbers or other personal info from people who want your product, organizing a raffle on your Coming Soon page is a great way to do so. Players who sign up will be qualified leads that are actually interested in owning your product. And you will be left with hundreds and thousands of emails even before your website is complete!

Remember to be unique, hard to forget and thought-provoking: this is the best recipe for capturing the highest number of leads!

Featured image by Austin Distel on Unsplash