We see it every year, right after the New Year, hundreds of people sign up for the gym, because they know it’s good for them only to quit a few months later.

With lead gen pages and sales pages, you’re essentially trying to encourage a potential customer to change their behavior and go with your product or service. This is why conversion rates are so low; people are scared, unsure or using a competitor’s product when they hit your lead gen page.

The recent release of the exceptional book “Switch” by the Heath brothers brings the idea of change to the forefront. Humans are stubborn animals, but with a few surefire tactics, you’ll be able to get the mind racing in the right direction:

Direct Them

• Follow the Bright Spots — Investigate what’s working on any of your lead gen pages/sales pages (or competitors) and clone it across all your lead gen pages
• Script the Critical Moves — Be very specific with your lead gen pages, make the benefits very literal and less lofty or nebulous.
• Point to the Destination — Getting a customer to fill out and submit the lead gen form is easier when the customer knows where their information is going and why it’s worth it.

Motivate Them

• Find the Feeling — Make people feel something. Use strong, emotional images, videos or graphics that showcases the problem.
• Shrink the Change — Explain what will happen after the customer fills out your lead gen form (You’ll call them, provide them free ideas, sign them up, etc.).
• Grow Your People — Subtly reward customers as they fill out the form (inline confirmation for correctly inputted fields and a thank you page).

Shape the Path

• Tweak the Environment — Make your lead gen form as easy and straightforward as possible. Keep fields to the bare minimum and make it hassle free to fill out.
• Rally The Herd — Showcase prestigious customers that are using your product or services.

Interest in your product or service is the first step to the sale.  The most annoyning thing you can do these days is cold call (or cold e-mail) a potential client.  You want to pull these leads in…not push them. Nobody likes to be pushed.

There are 10 secrets we follow closely at FlowLead to collect more leads through our lead gen webpages:

1. Clearly explain the benefit in the headline. We can’t stress this enough, explain your product or service’s benefit to your consumer right off the bat.
2. Use infographics or videos to illustrate your product or service benefit(s)
3. Do not include unnessary distractions or extra graphics/icons. Keep your page and flow easy to follow.  Look at Apple’s product features pages for a superb page flow.
4. Carefully contract your product or service against the comeptitor’s product or service
5. Don’t offer free gifts for participation, this could devalue or cheapen your product/service.
6. SUBTLY showcase your experitise, past/current clients, and knowleadge on the subject
7. Include several small calls to action (phone number, e-mail address) throughout the page and end on a larger call to action (button that leads the user somewhere or a form)
8. If you’re using a form as your call to action, keep the form as simple as possible. First name and email address are the only items you need to make the sale. Look at Tumblr’s signup page:
9. Break big sales copy in to smaller paragraphs that are easy to scan. Think about possibly using bullet points instead of some longer paragraphcs.
10. After you’re happy with your landing page TEST it out. Test your body copy, font sizes, colors, images, videos, etc. There are serveral services you can use to test your page out: Google Optimizer.

Once you collect these leads, you can slowly ping or remind  them of your product or service. The eventual sale or purchase of your product should be infintley easier

This new reality is putting pressure on companies to participate and hopefully convert these friends and followers. In our opinion, the easiest way is with a custom landing page for each specific social destination. Big brands aren’t doing this yet, with their focus on branded content, but smaller companies are in on the idea.

The most common landing page we’ve seen inside Facebook concerns a custom tab that follows the standard landing page template:

• The primary offer or solution
• Headline
• Shorter and smaller graphics
• Small image
• Minimal links out
• Call-to-action text and form

When the user lands on the tab, the user has a few options:

1. Read the landing page offer and fill out the form
2. Become a friend of the Brand/Company/Organization
3. Explore the Brand/Company/Organization’s wall and content
4. Go somewhere else in Facebook

In three of the four situations, you’re a winner.

Obviously, we want them to fill out he form and collect them as a lead that we can contact later. Secondly, after they fill out this form, the landing page will direct them to a thank you page with a “Friend” or “Follow” us buttons, so we can capture them (the second most important action) for future offers.

Furthermore, you can now include Analytics on your Facebook pages (link to tutorial), which allows you access to data on how your landing page is performing.

In order to create a landing page inside Facebook, you’ll need to be familiar with FBML (Facebook’s HTML markup language), FBJS (for form validation), the FBML application for pages , and you’ll need to make that FBML tab show up first for guests.

In the future, FlowLead will help you integrate your landing pages on Facebook without all that mess. Are you interested?

Sign up for our Alpha program!

At FlowLead, our focus is on you. We want you to collect as many leads as possible. FlowLead will do this through several channels, the best technology possible and several hot features.

We don’t want to reveal too much just yet, but we can’t wait to get our first set of Alpha users.

If you would like to join our Alpha program, please fill out and submit this form.

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This blog and our Twitter account (@flowleadapp) will be our main way to communicate product news. Keep in touch!

Thank you! — The FlowLead Team