5 Things To Do in the Next Hour To Increase Leads on Your Real Estate Investor Websites

If your real estate investor websites aren’t converting visitors to leads (gold in our business, where we need many leads to equal 1 deal), there is real action you can take, in the next hour to start turning potential visitors into leads.

So, give me an hour, and I’ll give you a higher visitor-to-lead conversion rate.

Statistics suggest that a minimum of 15% of the visitors to your webpage should be submitting their information to you (your conversion rate for the form). More is better, and less leaves room for great improvement.

To calculate your conversion rate, check your web statistics to see how many visitors you’ve had in the last month to each of your real estate investor websites. Divide the number of leads submitted from each webpage by the number of visitors to each webpage to get your conversion rate (sophisticated users can also easily set up Google Analytics to track visitors AND conversions and even the actual dollar value of visitors and leads).

Another quick tip for the less technically savvy is that your real estate investor websites should really ideally be  “squeeze pages.” This will greatly improve your conversions over a “brochure site.”

A squeeze page is a single webpage which has a singular purpose… getting sellers/buyers/etc. to take the next step by submitting their information. You can (and should) have a number of these… seller, retail buyer, wholesale buyer, possibly private lender.

So, definitions out of the way, here are 5 actionable tasks you can do right now, in less than an hour, to improve conversions on your website:

80.3% of time spent on webpages was “above the fold.”

1. Make sure every page (whether there is 1 or multiple) has an optimized call to action. Make sure your call to action meets the VEPA formula (see my post on optimizing your website call to action). Ditch the standard “submit” buttons and instead use the submit button text to finish the sentence “I want to…” (for example “Get an offer on my house” or “Learn how to earn 15% on my IRA funds”).
2. Include a local contact phone number in your page header. There are 3 important points here… first, that you include your phone number – a good percentage of visitors would rather contact you by phone than submitting a web form. Second, that  the phone number is front and center in your header (for a bonus, include it in the page title – this will make it show up in Google results in the first line). Third, that the number preferably is local – visitors will respond better to a local number.

What if your calls are going to a non-local answering service? No problem… you can get a “market expansion line” (a local number that instantly forwards to a non-local number) from your phone company. Take advantage of the opportunity to request a vanity number – for example, my seller line ends in 7653 (SOLD).

3. Your web form (the box where they submit their information) must be “above the fold.” In a recent study by Nielsen (the media researchers), 80.3% of time spent on webpages was “above the fold.” This is a holdover marketing term literally indicating the area of a marketing piece above where the paper was folded – now it means the area a visitor sees without scrolling. Average screen resolution is 1024×768 pixels, which means you need to be in the top 768 pixels (minus the toolbar) and the leftmost 1024 pixels.

See what your webpage looks like on all common browser sizes with this tool: Real Estate Investor Websites | Browser Screen Resolution Checker

4. Add your photo with a signature to the end of your copy. You’ll garner trust and credibility by showing you’re a real person, not just a webpage, and this is crucial on real estate investor websites. This translates directly into higher conversions. For the signature, I keep a scanned copy of mine to use online, but you could use a handwritten font in a pinch (just make sure you create an image of the signature with it, as your visitor won’t have the same font on their computer).
5. Rewrite your headline. The headline is what gets them to read further, and is crucial to whether they stay and read on, or leave immediately. It tells them whether or not they’re in the right place. For the style, after much testing, the top converting combination is red, Tahoma, 20pt bold. Also consider one of the 3 best performing headlines: “How to ________,” “X Easy Steps to ______,
   or “Who Else Wants to _______.”

BONUS – OK, when I finished paring down my ideas to a list of 5, I had an extra I didn’t want to eliminate, so here it is… rewrite the testimonial section of your real estate investor websites (if you don’t have a testimonial section, add one).

First, add a headline to each testimonial… something that might speak to a fear of the visitor is perfect… “I thought it sounded too good to be true…”

Next, put your testimonials in a yellow “johnson box” (a box with a colored background and a border, narrower than the rest of the copy – used to draw attention) located directly below your web form, which will give you an extra bump in conversion for the form.

If you want to learn more about real estate investor websites and squeeze pages (or you just want to use mine…) check out Internet Marketing for Real Estate Investors.

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