In short
- A quote form only catches visitors who have already decided. Without a soft conversion, you let whoever is still looking around walk away.
- A calculator, quiz or scan gives the visitor something back straight away, and gives you their details. Both win.
- A soft conversion only works if it ends in a next step and you follow up. Otherwise you are just collecting email addresses.
In this article (6)
Your website has one button that matters: request a quote. Or get in touch. For the visitor who has already decided, that is fine. But that visitor is rarely the biggest group. The rest look around, hesitate and click away. Without leaving anything behind.
That is not a problem with your visitors. That is a problem with your website. You give them only two options: all or nothing. In this article I show you how to add a third option, and why that gets you more leads than tinkering with your quote form yet again.
A quote request is a big step
Picture an HR manager. Tuesday evening, laptop on her knees. She is wondering whether her salaries are still in line with the market, because two good people are leaving. She lands on the site of a recruitment agency.
What does she see? “Get in touch for a no-obligation chat.”
She doesn’t want a chat at all. Not yet. She first wants to know whether she has a problem. So she clicks away, and the agency doesn’t even know she was there.
A quote request asks for commitment. You hand over your details, you know someone is going to call, and you have to be able to explain what you want. You only do that when you are already half convinced. Everything before that, you leave on the table.
And here is the odd thing: most businesses try to solve that by tinkering with the form. One field fewer, a cheerier button, a different colour. All of it can help. But whoever isn’t ready for a quote won’t request one with three fields either. You are optimising the door for people who aren’t even near the door yet.
What a soft conversion is
A soft conversion is a smaller step before that big step. The visitor leaves their details, and gets something back straight away. Something that helps them, even if they never become a client.
Hard conversion
Request a quote, book a conversation, buy. For whoever already knows what they want.
Soft conversion
A calculator, quiz, scan or whitepaper. For whoever is still looking around, and wants a taste first.
The beauty is that both sides win. The visitor gets an answer to their question. You get a name, an email address and often their answers too. With those, you know exactly where they stand before you ever speak to them.
With us, that is called a tasting. A masterclass is our favourite recipe, but a calculator, scan or quiz is just as much a way to let someone taste what you know.
Calculator, quiz, scan or whitepaper
Not every soft conversion suits every business. Choose the form that fits the question your client asks before they buy.
The calculator
For the question "what does it cost, or what does it deliver?" The visitor fills in their situation and gets a tailored indication. Like the salary calculator we built for a recruitment firm.
The quiz
For the question "where do I stand?" A few questions, a result that says honestly how things are. Playful, and people finish it because they are curious about the outcome.
The scan
For the question "do I have a problem?" The visitor submits something, you look at it and give a verdict. More work for you, but more impressive too.
The whitepaper
For the question "how do I tackle this?" Knowledge in a document. The classic, and also the form that ends up fastest in a forgotten downloads folder.
My opinion: the whitepaper is overrated. Not because sharing knowledge is bad, but because a document says nothing about the reader. A calculator, quiz or scan does. Those are about them. About their salaries, their situation, their leak. That, they do read.
Our own example: the leak test
We do it ourselves too. Our own tasting is the free leak test. Thirteen questions, three minutes. About your offer and your price, the staircase to your core product, where your leads come from and what happens at the counter.
Thirteen questions
About your offer, your lead sources and your follow-up. Done in three minutes.
Your name and email address
Only then do you see your result. That is the trade.
A detailed analysis
Per step: what you answered, what it means, what you can do yourself tomorrow and what we would do.
A next step
Want to go through your result together? Then you book a free baker's chat of one hour with me straight away.
See what happens? The visitor gets something they can get started with tomorrow, even if they never become a client. And whoever does want to go further has a logical next step right in front of them. Not a cold quote request, but a conversation about their own result.
Why a test, and not a scan of your last event? Because most experts don’t have an event yet. A scan asks you to submit something, a test only asks for three minutes. That lowers the threshold exactly where it is highest: at the first introduction.
And for us the gain is just as big. If someone books a call after the test, I already know a lot about their offer and where it leaks. So the first conversation doesn’t start with “tell me a bit about your business”, but with their own result. That saves a lot of getting acquainted, and to the other person it doesn’t feel like a sales call.
Want to know whether your soft conversion works? Then measure more than just the number of submissions. How many people start it, how many finish it, how many leave their details, and how many of those then book a conversation? Only when you know that whole row do you see where it leaks.
What makes a good soft conversion
A soft conversion that doesn’t work is worse than no soft conversion. Then you have promised visitors something and not delivered. This is the difference.
Factory bread
A forty-page e-book behind a form with eight fields.
Lots of questions, and the value only comes once someone starts reading. Usually they don't.
Fresh from the baker
A three-minute quiz with a tailored result.
The value comes straight away, and is about the visitor themselves.
Factory bread
A calculator with an outcome that leads nowhere.
The visitor has their answer and leaves. You have an email address and no conversation.
Fresh from the baker
A calculator that ends in a concrete next step.
Whoever wants to go further knows how, straight away.
Factory bread
Leads that sit in a list.
A week later nobody remembers who you are.
Fresh from the baker
Following up while it is still warm, with an email or a conversation.
Interest is highest right after the result.
Three rules I keep to myself:
- Really give something back. A result someone can get started with tomorrow. Not a sales pitch in disguise.
- End at your offer. A tasting that leads nowhere is free advice. Nice, but you are not a charity.
- Follow up. The soft conversion is the start of the conversation, not the end.
Devising and building
This is where many businesses drop out. Devising a quiz is one thing. Building it, connecting it to your mailing and setting it up so the result is actually right, is something else. So one agency advises a lead magnet, and another gets to build it. Somewhere between the two, the idea gets lost.
We devise the tasting and build it ourselves. From our own leak test to the salary calculator for a recruitment firm. Always with one goal: that there is a conversation or a client at the end.
What such a calculator delivers depends on how many visitors you have and how burning the question is that it answers. So agree up front what you measure and who follows up the leads. A calculator without follow-up is a nice toy. With follow-up, it is a counter.
It doesn’t start with the technology, but with the question of what doubt your visitor has. How we approach that is in how we work. If you are building a new site anyway, include the soft conversion in your plan for web design from the start. And if it needs to do more than a standard form, such as calculating with your own data, we build it custom, as with Laravel website development.
Let visitors taste first. Whoever likes it comes back for more by themselves.
Rubin is the founder of Online Marketing Bakery in Roermond. You take the stage, we fill the room. And we make sure it buys.
[email protected] · More about the bakers
Further reading: Take the free leak test · How we work · Web design · Laravel website development · The Sold-Out Session
How we work: first the offer, then the room. Want to get going with a brief like this? We do that in the Sold-Out Session: your offer and your event structure in one half-day.