No matter how many leads you attract, your business can only survive if you can convert them into customers. Lead conversion means turning a lead into a prospect and eventually a customer. While leads have some exposure to your business, prospects are interested in your products.
Your sales and marketing teams must nurture leads to draw them into the sales funnel. Most leads convert to prospects by simply engaging with marketing materials. Your lead conversion process sets the tone for the entire customer interaction. Without the right lead conversion process, no business can succeed.
Steps to Building an Effective Lead Conversion Process
Any business owner wishing to compete in today’s markets must create an effective lead conversion process. This means that they can pull leads into the sales funnel at a rate that satisfies their demands. To convert leads, a sales team needs a conversion strategy.
Building the right lead conversion process relies primarily on building a functioning website. First and foremost, all of your advertisements must lead back to functioning pages. This means that the links work and give the lead an easy way to buy. But, it goes a little deeper than that to really build a working conversion process.
Here are some steps to build an effective conversion process.
Prepare Quality Content
When leads enjoy the content you expose them to, they connect with your brand. This connection sets the stage for their eventual conversion from leads to customers. Therefore, you need to fill your marketing materials with quality content, including advertisements, eBooks and newsletters.
The better your content, the more leads you attract and connect with. Keep all content you release, from ads to blogs, at an acceptable level of quality.
Build an SEO Strategy for your Website
A proper SEO strategy ensures that your website appears from the right search engine results. This includes using the right keywords the proper number of times. So, mention the topics of your articles and blogs often while keeping a high and natural flow.
Headers, links and content also contribute towards good SEO. When combined, you get a perfect storm the search algorithms love. SEO strategies could fill a whole article on their own. To keep from getting off course, check out Google’s SEO guidelines here for more thorough information.
Create an Appealing Landing Page Design
Your advertisements might already attract plenty of attention. To capitalize on that attention you need a proper landing page. Fill your landing pages with quality images and content, full of the proper links. You want to give leads more information about your business while keeping the page aesthetically pleasing.
Give your leads all the tools they need to become customers right from the start. Setting a great first impression helps win lead trust. Combine it with a frictionless experience and leads you will start seeing plenty of new customers.
10 Most Effective Strategies to Improve your Lead Conversion Rate
Now that you know the basics of lead conversion strategies, here is how you put them into practice. Like all strategies, you need a benchmark to visual their success or failure. Examples of lead conversions include:
- Email newsletter signups.
- eBook downloads.
- YouTube channel subscriptions.
- Webinar signups.
- Purchase transactions.
- New sales contacts.
Depending on your business model, you may employ one or all of the above methods. When you see a gain in any lead conversion metric, then you know that the strategy works. When using the below tips in the right manner, you will see gains in whatever metric you decide to use.
Capture the Right Market
You will never get anywhere if you do not focus on the people who could benefit from your products or services. No matter how good of a marketing campaign you have, it always fails when it reaches the wrong people.
Look into the characteristics of your ideal buyer including demographics and other attributes. The better you know your customer base the better you can expand it. Work with your marketing contacts to deliver your message to the right people. A targeted campaign saves tons of money and gets results.
Spend time and effort understanding who buys your product before you start any marketing campaign. Looking at current customers might reveal markets you had not anticipated. You can use this data to forge a more effective and lucrative campaign.
Maximize Your Social Media Campaigns
Social media platforms give advertisers more data than they know what to do with. Data from the attributes and interests of all social media users helps you reach your audience with pinpoint accuracy. So when you roll out a new marketing campaign, focus especially on social media. Not only will a social media campaign generate leads, but it also helps convert them.
Get specific with your target to get the most out of your social media campaign. Most platforms ask for a lot of specifics when advertisers launch an ad campaign. Take advantage of these information fields. Additionally, make sure all your campaigns link back to appealing landing pages or lead magnets.
Mobilize your Email Marketing Campaigns
Most leads will receive steady information about your business from their email inboxes. Going above and beyond on email marketing helps pique a lead’s curiosity and kickstarts their sales journey. Most email recipients are already quality leads, so you want to use the medium to foster their interest.
Make your emails brilliant pieces of content all on their own. From good prose to fun videos, you can experiment with it to find what works best. Pack your emails with pertinent information and plenty of links. When a lead likes an email they might just decide to make a purchase.
When used in conjunction with your CRM (customer relationship management) database, you can reach the right leads with the right emails. Sending a uniform message only goes so far. You can target your leads better by segmenting them into groups.
Segment Your Lead Markets
Segment Your Lead MarketsSegmenting your leads will give you different groups to target with more specific campaigns. You can divide by demographics or lead behavior. The more a lead interacts with your marketing materials the better you can focus your aim. Once you segment your leads into groups, hit them with appealing content.
When you initiate a successful lead generation campaign you will end up with thousands of leads. However, not every lead will be high-quality. Lead segmentation helps determine which leads your sales teams should focus on. Using a lead scoring method you can determine a lead’s likelihood of making a purchase.
Initiate Lead Scoring
Lead scoring helps you prioritize leads by their likelihood of purchasing. But how do you go about lead scoring? You compare known data regarding a lead’s attributes to see how well they match with your current or target customers. Your CRM system does a lot of the lead scoring heavy lifting so your teams can get to selling.
When a lead scores high, your teams should pay extra attention to that person. Hot leads might have explicitly expressed interest in making a purchase. This includes reaching out to a representative, adding items to their online shopping carts or making repeated visits. These leads often just need a little push to get them fully engaged with the sales process.
Reach out Upon Conversion
When a lead takes that fatefully step from lead to prospect, get in contact with him or her quickly. You want to take advantage of the higher levels of interest as soon as you can. Especially with B2B leads, you want potential customers to know that you mean business.
Send a newly converted prospect a friendly email. Let them know you have noticed their interest to help foster that new relationship. Any delay might mean they turn to your competitors instead. Sometimes you can stay direct and reach out with a phone call. Keep the conversation on topic and gauge the prospect’s interest.
As always, you want to find out what they need so that you may satisfy them. Give a brief explanation and demonstration of your product and get the prospect excited. You never want to annoy a prospect away, so do your best to get to the point quickly.
Utilize the Right Communication Methods
Phone calls, emails and social media messaging make up the top communication channels of today’s economy. Use all of these channels to reach your leads in their preferred method. On your lead magnet devices ask for the lead’s preferred contact method and then follow up through that medium.
A mix of all communication channels gives your sales team the advantage of a wider net. Consider reaching out to leads with a cold call to gauge their interest. As the most direct approach other than face-to-face interaction, a phone call gets the ball moving sooner.
Perform Regular Follow-Ups
Sometimes a lead wants to buy, just not immediately. Sales representatives should reach out occasionally to gauge their interest and keep your business in mind. This ensures that leads will come to you first when they want to buy. You can reach out with any communication channel you see fit.
Email campaigns work best for a regular follow-up. You can send them a standard newsletter or use more personalized marketing techniques. For instance, when a lead abandons their online cart you can send them an email reminding them about it. This helps reignite interest in your product and brand.
Additionally, follow-up with leads after they make a purchase. Ask for feedback, reviews or provide a receipt with similar items. This post-purchase engagement helps enhance the customer experience. It also gives more information about that specific customer, which you can enter into your CRM system.
Speed up the Process
Speed up the ProcessSometimes you just need to make a sale as soon as possible. You can always take a number of steps to accelerate the sales process. Sales and discounts give leads the incentive to make a purchase quickly or else miss the deal. The fear of missing out works wonders in converting slow or skeptical customers.
You can also put more practices in place around the office to speed up your teams. Create a competition to see who can make the most sales in a week. This motivates representatives to work more efficiently. Just make sure you make it a good clean competition.
From a management perspective, you should do everything in your power to help your teams succeed. Not only should you reduce buying friction but selling friction as well. Give your teams all the tools they need to complete their tasks in a timely and efficient manner.
Display Positive Customer Testimonials
Leads will always keep in mind the fact that you want to sell them something. This makes them naturally skeptical of your word. Gain their trust by sharing customer feedback and testimonials. Put the good reviews on your landing pages and put a review section on all of your product pages.
Leads will trust the testimonials of your customers as proof that your products work. These reviews also help leads visualize using your products in their own lives. The more positive reviews you have, the more customers you attract. So exude the effort to create the best customer experience they will want to tell all of their friends about.
Develop the Right Conversion Process for Your Business
Whenever your lead conversion strategy gets stuck, you can count on the expert consultation of Selling Revolution to help. We focus on developing the core aspects of your selling-based business including increasing leads, improving the sales process and recruiting top talent. No matter your industry or experience, our assistance can guide you to success.
Reach out today for a 20-minute no-obligation introductory call to identify your needs. Schedule your future today and join the revolution.