Leads are great, but only to the extent that you convert them to customers. It’s not rocket science, but you do need some smarts about motivating leads to purchase your goods or services. In this article, we’ll give you some tips on how to qualify and convert leads, thereby increasing your sales and growing your business.
There are plenty of useful tools for nurturing and converting leads. You can use a customer relationship management (CRM) app to keep track of leads, customers, and interactions. You can use a tool to automate your email campaign, or perhaps use an entire platform such as HubSpot, which offers a suite of tools for inbound marketing.
To simplify the discussion, let’s say your small business acquires leads by collecting the email addresses of website visitors. Perhaps you have a free offering that requires a visitor to enter an email address to qualify. Now, some leads are more promising than others. Here’s how to identify good leads and engage them:
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Optimize product pages:
Your website should clearly describe what your company does and what it offers. Visitors should be able to easily navigate to product pages for the particular goods and services that interest them.
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Always include calls to action (CTAs):
You use CTAs to collect email addresses and other basic information when visitors request a free download, demonstration, or some other goody. This is the most common way to collect leads. You can also buy sales lead lists from list brokers who deal in your industry.
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Nurture leads via email streams:
You can create streams of automated emails to nurture leads. You start with emails that offer generally useful information and then slowly introduce your sales pitch in later emails. Using email management software like Mailchimp can help you track the progress and effectiveness of your email campaigns. Software can vary the mail stream depending on the lead’s responses. You want recipients to open their emails, so include compelling information, special deals, and other enticements.
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Schedule a meeting:
The email campaign should help you identify the most promising leads. These are the ones that would benefit from a personal contact, such as a phone call, meeting, or an invitation to a seminar. You should try to schedule the follow-up interaction as soon as possible before the lead loses interest or is otherwise distracted. You can automate a Google Calendar entry that leads can post.
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Institute a reminder strategy:
The reminder strategy involves contacting a lead via an email, phone call, text message, etc., about a scheduled interaction. A gentle reminder can reduce the number of no-shows. You will want to confirm their preferred method of communication, including their best phone number and email address.
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Offer a deal:
You should understand your competitors’ offerings and prices so that you can offer an enticing deal at a defendable price. That means ongoing market research so that you can always present a competitive price.
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Track your sales reps:
If your business is big enough to have sales reps, you must track their performance over time. Underperformers may need training and additional support.
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Collect statistics:
Your marketing return on investment (ROI) can only be measured if you collect meaningful statistics on your marketing and sales efforts. There are many stats to track, but of course the most important one is leads who make a purchase — your conversion rate.
Conclusion
Leads are valuable, don’t let them go to waste. Review your marketing and sales strategies over time by way of conversion ratio and other metrics. And if you don’t feel like you’ve got a handle on this aspect of marketing, there are many resources available to you, including books, websites, videos, courses, seminars, toolkits, and so forth.