Think for a moment and ask yourself, are you really doing everything that you can in order to capture each and every visitor to your website as a potential donor?
If your answer is no, or even if you pause a bit before answering yes, there may be something else that you can do to increase your capture rates and build your lists / databases to new heights!
It’s all about the opt-in approach
How you go about capturing donors is of course going to have a huge impact on the numbers you see. Having some sort of opt-in form has long been an acceptable and recommended way to capture potential donors by encouraging visitors to submit their email address. Various rewards or incentives are usually offered including notifications of subscriber content updates first.
Location, Location, Location
Location really is everything!
Opt-in forms have traditionally been relegated to the sidebar of a website, where they are out of the way of the content. This has the distinct disadvantage of working too well at times – visitors can easily pass such a form by or ignore it in favor of the content they came to find. No matter how gorgeous such a form might be, how well-intentioned or well-designed, if it can be put out of sight or out of mind, chances are it will be forgotten by some of your visitors.
To pop up, or not to pop up?
This is a difficult question for many to answer because we’ve all been conditioned to hate being on the receiving end of pop up ads, and have carried this over into our organization’s practices. If you’re opposed to the idea of a pop up or pop under opt-in form, don’t dismiss them too hastily. Some organizations have seen a huge boost in their opt-in numbers, and scores of new donors as a result of implementing them.
You can avoid retargeting repeat visitors by using cookies to identify them so they’re not affected by the opt-in form. If you’re worried that people will leave your site early because they were annoyed by the pop up, you can set it up to only appear as they are about to leave your site.
Would you like to see an increase of captures up to 10x what you’re seeing on your site now? Most of us would for sure! This type of opt-in also allows you to test different methods and styles without having to mess with your website’s primary coding too much. If you have someone managing this sort of thing for you, it’s even easier to “set it and forget it” and let the opt-ins work their magic on your visitors.
Test, Test and Test Again
It’s very important to not just dismiss something that didn’t work immediately. If you’ve tried adding a lead capture form to your website but you didn’t get the results you anticipated have you tried performing some Split Testing? Spit Testing is a way to compare one version of the lead capture form with another, perhaps using different colours, fonts or location. Once you find the one that works with your audience (as there is no magic formula that is guaranteed to work for everyone) then you tweak that until it performs perfectly.
What do you do after you’ve captured?
So you’ve captured all these email addresses from potential donors, now what? Now you need to communicate and educate them providing heartwarming stories about what you do and why you do it, build a connection. You can do this through email autoresponder systems which can send out pre-written emails at specified times.
Your website has the potential to capture ALL of your visitors as potential donors – all you need is the proper strategy and a way to put it to work for you.
If you’re not very technical, don’t have the time to handle this sort of thing, or just plain would rather have someone else do it, we would love to lend a hand! Please get in touch with us and let us know more about your organization, your website, and your goals for the future.
Together we can increase your capture rates, increase your donations, and send your organization’s success soaring!
