Website Optimization Guide for the Building Industry

Conversion Optimization

Now that your website is structurally sound, it’s time to focus on where the real magic happens — conversion optimization!

Your website should do more than just tell people about you, your business, and your products or services. It should also collect information about your visitors!

In the simplest form, a phone number at the top of your site does this for you. People see the number, call you, and you collect information from them. However, most website visitors are not ready to call the first time they land on your website.

Conversion optimization is the art of offering informational incentives to the reader in exchange for their contact information. 

By the time you’re done reading this article, you’ll have seen a few of our incentives. One will be to download the entire marketing guide for builders in exchange for some information about you. Another incentive you’ll see is our newsletter pop-up which will ask for less information from you but provide less of a benefit in return. 

The last one you’re likely to see will be a direct call to action where we position ourselves as the solution to the problem that brought you here in the first place — the need for website optimization and a stronger marketing campaign!

We’re sharing this for two reasons: 

• Because it’s obvious what we’re up to — we want you to have the information and tools you need to successfully grow your business. 
• We want to prove that you’re surrounded by these types of incentives all the time as you browse and do research on the internet. 

If you were on the internet in the early 2000s, you’ll remember the poor reputation that pop-ups developed. Overzealous marketers put them everywhere, and they made viewing the actual website nearly impossible. 

Pop-ups have come a long way since then. Today, pop-up and slider forms are a couple of the tactical tools you can use to generate more leads and ultimately increase your bottom line.

So now you know that conversion optimization is the art of offering informational incentives in exchange for contact information. The next step is learning what it looks like on a real website and how it works. This article will unpack all of that, but first we need to understand the bigger picture.

You may have guessed it by the word optimization, but this process is different from something you can set and forget. Ideally, you set goals that you test and adapt over time in order to produce the results you need to grow your business.

Each of the following sections will help you have a better understanding of how this works. Then, we’ll move on to the tactical, how-to-do-it section that breaks down the how and why of each form type.

All of this is going to build pretty heavily on the HubSpot Tools described in our Guide to the Best CRM for the Building Industry. If you haven’t already, you should read that before continuing in this guide. 

The HubSpot Plugin for WordPress

Lead conversion starts with a software to power your forms, call-to-actions, and email marketing to provide you with reports about what is or is not working well. While it’s not the only option available for capturing and optimizing conversions, HubSpot’s Plugin for WordPress is our favorite.

Simply put, HubSpot excels at everything they do. By using their plugin, you’ll find seamless integration between your website conversion points and the database within the HubSpot CRM. It will also allow you to manage all your marketing and conversion points from within one system, as opposed to using three or four different plugins to accomplish the same output.

The only caveat is that your website has to be built on the WordPress platform. If it is not, then this won’t be an option.

If you’re running a site that’s not on WordPress, schedule a consultation with us to discuss how that’s detrimental to your business. Your non-Wordpress site could be holding you back, and we’d love to rectify that for you.

While the HubSpot plugin is free and much of HubSpot’s functionality is, too, you may want to consider some of their paid options to maximize your effectiveness. If you’re considering contracting our services, please reach out to us before signing up for HubSpot. As providers, we’ll help you determine what packages are best for your needs, streamline onboarding (saving you thousands in fees), and take a lot of the heat off your back from HubSpot’s amazing sales team.

Targeting Based on Lifecycle Stage

While it would be great if every visitor who came to your site was ready to buy, the data proves that the opposite is true. As many as 80% of the people who visit your website will never even come back, let alone buy your product or service.

With that in mind, you want to do everything you can to reduce that percentage and keep people coming back for more. 

The key to achieving a higher sales rate is to target visitors based on their lifecycle stage. Every visitor who comes to your website will be at a different stage on their buyer’s journey.

People at different customer lifecycle stages are going to be willing to share different pieces of information about themselves. They’re also going to be most pleased when they see new information as they move through their journey. You can accomplish this by targeting different types of forms and freebies at different stages. 

Before we go any further, let’s define what these stages usually are:

• • Unknown contact: A visitor who is not yet in your database.
  • Marketing-qualified lead (MQL): A contact who has agreed to receive your marketing.
  • Sales-qualified lead (SQL): A contact who has shown explicit interest in your product or service. Often, the switch from MQL to SQL will be determined manually by a salesperson. However, you also could have certain landing pages or forms which you know only people with high sales intent will fill out, which we’ll detail shortly. In these forms, you can use HubSpot to automatically update the lifecycle stage to SQL.
  • Opportunity: A contact who has given intent to purchase, generally in the form of a deposit. If you’re using a Deals Pipeline in HubSpot, their software will automatically update the lifecycle stage to Opportunity when you create a new deal. 
• Customer: A contact who has completely finished their purchasing process. 

Now that you have an understanding of lifecycle stages, here’s how you can target people at each step of their journey:

• • Unknown contact: Often, a newsletter sign up form will be all that you need to collect a first name and email address. 
  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Once someone’s in your database, they should see a different form the next time they visit your website. For example, you could now show them a pop-up offering a downloadable PDF in exchange for more information, such as their last name and phone number.
    
    
  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): When a contact is sales-qualified, you’ll want to provide them with information that will help them become an opportunity. One of the best freebies here can be a form offering a free consultation with a sales person. In exchange, you can ask for information about their project in the form to help prepare for the meeting.
  • Opportunity: At this lifecycle stage, your contacts have likely given you money and committed to purchasing. When they visit, they’re most likely looking for something specific. Instead of bombarding them with forms, one of the best things you can do is simply make it really easy to connect with their sales representative. Make that happen with a Chat (a HubSpot Feature), or a simple pop-up asking if they need help once they’ve browsed for a few moments. 
• Customer: Targeting people in the customer stage depends on what your product or service is. If you only sell one large item, like a house, then you won’t need to specifically target existing customers who return to your website. If your contacts can buy from you repeatedly, then you can treat returning customers as opportunities. Contacts in both stages are already in your database and are familiar with you. Making it easy for them to connect with their sales representative is a great way to facilitate the next conversation. 

Now that you have an understanding of how to target each lifecycle stage, let’s discuss how to do it in real life. 

Each form you create in HubSpot will have targeting options. While there will be many options to choose from, forms targeting specific lifecycle stages should be targeted to only that stage.

That type of targeting would look like this:

• Include: All contacts in Marketing Qualified Lead lifecycle stage
• Exclude: All contacts not in Marketing Qualified Lead lifecycle stage

By targeting to both include and exclude, you’ll ensure that you only target contacts in that exact stage.

Pulling this all together, you’ll need to create forms with content and targeting for each lifecycle stage. It may sound daunting, but the results will be worth it.

Segmentation

In addition to targeting, there are almost limitless other ways that you can segment your contact records. 

If you’re unfamiliar with segmentation, it can be described as building lists of contacts that share similar interests or characteristics. Segmentation is a rabbit trail that can lead all the way to Wonderland, but for our purposes we’ll keep things simple and direct. 

In the building/contracting industry, there are many points of data you may want to segment with. For example, if your local area has several communities or homeowner’s associations, that’s information worth knowing for each contact in your HubSpot database.

This is super helpful, as each of those communities has a specific demographic who usually buys or rents there. If you know that your services are best suited for higher income homeowners, then you will also know which communities are not worth your time to visit for estimates.

Plus, if you want to do more business in a specific community, and you have previously been collecting this piece of data, you can send marketing emails to contacts who are only in that community. 

Tactics like this can be great for scheduling multiple jobs in the same vicinity so your crews can operate more efficiently.

Once you’ve identified some data points you need for segmentation, there are two ways to collect this data:

1. Manually, via an email or phone call.
2. Automatically, via a form that requires this data for submission.

Using HubSpot forms to automatically collect these data points will be easier, but sometimes the data will come out in a phone call or in an email. Whenever or however you receive new or updated information, make sure you’re updating the contact record within HubSpot. Keeping the contact records up to date will help you properly segment and market to those segments.

Types of Forms

Now that you’re well-acquainted with both lifecycle stages and segmentation, it’s time to get tactical!

There are some powerful forms at your disposal, each of which has unique advantages to retrieve the information you need.

Pop-Ups/Sliders

Unlike the pop-ups of the early 2000s that used flashy colors and deceitful wording, today’s pop-ups are much more streamlined and user-friendly. Some of the best companies today are strategically using pop-ups as a way to target specific visitors and provide helpful information to them.

A single pop-up, timed properly and with the right message, can help solve a visitor’s problem or provide a way for them to learn more.

For example, imagine someone’s been hanging out on your pricing page for more than 30 seconds. It would be safe to assume that they’re looking long and hard at your costs. Perhaps they need the help of a salesperson.

Up pops a little box, featuring a smiling face and the words, “Need help?”

The visitor fills out the form, and you now have a lead — likely a good one, if they’re asking for help on a pricing page — and the opportunity to help solve that visitor’s problem. 

Another best practice for pop-ups is to use them for newsletter opt-ins. Wait to show the form until a visitor has been on a page more than seven seconds or has scrolled more than 50% of the page. Then, a low friction pop-up will enable them to easily sign up for future updates.

Remember to target any of your pop-up forms to different lifecycle stages, too. You’ll likely want to show different opportunities to different stages of people’s journeys. Feel free to review the previous section on targeting based on lifecycle stage for more details. 

Embedded

Unlike pop-up forms, embedded forms don’t come and go. They stay put on the page where you place them.

You’ll often see them on pages where visitors are very likely to ask questions. This provides a very low-friction way to help them get the answers they need.

Landing Page

Landing page is just a fancy term for a dedicated web page that only has a single conversion goal. They’ll usually have a few defining features:

• No main menu or social media links: The goal of a landing page is focused on driving conversions, so best practice is to not have anything else on the page besides the copy and form.

• Compelling copy: No one would fill a form out without knowing what and why it’s there. Good landing pages will have copy that compels the right people to take the specific action of filling out the form and sets expectations about what happens when they do so.
• Embedded form: No landing page would be complete without a way to get information from its visitors! Best practice here is to ask for as much information as you need, but not so much that it discourages people who would otherwise happily fill it out. 

Now that you know the characteristics of a landing page, you need to understand how visitors find them in the first place. They do this by clicking a link that takes them directly there. 

Here are a few places we love to put links to landing pages:

• In paid advertising: When done well, an ad will create interest about a product or service which the landing page further educates and entices the reader about. The leads with highest interest will gladly fill out the form and become future raving fans.
• In social media posts: We use landing page links all the time to encourage social media viewers to sign up for a newsletter or consultation.
• In pop-up forms: Targeting website visitors with a pop-up and then sending them to a landing page can be a great way to get the information of your best visitors. This works great for things like scheduling a consultation. 

Using landing pages is a great strategy for finding highly qualified leads. If you’re using them and not seeing the results you need, reach out to us and we’ll review your entire strategy to find the bottleneck!

Setting Targets and Measuring Results

If you’ve followed this strategy so far, then you’re setting yourself up for success!

However, there’s still more work to do. No matter how well you do with conversion optimization, you’re going to have to adapt and tweak your strategy as time goes on. If you’ve signed up for HubSpot, then you now have powerful analytics tools at your disposal.

At least once a month, you should visit your Forms Analytics page to see how your forms are performing. There’s no hard-and-fast rule for how they should be doing, but you can work backwards from your own goals to give yourself a conversion target.

Let’s say you know you want to build 25 new custom homes next year. Say you also know that every 4 conversations leads to a build. And, let’s also say you know that every 5 new leads turns into 1 conversation. 

Multiplying 25 x 4 x 5, you learn that you need 500 leads to reach your goal for next year. Not all of your leads won’t come in through website forms, though. You could weight that number by 80% and come up with a total of 400 new leads needed through contact forms. 

From there, break it down by 12 to see that you’d need to see a total of 33.3 leads per month. That’s about one per day!

If 400 seemed like a lofty goal, one per day definitely seems more realistic — and you’ve just set an attainable goal for yourself. 

It’s important to note two things here:

• Keep track of what you change: A simple Google Doc can help you remember what you changed and how it affected your conversions. The more you change things, the more you’ll lose track of what you’ve tried. Keeping a log will enable you to save time and make informed decisions.

• Not every new lead is worth the same amount: Some leads will start their journey significantly closer to purchasing than others. Some leads will convert to customers at a much higher rate than others will. For example, you could have an immediate “Contact Us Now” form at the top of your home page. That form may not lead to the most conversions, but it may bring you the most ready-to-buy leads. Since it’s positioned at the top, people are only going to fill it out if they come to your website looking to connect with you.

Putting It All Together

You’ve learned what’s needed for a strong website:

• Each page has a single purpose.
• You’re using a consistent voice across platforms. 
• Your positioning is clear and appropriate.
• Your visitors have the opportunity to know, like, and trust you.

Plus, you’ve optimized your site for conversions by:

• Installing the HubSpot WordPress plugin.
• Implementing lifecycle stage targeting.
• Segmenting lists.
• Following best practices for forms.

Now your website rocks, and you’re ready to drive people to it!