Online marketing strategies are like bucket brigade. From one step in the process to the next, you want to make sure it flows smoothly from the start to finish.

The bucket brigade refers to a firefighting method before the advent of hand pumped fire engines. Back then, firefighters would pass buckets of water to each other to extinguish a blaze. This method maximizes throughput better than if each person going back and forth from the nearest source of water and to the location of the fire.

Each personnel do the best to make sure s/he spills the least water possible when handing off to bucket to the next personnel.

What does it have to do with online marketing — and marketing generally?

People Rarely Buy on the First Visit

To answer the question, prospects rarely buy on the first visit to a web site, especially for new sites that they have never visited before.

How do they know you provide the product / service they want? Are you reliable? Can you provide the kind of results they want? Do you really know what’s their problem? The list of questions goes on and on.

Research shows that it takes 3-8 points of contact (or even more, some say up to 27) to build the kind of relationship that makes people buy from you. I guess that will getting truer nowadays because of the amount of competitors available offering the same or related product or service to the market.

When people visit a site, they usually have no clue about the product or service. They’ll try to browse around and see if you have something that could help them move closer to solving their problems or getting what they want.

That’s just a simple view of what’s happening.

Lead Generation to the Rescue

Customers are not going to hand their wallet to you. If you provide no mechanism to capture the name and contact information from the visitors, it’s like knowing there is a leak in the bucket and pretend it isn’t there.

The other marketing activities like promotion and driving traffic to your site is of little use, if at all. Perhaps you’ll get a handful sales from prospects who urgently need your product or service but most of them leak through the hole in the bucket…

… and never come back again.

Lead generation can help. (Read this article for website lead generation tips.) Instead of letting them going forever, make an offer so they can raise their hand easier than asking for an immediate sale.

People who can relate to what you have to offer will usually sign up for a newsletter, read an article or two, download white papers and download free podcasts. Getting contact information, in my opinion, is the most important thing you should do.

You want to make sure you can contact them, give them valuable content, educate them about how to solve their problems, and so on. Basically you want to build relationship with them to let them know that you know their problems before sending the first offer for your product / service.

Nowadays, newer marketing technologies allow web site visitors to raise hands and get more content from you — and the ability for you to keep in touch with them — without trading their contact information. RSS and podcast feeds are just two popular examples.

Other tactics involve offering a free evaluation, but with tactic you can also request for contact information before sending the link to the free offer in the email.

Conclusion

Long gone are the days where you put one or two lines of information about products and immediately end that with an order (or add to cart button) button.

Doing so nowadays isn’t effective. It’s like throwing your money out of the window. After all your effort, you want to shift to the next stage as smooth as possible without leaking too much water from the bucket.

The spills are not avoidable. There are always people who don’t want to take up your offer, no matter how compelling and great it is.

However, process optimization is important and it can make a difference between success and failure in many marketing activities like advertising, media buying and generally the business itself.

What’s next? Read more lead generation articles.