5 Best Practices to Create a High-impact Sales Lead Generation Web
Site

CHALLENGE: Misys Healthcare Systems is one of the top five
healthcare IT companies in North America, with more than 2,600
employees. As any marketer knows, managing sales lead generation
programs for a company this large has its upsides and downsides.
On one hand, many prospects have probably heard of you. Plus, you
have a sales team in 60-locations who are ready to spring on leads
when you generate them.

On the other hand, it's hard to do nimble online marketing tests
when you've got a big IT department busy with loads of other
projects, a fancy existing, general-purpose, corporate site, and
years of traditional marketing ideas to overcome.

"Do doctors even search the Web looking for medical records
software?" one executive wondered. "I thought they just checked
their stock portfolios online."

Every Net project needs an internal evangelist -- in this case it
was Misys sales rep Jennifer Nichols. She'd won the President's Club
Trip for 2003 and wanted to test her wings on something entirely
different.

Together with an outside developer, she put together a pitch to
convince senior management to let her try a test project.
This internal pitch was as carefully crafted as any outside sales
call she'd ever put together. With help from the marketing
department's intranet, Nichols pulled cost-per-lead data on each of
the traditional marketing tactics, such as trade show booths and
direct postal mail.

Then she created a PowerPoint slide comparing this to the number of
online searchers for terms related to software like Misys's and what
the per click cost would have been if Misys bought search terms
and/or optimized a site for search. "We're spending $60-70 per lead
generated on direct mail, but we could be number one in Overture for
just $9 a click."

Management was impressed enough to ok a test project. Nichols had a
tight budget and a deadline of 60-days to launch a lead generation
site and prove the Web could work.

CAMPAIGN: Nichols put together an outside team of a copywriter, a
Web designer, and a programmer to help her create the new
stand-alone Web site that would function as a lead generation tool.
(Note: Why not just tweak the existing corporate site? Because it
had a general information role to serve, and served it very well. A
separate site meant leads wouldn't be distracted by non-pertinent
click paths. Plus, it was easier and cheaper to create a new site
than work within corporate beaucracy to alter the existing one. All
of these factors are probably true for many large companies.)
The team used five specific best practices to make the site as
high-impact as possible:

Best Practice #1. Home "Hero spot" Links for Both Kinds of Prospects

Nichols knew that she'd probably get search traffic from prospects
in two distinctly different parts of the sales path -- people who
researching electronic medical records software in general, and
people who had narrowed their research to picking the best system.
Web sites that try to serve two different audiences like this often
fail, especially for search-results clickers who want to see content
that applies directly to their needs within seconds without poking
around for it.
The team's solution was to place two big links in the "hero spot" of
the home page below the logo. One read, "Why EMR? Find out more
here." The other said, "Why Misys? Find out more here."
So, no matter which kind of prospect you were, your path was
immediately apparent.

Best Practice #2. Building Trust With Loads of Client-Peer Mentions
Nichols knew from in-person sales calls that prospects always want
to know, "Who else is using this software? Is their practice like
mine?" So, almost 50% of the home page was dedicated to elements
proving Misys is popular with prospects' peers.

Because peer-use was such an important point, the design team
included information in three different visual styles to catch the
eye of prospects no matter what their preferred site-scanning method
was:

- For "readers" the headline and body copy expounded on how many
practices use the Misys system.
- For "people who like people" the designers posted four
headshots of actual clients along with their testimonials.
- For "newshounds" the home page featured an 'In The News'
section that looked like a typical corporate site list of news
releases... but instead each story was about a new, named-client
who'd just selected Misys.

Best Practice #3. Multiple Offer Options to Garner Leads
Nichols thought it would be foolish to rely on a one-size-fits-all
offer. So, the team developed six different interactive offers:
o A White paper to download
o An ROI calculator
o An online demo
o 'Request a free CD-ROM' offer
o An in-person demo
o A sales rep contact
Because the site was going to be promoted via both paid and
optimized search marketing, Nichols knew that incoming traffic might
easily bypass the home page, and enter on a completely different
page. So, the team made the tidy list of six offer links a permanent
part of the top right column on every single page of the site.
No matter where you entered or surfed, you could respond by in one
quick click to get the offer of your choice.

Best Practice #4. Personal Touch with Zip Code Search & Rep Photos
If you've got a big outside sales force, why not flaunt it? Misys'
HR department had photos of all employees already databased, so the
Web team borrowed them to create a great feature we've never seen
before -- a "Meet Your Local Support Team" interactive tool.

Visitors simply typed their zip code, clicked, and saw smiling faces
and contact info for the reps in their local area.

The team also hoped this functionality would raise the site's search
engine visibility because now the site had a page for every zip code
in America. And the more pages you have, in general the more likely
it is you'll be found and indexed under more terms by search engine
spiders.

Best Practice #5. Watching Live Visits to Determine Final Tweaks
Although the site was developed with a Web analytics package, the
team didn't want to wait for reports to find out how they were doing
and determine what to tweak to improve results.

So they jerry-rigged an informal focus group to see how real-life
visitors would interact with the site in real time.

How? Turns out if you install some (very) low-cost chat messaging
software on your site, you can use its real-time reporting function
to view exactly what search engine page the visitor found your link
on, and how that visitor then moves through your site. (Link to
software below.)
Note: The team didn't actually use the software to chat with anyone,
or to even visibly offer people the option to chat. Instead, they
just used it for this nifty, easy-to-view, reporting function.
Then they tweaked both the site navigation paths, and the paid
search terms chosen, based on results. (Learning which terms
qualified prospects find you under in "organic" results is a great
way to discover terms to buy paid results under.)

RESULTS: "The site launched five months ago, and it's definitely
successful," says Misys' Marketing Communications Manager Mike
Truell. "It's now the model we're using with the rest of the sites
we're putting up. There are a lot of elements we want to incorporate
into our main site as well."

Turns out people love having their choice of offers:
19% of visitors click on the ROI calculator offer
20% click on the white paper offer
49% click on the link to the online demo

Plus, by watching the live visitor info, the team learned that
multiple offers may be crucial to a site's success. Turns out that
when most people click on an offer link and discover there's a
registration form barrier, they immediately return to the "open"
part of the site. Then they poke around a bit more, and finally
click back to either another offer or the original one that caught
their eye.

Only then do they fill out the registration form.

As Nichols suspected, visitors are at many different stages of the
sales cycle. According to the answers they give on forms:
60% are "Just Started"
18% have conducted "Extensive Research"
14% have "Seen Presentations
8% are "Decision Ready"
Plus, it turns out that doctors do surf software sites. 42% of all
leads generated so far are from doctors themselves.

-> Useful links related to this article:

MisysEMR - the lead generation site
http://www.misysemr.com

My Smart Suite -- The outside team Nichols hired to invent and
create the site
http://www.mysmartsuite.com

LivePerson - the low-cost software you can use to track visitor
paths in real-time
http://www.liveperson.com

Mysis Healthcare home site:
http://www.misyshealthcare.com/