Perfecting your lead generation takes a lot of hard work. In addition to constantly implementing new strategies, you also need to keep analyzing your progress to see how your strategy is resonating with those leads.
Without strong leads, a business can’t build their customer base. While a lead is certainly not the same as a current customer, the goal is to get them there as quickly as possible. And, keep them there. Converting a lead over is one of the most challenging aspects of any business. After all, how do you know when it’s time to send that lead over to the sales team?
Are your leads qualified enough for that next step? How do you know?
Ask yourself these questions:
- How much time does this lead spend on your page? And, what do they do?
When this lead visits your website, you need to study how long they are spending on that page, and what pages they are visiting. Does it look they are just considering your site for a moment, or are they spending serious time getting to know who you are? If they are just taking a glance, they aren’t quite qualified yet. But, if they are opting-in and also searching your products page, you’re going to need to get this lead over to sales. They are qualified.
- When was the last time this lead visited your site? What about frequency?
If it’s been three months since this lead last visited your site, you might not want to spend too much time focusing on them. In addition to looking at other criteria, there’s a good chance their activity is too far back to qualify them. On the other hand, if this lead has been on your site once yesterday, once Monday, and three times a week prior, you need to hone in on this lead ASAP. Remember, time is money, and you only have a little time left to take care of this qualified lead.
Dig in Deeper
- How are they treating your emails?
When you send out e-mails to this lead, how are they “responding” to it? We don’t mean whether not they are literally responding, but are they reading it? If these leads are opening up your emails and reading them, that’s a great sign and means this lead may be qualified. However, if a lot of those emails aren’t being read, you need to then try another strategy.
- Are they showing interest? Where are they showing that interest and how serious is it?
Taking into consideration the emails and the website factor, does it seem like this lead is showing interest in what you do? Try to pin down what it is they are interested in. Are they only interested in your complimentary ebooks? Or are they interested in something you’re selling, but maybe they are deterred by the price? Consider what it is that this lead wants. If they’re close to conversion, think of a more personalized strategy to keep that interest long enough to convert them.
- And finally, can you score your leads?
None of this will really make a difference unless you can score your leads. Scoring your leads means you’ll have an easier way of taking all these criteria and understanding them individually.
Cultivating Leads with Marketing Automation
Lead scoring gives your leads a “score” on a scale, so you can quickly determine whether or not this lead is qualified or if this lead needs to be put on the backburner. Of course, a marketing automation software like The Mission Suite has a great lead scoring feature to help you get those qualified leads onto the next step.
Recently we’ve talked a lot about how businesses can harness new technologies and strategies in order to create new leads. Generating new leads is all well and good -it’s crucial to the success of nearly any business – but what do you do with those leads once you’ve got them?
That’s where marketing automation comes in. We’ve discussed the power of proper marketing automation before, but we have yet to really dive into the specifics of how you can utilize this tool to cultivate leads and turn new leads into new income.
Nurture Leads with Custom Content
Once you’ve acquired a set of leads from your various inbound and outbound marketing tactics, it’s a good idea to segment them based on any knowledge you have about the individuals behind the leads. This might be something as simple as the specific product pages they viewed on your site, or more in-depth knowledge like their role in their company.
Once you have these segmented groups sorted you can start crafting custom content that is tailored to their (apparent) needs. This isn’t a 100 percent foolproof plan, but the more information you can gather on your leads the higher the likelihood of success.
Test the Water
With your leads segmented and your custom content created, it’s now time to put your plan into action. If you are currently using a marketing automation system (like Mission Suite) then this is where your automated workflow would most likely begin.
To be successful this strategy relies heavily on the generation of quality, relevant content that will successfully engage your new leads. By crafting content based around the lead’s past behavior you can maximize the email’s relevancy and hopefully drive traffic to your site. Relevant and engaging emails also help to establish trust and demonstrate that you have value to offer your customers.
When the CMS Wire team decided to test the effectiveness of this strategy they were impressed by the results. Nurtured leads were 169% more likely to open an email and click through to the website. These nurtured leads were also 15% more likely to visit the purchase page of the site than those leads that had not received special consideration.
You can see from these impressive results that lead nurturing through marketing automation can pay serious dividends when executed properly. If you already have an email marketing system in place (which you should) then it’s imperative that you learn how to utilize information gathered on leads in order to create custom content that will engage your prospective customers. Then, using your marketing automation system, you can deliver this content where and when it will be the most effective.
If you’d like to learn more about how marketing automation can help turn leads into sales be sure to sign up for your demo of Mission Suite.
If you’ve got any questions about the topics covered in this article, or anywhere else on the blog, be sure to drop us a line in the comments!
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