“Lead” is a word that is simple to pronounce and write. But when it comes to relating to this term, marketers do that more precisely.
So, what does the term to which marketers relate the most stands for???
Leads are nothing but potential customers who have shown some interest in your products or services.
So now it must be clear why marketers relate more to this term.
Whenever a new marketer joins the crowd of marketers either in the field of retail sector or online business to make his business long living he wants leads for his new business.
Do you remember, the theory of “survival of the fittest”?
To enter into the list of survival of the fittest, the companies need to acquire leads for the business they are holding. Without the leads, not a single business can survive in the crowd.
You know….
Marketers pay special attention to new leads because they are the ones who can be converted into customers or say, loyal customers.
In this blog post, we have covered all the basic tactics that marketers need to follow to generate leads for their business. To perceive the term ‘lead’ more closely, for which marketers give their maximum exertion refer to the lead generation complete guide.
Well… well… let’s come back to the topic.
I have one question for you before we explore the tactics of lead conversion!
Do you know the basic difference between a sales lead & a prospect?
I have discovered that users usually get confused between these two terms. So, it’s important to know these terms before knowing how to convert a lead into account.
Lead is an individual who shows interest in products and services by providing his demographic details (like name, address, phone number, email address, etc). Here is a possibility that the lead might convert into a profitable sale.
- Leads are characterized by one-way communication.
- They interact with companies by providing their demographic details.
- Companies contact the leads in large groups or as part of an automated program.
On the other hand,
Prospects are qualified and interested individuals who do two-way communication to show the companies that they are planning to make a purchase from them.
- Prospects are characterized by two-way communication.
- They interact with the company through emails, calls or by scheduling a meeting.
- The companies contact the prospects on an individual or small group basis.
So, now I think we can start discovering marketing terms like lead conversion and lead conversion rate.
Whereas,
“Lead Conversion Rate” is the percentage of users who have completed the desired action out of the total number of users who have participated in the event. In other terms, we can say it shows the total number of leads who have successfully become your customers.
So, when can we say a lead is converted?
A lead is taken into account if they perform any of the following operations.
- Purchase something from your store.
- Provide their demographic details in order to get information about the updates and trends from your store.
In brief-
When someone shows interest in any of your products or services by completing either of the desired actions on your landing page or by giving you personal information like email address, contact number or any other information, we can say the lead or prospect is taken into account. This is a simple example of the initial process of lead conversion.
To convert these leads into loyal customers, marketers use both inbound and outbound marketing strategies.
To create lead conversion strategies it’s required to understand the process of lead conversion. So, let’s take a look at the process of converting leads successfully first.
How to Convert Leads into Sales?
The majority of visitors don’t automatically convert into sales. First, you need to convert visitors into leads and then leads into sales.
By enticing, fostering, stacking up relationship and trust it is possible to convert strangers into loyal customers. The following process will help you to understand how to convert a visitor into sales.
Process of Converting Leads into Sales
1. Attract
In this stage, the visitors are completely unaware of the products and services your company sells. So, try to create awareness and entice visitors about your products and services through your blogs, social media posts, PPC ads etc.
To generate leads with social media, PPC or through blogs, create a strategy for it by yourself or ask a digital agency to do the same for you.
2. Acquire Details
In this step, the visitor shows some interest in your products and services by giving their personal information like name, email address, contact number, etc.
Basically, in this step, they fill a form in order to stay in touch with you and your company.
If the visitor completes the desired action it means they have some interest in your products and services. Here all you need to do is nurture the leads in a manner that they can convert and become your customers.
Tip- Create gated content to acquire demographic details about your new lead.
3. Convert
All the exertion you put in converting your leads starts becoming visible when they finally purchase something from your store.
4. Try to sell more
Use upselling strategies to sell more products to your new customer at the time of shopping.
Along with this, use email marketing and social media marketing to update them about your new products and offers. Stay in touch with your new customers to build a relationship and increase trust level with them.
5. Promoters
In this step, your customers become your promoters. Your new customers try to increase and make your customer base potent by bringing new leads for your business.
Qualifying and converting leads into sales is undoubtedly vital for enhancing business and for creating awareness towards the products and services. So, let’s start discussing a few lead conversion practices that you should implement for your business.
8 Practices for Lead Conversion
#Practice 1. Prepare Content
“Content is king”. We all have heard this phrase many times.
But nowadays the use of this phrase has become more relevant than ever… Through blogging, you can stack up a healthy relationship with your customers and develop a strong customer base. To gain customer trust
- Generate a variety of content like blogs, ebooks, white papers, and product demos to name a few.
- Use gated content to acquire demographic details about your potential leads.
- Create content that describes your business culture.
- Along with informative blogs create blogs that showcase your products.
Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.
-Andrew Davis
So, ask your content team to create a variety of content that is engaging plus converting. Now, let’s take a look at practice 2.
#Practice 2. SEO
When you are visible on Google you can effortlessly generate leads for your business. For visibility on Google SERPs, SEO plays a vital role.
There are many digital marketing agencies that provide search engine optimization services to improve online visibility and help in better ranking on web search engines.
The five crucial search engine optimization elements on web pages are page title, URL, page header, internal links, and page content.
These five things will help you in increasing your presence on Google and converting more leads for your business. So, on a broad level….
If your pages are optimized and if it ranks then you can generate leads. If you are planning to invest in search engine optimization services I would suggest you to go through the Google updates to better understand how can you hold a position on search engine page.
[SEO things you need to remember while planning and implementing your holiday campaign to get more holiday sale. ]Before you start implementing your search engine optimization services to acquire natural traffic, let’s proceed to practice 3.
#Practice 3. Landing Pages
“The first impression is the last impression.”
We all say and hear this line many times. This phrase not only applies when we meet someone in our life but it also applies when someone lands on our website for the first time.
If we are successful in achieving their attention towards our landing page we can easily convert them. Remember, through the landing page you are creating your own presence in your audience’s mind. So, pay special attention to designing and the content on your landing page.
In online marketing, a landing page is also termed as lead capture page, destination page, or static page.
The purpose of a landing page is to capture lead information and to increase their engagement with your brand over time. The desired actions that a lead takes on a landing page is what determines an advertiser’s conversion rates. The desired actions could be downloading content, registering for a webinar, requesting a demo, etc.
HubSpot says companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15.
Image credit-Marketing Agency Software | REPORTGARDEN
The objective of a landing page is to foster the leads to take the desired action and increase the conversion rate of companies.
To make your landing page alluring in your audience’s eyes create compelling content. For icing on the top, use images and videos in it to make it even more interesting.
Along with this, use CTA buttons with converting lines like “Get Started!” or “The Next Level of Marketing Automation Is Here!” where your new leads can give their demographic details.
Make sure all your links on the landing page are clickable and 404 error-free.
Enrich your content with SEO keywords to increase the visibility of the landing page on the Google search.
To make the task of marketers easy there are some pre-designed landing page templates. On the request of marketers, the sellers also do modification in the code to make it according to user specification.
The landing page templates we have on HubSpot Marketplace are fully-customizable, well-commented, and designed by experts keeping all the requirements in mind. Try them and see how they help you improve the user interface and experience on your website.
So, after the practice of landing page let’s proceed to practice 4.
#Practice 4. Lead Scoring
The sales and management department uses the term lead scoring to determine the worthiness of leads and prospects. Basically, it’s a methodology used to rank the leads.
In lead scoring companies assign a value to each prospect and lead based on their interest towards the products or services.
Lead Scoring Model includes
-
Implicit Information
The implicit score contains information derived from monitoring prospect’s behavior like which websites they visit, what do they download, which email they open or click and so on.
-
Explicit Information
The explicit score contains information provided by the prospect like company size, industry segment, job title or geographic location.
-
Social Information
The social score predicts the lead quality based on analyzing user presence and activities on social networks.
For qualifying leads, many companies use a point-based system. And most of the companies use a term like hot, warm and cold to refer the leads and prospects based on their history.
The objective of lead scoring is to identify the leads who are ready to convert into sales and the leads that require further nurturing.
Through lead scoring tactic it is easy to assign a value to the leads based on their behavior. Lead scoring also distinguishes between the users who have a low and high priority to become your sales lead. Through lead scoring, it is easy to enhance the conversion rate for your business.
Let’s talk about practice 5.
#Practice 5. Social Media
Social Media….. We all are familiar with this term.
In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that nowadays even kids know and use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc to communicate and stay in touch with their family and friends.
For normal users, social media is a way to keep in contact with each other. For online marketers, it’s a tool that provides an opportunity to spread awareness about their brand and products.
You can effortlessly spread awareness about your products globally as with social media there is no geographical limitation. It doesn’t matter whether you are a seller from India or America or from any other country. You can spread awareness and enhance engagement on your brand products.
The industry that utilizes social media platforms to it’s best is the fashion industry. Yes, they are doing their best to convert their potential leads and to retain their lapsed customers.
[Whether we want to generate leads with social media or want to enhance loyalty program, social media elevates results for both.]After social media, it’s time to know about practice 6.
#Practice 6. Video Marketing
Whenever we want information on any specific topic or on the current viral trends we prefer to read a blog. But….
We can’t neglect, we all want information in minimum time and in an attractive manner.
This is the reason why a large amount of population prefers to watch videos rather than reading long and lengthy blogs.
If we talk about brand awareness, engagement, and traffic, video marketing helps to accomplish all these effortlessly.
In simple words, video marketing is used to promote, market, generate, convert and retain your brand audience’s . The Benefits of Video Marketing include-
- Increases brand awareness
- Improves engagement rate
- Boosts conversion rate
- Increases Ad effectiveness
- Stacks up trust and relationship
The MakeWebBetter team invests in video marketing and as a result of our continuous exertion, the engagement rate and traffic on our site has increased exponentially.
Before you convert into a video production company let’s see practice 7.
#Practice 7. Email Marketing
Do you know how old email marketing is??? Any idea….
If no then let me tell you this inbound marketing strategy is nearly 40 years old.
Yes, it is. But…
The power that this marketing tactic holds is still the same.
Electronic mail can positively influence your conversion rate if done precisely.
This is because it helps in fostering and building faith in the potential leads, existing customers and the lapsed ones for your business.
So, what do you need to do to make your email campaign resultful plus effective? What approach did we use to drive better results for our brand?
First, we created a team of content writers who worked only on developing high-quality and personalized emails for the customer base we have.
Along with this before sending emails to our customers we asked our designers to create email templates to make our email content even more attractive and engaging.
As a result of continuous exertion the email open rate, engagement, and session on email has increased with a significant reduction in the bounce rate.
If social media is the cocktail party, then email marketing is the ‘meet up for coffee’. The original 1 to 1 channel.
– Erik Harbison
Create personalized emails but after reading practice 8.
#Practice 8. Perform Optimization
Optimization??
Yes, you need to do that on a weekly basis.
You know while ranking any web page on SERPs, Google prioritizes those sites that constantly work on optimizing its site, content, speed, and other things.
So, if you want to stand out in Google search engine page don’t forget to add optimization in your task list.
Make sure….
- Your site speed is optimized
- CTA buttons are performing the desired action
- Your site and blog content is up to date
- You use optimized keywords
- All 404 errors are resolved
Along with on-page optimization perform off-page as well to increase your domain authority.
As an online marketer, these are the lead conversion strategies that you should include and implement in your lead conversion campaign.
But….
Along with these, the most important thing you need to do is……
Measure your success
After all the efforts it’s time to measure how many leads have you converted from your consistent exertion.
Measure your lead conversion ratio on a daily basis. Measuring your lead conversion ratio can help you to identify your progress and will help you to focus on the points you are missing.
Not only this but measuring lead conversion ratio will also help you to track your previous work and help you to analyze the vital factors you need to focus on in the future.
Over to you!
To convert leads into loyal customers, proper nurturing and nourishing is required by marketers. By developing and creating lead conversion strategies you hold a chance to increase your conversion rate.
Remember when we plan or implement any strategy it takes some time to show results…. THE positive results. But in the end, you will be proficient to increase the conversion ratio. ( Read our blog Increase the Retail sales by Simple 10 Ways to know how to increase the sale of online retailers this festive season. )
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