How to maximise leads through your website’s coming soon page!

Building a coming soon page for your business’s new website might seem easy and straight forward. Well it is BUT far too many people are doing it wrong and they’re losing a lead every time someone visits their URL.

So, I’m going to teach you how to channel your inner website design expert to craft the ideal landing page for your new site with these helpful pointers!

What most businesses are doing wrong.

I would put money on that you’ve come across an under-construction or coming soon page while trawling through the web at least a handful of times, right? And you’ll most likely agree with me that the majority of these pages are very basic. I’m talking; a boring white background, a logo, a quick description like, “we’re under maintenance, come back soon”, and maybe, if you’re lucky, a phone number and an email address.

So, what are these businesses, or their web developers, doing wrong? Well, let’s start from a sales point of view. If your website is offering purchasable products, where are they? Where can I see your products, and can I jump on a waiting list for them? The answer is I can’t, and neither can your visitors. Without even thinking, I’ll press the back button and you’ll never see me again. Oh but you’ll come back when we’re up. Nope! I’ve just gone to a competitor and purchased their product and now I’m in their database to be marketed to.

Let’s try a bricks and mortar store. Hmm, where is their address? What are their services? Why did I come to this page again? And bam, you’ve lost me. I’ll press back and go to the next result in the search.

So what can you do to stop visitors going elsewhere?

Okay, so you’re selling, or looking to sell, products on your new website. You could display your products on the coming soon page and add a simple email signup form with something like, “Get on our waiting list, don’t miss out!” Obviously, you’d be a little more creative but instantly you’re giving the visitor a chance to own your products, even if that’s not today. How? Well you collect their email address and funnel it through to a mailing client like MailChimp and set up an automated response email saying, “Thank you for your interest, we’ll let you know when our store is open” but again, add some creative flare to that email.

But I don’t sell any products, what do I do now? Okay, I hear you and don’t stress out. What I highly suggest doing is utilising something like InstaPage. InstaPage is a fantastic landing page builder that has dozens of pre-built designs you can choose from and build in under 10 minutes. All you need to do is drag and drop your content and images into the design and press publish. It also has a 14 day trial period that will let you test out the bells and whistle before committing. But the best thing about it is that it already has a bunch of extensions you can integrate it into such as MailChimp, Google Adwords or even into your WordPress website. This means you won’t need to stuff around with all the coding jargon that our web design gurus do. And since it gives you proven lead generating designs, AND tells you how to place your content, all you need to do is come up with that content.

Just a few of Instapage’s template designs.

There is also another great way to keep your leads and sales coming though if you have an under-construction page. Simply don’t have a under-construction page, keep your current site live! Tell your developer to build your new website either on their local server or in a sub-directory of your site. For example, www.yourdomain.com/sub-directory/. Just remember to disallow that sub directory in your robots.txt file or it might start to appear in Google search results which you definitely don’t want.

Now that you know how to create a GREAT coming soon page, what’s next?

Well, what’s next is getting everything above finished asap so you can start building a database of potential future customers! Here are a couple of options to get you there in the fastest possible fashion. Firstly, you can learn how to do the above. It’s all fairly straight forward which makes it the best and most affordable option. Secondly, you can let your developer know this is how you’d like your coming soon page laid out. And if they’ve already built you a boring one, put your foot down and tell them to redo it! It should be something they offer you in their proposal and if they don’t, ask for it. Thirdly, you can get in touch with our friendly team of Brisbane base web design experts and we can help you achieve lead generating glory.