They say looks aren’t everything, but in marketing you need to grab attention to begin a journey. When it comes to conversions, capturing their attention is the easy part. Actually converting the lead, now that is a different story.
The heartbeat of any marketing strategy, conversion rates should be one of your top priorities when looking at benchmarks. They tell a story of pain points, bottlenecks, and how well our lead-generating funnels are working.
However, accomplishing a better-than-market conversion rate is no easy feat. Increasing conversion rates is a journey that can lead you down a rabbit hole of cost and time with very little effectiveness. It may sound exciting at first, but can quickly become an overwhelming task. Now let’s stop being a rain cloud on your goals of landing that sale. Because though tricky, a better conversion rate is attainable with the right tools and strategy in place.
You don’t need to throw money at this problem. Any marketer will talk to you about A/B testing, the science behind form fills, even the color of call-to-action buttons, etc.
But the biggest value is in the internal procedures once you receive the submission. Questions to ask are related to the customer journey as well as the internal steps the customer may not be aware of:
How quickly is your sales team being notified of a lead? Is there enough information being gathered to start a genuine conversation with the potential customer? Is MQL vs SQL clearly defined for both teams?
Once sales accepts the lead, are they providing the marketing team with valuable feedback in order to further refine the lead generation process?
What is the frequency of communication with the lead throughout the sales cycle and does the sales team have the right marketing materials and resources needed to keep the lead warm?
If the lead does not have an immediate opportunity, what does the nurturing process look like?
Walking through every detail needed throughout every step in the sale process is crucial to maximizing every lead. Not to mention this open communication will help your sales and marketing teams be aligned and understand the pain points and needs of one another. Wow, imagine that utopia!
Establishing your brand as an authority in your industry can have even more benefits than just conversion rates. But for the sake of not turning this blog into a novel we will save that for another time and another blog.
Positioning your company as an authority on a few key pillars takes a lot of time and elbow grease. But if done correctly, results in a big reward.
Take PandaDocs, for example. They started out as a small, locally run start-up trying to go up against some massive players in their industry. They focused a lot of effort on publishing case studies, writing articles and being incredibly active on Linkedin. Within a few months, people researching e-sign software assumed that this was a well-established and national brand run by industry experts. Who doesn’t want their sensitive documents to be handled by the authorities of the business?
Even companies such as Sweetfish Media are deploying advocacy programs within their company. Not only establishing the brand itself as an authority but also some of its key employees. Since launching their “evangelist” employees, they have closed $311K in annual revenue that they directly attribute to this program.
Harvard Business Review conducted a study on lead response time and found that businesses that respond within the hour are seven times more likely to have a worthwhile conversation with a decision maker. It sounds easy in theory, but we are only humans, not machines. For whatever reason, may it be human error or your internal POC is on PTO, leads can get lost in the shuffle.
So how do you streamline the process and make sure that every lead is optimized to its fullest potential? I’ll give you one guess as to what the answer is- automation.
Now don’t be hard on yourself, even for big companies like large-scale manufacturers, the process of distributing leads to their dealers and sales teams (sometimes in the thousands) can be a time-intensive task.
Pop Quiz- If you add up the time it takes to manually distribute your leads, multiplied by the lag in between your dealer receiving the lead and actually following up on the lead, what does that equal? Ding ding ding, you get decreased likelihood that lead will actually convert.
I once heard a client say that before they used PowerChord’s lead distribution platform, he was sending thousands of leads a week manually through WhatsApp. Needless to say, their conversion rates were abysmal.
A powerful automation software like the PowerChords platform not only makes the distribution process less labor-intensive, but also offers one-click-action features that allow you to automatically follow up with a lead by email or text message from a designated salesperson. This dramatically shortens the response time, limits human error, and increases conversion rates.
Now I hope you are feeling geared up and ready to take on the challenge of increasing your conversion rates. Because with time, creativity, and the right software in your toolkit, you can quickly surpass each industry benchmark.
So set those recurring meetings between sales and marketing teams to review lead coverage and pipeline flow. Create more organic lead-generating tactics that give potential customers peace of mind that they are working with industry experts. And if we haven’t said it enough already, automate. Not only does automation take the pressure off both sales and marketing, but good automation software will often provide valuable insight into the things that are and are not working.