You can invest substantial marketing dollars and resources into generating leads, but how effective is your business at converting them? If you cannot reach your goal conversion rate, it’s time to review your buyer journey, nurture and conversion tactics.
To assist, we outline five ways to help convert your leads into customers.
Identify your buyer journey
Documenting your buyer journey will help you ensure your business provides each ‘lead’ or potential customer with a consistent level of service and attention.
Once a person contacts your business, either via a form on your website, phone call or email, they are considered a lead. Some other common ways to generate leads on your website can be via subscribing to a newsletter or blog, downloading gated content like an e-book or a guide, or attending a webinar, to name a few.
There are several steps a lead can take from this point to when they become a customer, and this journey can take anywhere from days to weeks, to months or even years.
Tip: Mapping out and documenting your Prospect Journey, including the steps your business takes to nurture and communicate with them, is a great starting point in helping you understand where the opportunities and gaps might be.
Make responsiveness a priority
How long does it take you to respond to a lead from the moment they get in contact?
Harvard Business Review study found that firms who contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later. And they were more than 60 times as likely to qualify the lead as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.
We recommend responding with a phone call or email within 24 (business) hours to ensure you don’t miss the opportunity, as poor responsiveness could mean losing the potential customer.
Integrate your lead data
Tracking your leads in customer relationship management (CRM) system or lead management software enables you to retain all the critical information about a lead to ensure you can follow them up effectively and take them on a journey to conversion.
If you are capturing your leads online, ensure you integrate your web forms into this system to efficiently track them, qualify and nurture them.
Do not forget to keep data privacy and marketing opt-ins in mind, if you are planning to send emails to these leads, they must have opted-in to receive marketing information from you.
Qualify your leads
After a person gets in contact with your business or hands over their information, the next step is to make contact with the lead and qualify them.
Qualifying and ranking your leads will help you determine the most appropriate form of communication and follow-up actions. The most popular system for qualifying and ranking your leads is classifying your leads into ‘hot’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ leads based on where they are in the buyer journey and their readiness to buy from you.
Nurture leads with email marketing
Email marketing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to communicate with your leads and nurture them to the point of conversion. Most email marketing platforms have comprehensive automation tools to allow you to set up email marketing sequences.
This might include a welcome email, followed by more information on the business, its products and services, educational tips or blogs, and promotional offers relevant to their actions and preferences. Depending on how well you have qualified your leads, you will be able to segment your lists and make your messages dynamic and targeted to encourage better open rates and click-through rates.
For example, for ‘hot’ leads you want to ensure you are sending them a promotional offer to encourage them to take action, whether it be a free trial or sample, discount or coupon or a ‘percentage off’ sale. If you sell your products online, you can also set up abandoned cart emails to assist with conversion. So when your customer abandons the cart, an email sequence can be triggered to encourage them to come back and purchase that product.
How you execute these key steps will determine how quickly your leads move down the sales funnel and are likely to convert. Consistent communication with the right message at the right time will help you engage with and nurture your leads, so documenting these processes and following them is the key to success.
Victor & Flo can partner with you to strategise, implement and manage the entire marketing funnel, to help you take your prospects on a journey from awareness to purchase.
Get in touch to find out more about how we can help – hello@victorandflo.com