Tag Archive for: Lead Conversion

Lead Liaison

Converting More Online Leads: Sales Team & Marketing Team Coordination

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Marketing teams utilize online marketing activities to directly impact lead generation. It is no secret that leveraging data from various marketing channels provides companies with the ability to determine ROI and increase sales. Because of the nature of this relationship, a company’s marketing team and sales team should be closely aligned in order to close deals faster and collaborate on the best plan of action to effectively reel in potential customers. Too often, companies maintain a disconnect between these departments and lose out on profits. Consider the following problems and potential solutions to strengthen your business today. 

Problem: Lack of Interdepartmental Communication

Many companies find communication between departments to be difficult, so identifying the communication “pain points” is the first step in the process. You marketing team and your sales team should work with each other, not against each other. 

Solutions:

Funnel Location: The sales team needs to be assured that the marketing team is only passing along qualified, sales-ready leads. When a lead is established by marketing, it is important that the sales team knows what stage of the funnel the user is in. This allows a sales rep to tailor their approach when reaching out and presenting their sales pitch to the end consumer.

Tracking progress: The sales team can also find out the needs of their end consumers using online platforms if they are trained in the analyzation of prospect activity. All data, including emails and chat archives, should be sent over to sales once a new lead is acquired. If your marketing automation platform tracks this automatically, that’s a real bonus. 

Follow-ups: To be certain that no lead falls through the cracks, both departments should create a plan of action to follow-up with any lost leads identified throughout the online lead generation process. This should be completed on a monthly basis and can often be done by using a CRM tool.

Problem: Lack of Engagement on Social Platforms

Sales teams do not usually engage with leads through social platforms. It is imperative to teach the sales team to pay close attention to social media outlets and engage with possible leads when appropriate.

Solution:

Utilize LinkedIn and Other Online Social Tools: Both the sales and marketing teams should network with potential leads and current clients online. In addition, these platforms can be an effective way to gather information about a lead and add more ammunition to the sales pitch. Solutions like our social append allow for social data to enhance prospect profiles. Salespeople should also track one-on-one social engagement as notes in their CRM. 

By effectively synchronizing marketing and sales teams’ efforts, companies are bound to see an increase in ROI from online campaigns.

Author Bio: Tracy Julien is the VP of Marketing for GuidedChoice, a leader in retirement investment planning. Tracy received her Bachelor’s degree from Ohio University in 2000 and her MBA in Marketing Management from DePaul University in 2006. She has over 15 years of experience working for multi-national companies. Tracy specializes in consumer marketing, focusing heavily on marketing strategy, global brand management, customer experience, and product innovation.

Lead Liaison

Buzzwords in Marketing Automation: Landing Page

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Landing Pages: its meaning and how to apply it. A part of the series Buzzwords in Marketing Automation.

What is a landing page?

As it relates to marketing automation, a landing page is a web page that has two functions: to convert a lead and to serve up information. So we should start there. Converting a lead means to take a prospect (or “lead”) and convert them into a contact or an opportunity.

Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. – Search Engine Land

The way a landing page converts a lead is usually by a form. It is typically reached through clicking a link or advertisement. It is a key component of any marketing campaign, and exists as a way to measure campaign traffic.

The most valuable thing you can get from a landing page is a person’s email address. In exchange for that, you can offer all sorts of things like:

  • Coupons
  • Downloadable content
  • Free trials
  • Access to a cool video

What should it look like?

A landing page should be uncluttered. Visitors typically only spend about 5 seconds interpreting what is needed from these types of pages. The call to action should be clear. For example, “Submit your name and email address for a 50% off coupon!”

If within 3 seconds, the visitor can’t assimilate how the page will benefit them in any way then they won’t stay. – True Conversion

It’s common for landing pages to exist on their own, without navigation to the main website or menu. The page should look like it is a part of your website (same color scheme, logo, etc), but only have one option: to collect the visitor’s information.

With the right software, you can build trackable landing pages into your marketing campaigns in no time.

Get started building landing pages and more!

 

Lead Liaison

Personalize Your Website to Convince and Convert

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Personalize Your Website to Convince and ConvertPersonalize your website with the use of dynamic content to make a tremendous difference in your conversion rates. As the world of online marketing has grown increasingly competitive, it is no longer enough to simply update your website with new content. Instead, you must focus on creating dynamic user experiences that encourage visitors to convert. The use of personalized content makes this possible. By moving visitors to conversion faster with a personalized website, you can significantly reduce the sales cycle.

Benefits of Personalized Website Content

Simply relying on generic content is outdated. Today, you must make web experiences as relevant as possible to each individual user. Personalization offers a number of benefits, including a highly targeted approach that helps you cut through all of the noise, clutter, and distractions faced by your visitors. Providing a personalized experience encourages visitors to remain on your site longer, download more, and in the end, make more purchases.

To maximize the benefits offered by a personalized website, it’s important to use on-page content in conjunction with targeted emails. Doing so helps to ensure that visitors see an offer designed to move them to the next part of the sales funnel.

Getting Started with Personalized Website Content

Personalizing your website content is easier than you might think. For instance, you might include text referencing the visitor’s location on your home page. Even something this simple can be all it takes to capture a visitor’s interest and encourage him or her to stay on your site longer. Another option for personalizing your website content is to upsell your current customers by displaying dynamic content for a solution for which the customer is not already paying. You could also use a visitor’s name to catch his or her attention. Case in point, with Lead Liaison’s solution, known as SiteEngage™, standard and custom fields can be used to create rule criteria to determine what is shown to a prospect and at what time and that data can also be included into the content.

While this may sound complicated, the right marketing automation package can make this a breeze. Not all marketing automation packages provide this level of personalization, so make sure you review what your package provides.

Convert More Visitors!
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Why Your Website Needs to Be More Engaging to Convert

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Engage your Website VisitorsDid you know that you only have about 15 seconds to get the attention of your website visitors? According to Chartbeat, that’s how much time you have to capture their attention, so make it count. Further data from Chartbeat shows that most people do not read web content the way we think. Adding to the difficulty in capturing the attention of visitors is the fact that there is now more content available online than ever before. Google receives more than 4 million search queries every 60 seconds. As if that was not enough to concern a marketer, consumers are now reviewing more and more information prior to making a purchasing decision. In fact, 85 percent of consumers turn to trusted online sources for information to assist with buying decisions. On average, consumers will actually engage with almost a dozen pieces of content before they actually make a purchase. If your website needs to be more engaging then start to look at ways to personalize website content and convert your visitors.

More Difficult Than Ever for Marketers to Stand Out from the Crowd Online

Although the vast amount of content available online may make it easier for consumers to review products and services, it has also served to make it much more difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd. It is no longer enough to simply regurgitate facts. Your brand must ensure that your content is as engaging as possible, which means addressing the wants and needs of your audience while simultaneously empathizing with them. Doing so will allow you to increase your level of audience involvement, while also converting more people. Today, your prospects expect your brand to express interest in them by extending ongoing interaction, both via social media as well as your website. If you deprive visitors of this opportunity, you are also likely losing out to the competition and sacrificing the opportunity for your business to build important relationships with your prospects.

Engaging Your Prospects to Convert Them into Customers

Among the most common mistakes that many marketers make today is plastering their website with one-way content. This can come across as anti-social and serve to drive away customers before you even have the chance to convert them into paying customers.

One of the best ways to quickly grab the attention of a prospect is to personalize your content to that particular visitor. It’s also important to make communication as relevant as possible. In other words, you need to ensure your content is visitor specific. A couple of ways this can be accomplished is by using the visitor’s name or even inserting the city or state in which they live to catch their attention.

It’s also important to ensure your website content has a unique voice. This helps your visitors know what to expect from your content while also helping to reassure them, which is an important step toward building trust and converting visitors.

While your brand may have more competition online, learning how to engage your customers with personalized content can help you increase your conversion rate and bottom line.

Get a Demo of Website Personalization
Lead Liaison

Build a Stronger Conversion Rate Optimization Structure

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Build a Stronger Conversion Rate Optimization StructureConsistently improved conversion rate optimization is a process that requires two key components – time and money. And while time is in relatively high supply, sometimes money can be a real problem, especially for small to midsized businesses. However, in a pinch, taking the time to build a stronger conversion rate optimization structure can be all you really need in order to see marked improvements in conversion rate optimization. Read on to learn about some of the basic principles that build a stronger conversion rate optimization structure.

Content is King

Obviously, solid presentation is an extremely important part of web design, marketing materials, and the company’s overall brand. However, when you’re trying to improve overall conversion rate optimization, tweaking the color of a banner is not the change that will yield the best results. Ultimately, the level of lead involvement with marketing materials will be determined by the quality of its content. If someone has made it all the way to your website or decided to open an email that you sent, they are real people trying to find an effective solution to a problem they currently have. Strong content that communicates your company’s ability to provide a solution for that problem is what convinces leads to convert. In the long run, improving content will yield stronger results than a design will overall. Think about different types of content, such as documents or even popup content to help convert visitors. Lead Liaison’s SiteEngage™ solution helps create attractive content to help with conversion.

Test Constantly

It’s a principle that gets repeated with a high degree of frequency, but with good reason. The internet is constantly shifting and changing. To be competitive, your marketing team needs to be able to change along with it. Testing is the only surefire way to know whether your marketing materials get the results you want. Switch out marketing approaches and run A/B tests to see what’s more effective and give riskier strategies a chance, but make sure everything you try is compatible with your overall long-term conversion rate optimization strategy.

Be Prepared for the Long Term

To put it simply, short-term optimization strategies will not be effective over the long amounts of time needed to make a real change in conversion rate optimization. Be prepared to stick it out with customers, and take advantage of marketing automation software to develop tiered lead nurturing programs that ramp up interest effectively. It may be tough to wait for results to improve, but ultimately you’ll end up landing the best, most informed customers who will do the most for your business by spreading their appreciation of your product or services.

By adhering to these overarching principles, you should be able to build a much stronger conversion rate optimization strategy. It may take patience, but eventually you’ll start noticing a pattern of improvement in conversion rates. To learn more about maximizing conversion rates and other marketing automation topics, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog online.

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How Marketing Automation Increases Lead Conversion

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How Marketing Automation Increases Lead ConversionLead conversion is a vital statistic for any successful marketing and sales team. It can also be a difficult statistic to influence in a competitive world, one where failing to contact a lead at the perfect time can result in a competitor taking the sale. However, according to the Aberdeen Group’s Marketing Lead Management Report,

“Companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates from initial response-to-MQ.”

Read on to learn how some of the essential practices of marketing automation can increase lead conversion.

Lead Scoring

Marketing automation tools, by their very nature, gather a large amount of raw data. From web clicks and form submissions to social media demographic data, your marketing automation software is constantly gathering and analyzing a lot of data about every lead in your database. This data is used to then create an individual profile for each lead – one that is continually being updated. This profile is then evaluated by the metrics that your sales and marketing teams deem most important, and is assigned a lead score. This lead score indicates how likely an individual is to be converted to a client.

Once a lead has been assigned this score, it can go to one of two places. If the lead is warm, it will be sent straight to your sales team, who can try to convert the lead as quickly as they can. If the lead is not warm, it will be sent to your marketing automation software’s lead nurturing tools.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is a marketing automation process of contacting individual leads with promotional and educational material in order to make them more likely to purchase your company’s product or service. Lead nurturing also takes advantage of the large amounts of data that has been collected about each lead so that each lead can be placed on the most appropriate lead nurturing program. Once a lead has been placed on a lead nurturing track, your marketing automation program will continue to gather data on the lead, recording things such as email click through and giving you an even fuller picture of your leads.

If your lead exhibits positive behavior that may lead to a sale, then their lead score will increase, and when the time is optimal, will be handed over to your sales department.

Lead Conversion

When a lead is presented to your sales team, either by exhibiting positive buy signs when assessed initially as a lead or as a result of a successful lead nurturing program, your sales team will have all the information they need to convert the lead. With access to a leads entire history of interaction with your website and promotional emails, you can make sure the right person will know the right thing to say to make the sale.

These are just a few of the ways that marketing automation increases lead conversion. If you want to learn more about the benefits that marketing automation can have for your business, you should check out Lead Liaison’s marketing automation resource blog.

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How to “Spark” a B2B Conversion

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How to "Spark" a B2B ConversionThat first touch. That first look. That first sound. That spark! We often remember first impressions when something significant happens. It’s no different for business-to-business sales. In this case, though, we’re not talking about attributes like a snazzy website or a funny TV ad, we’re talking about timing, response, and good old-fashioned value. That first impression can come from how quickly you respond to a sales lead and what you deliver when they inquire about your brand.

We’ve created the spark that can transform the curious to the converted and can help you spark a b2b conversion.

A Spark is a real-time event trigger in the Lead Management Automation™ (LMA) application. What events can be triggered, you ask? Anything from adding the lead to a contact list to creating a CRM task in Salesforce.com. The value in automating these events is in the rapid response you can provide each sales lead.

What constitutes a Spark? A Spark happens when a visitor to your website uses a specific search term to reach you, has visited multiple pages on your site, or other activities. The Spark can be the start of a long-term relationship with that lead through a nurturing process. By quickly responding to an “inquiry” (a user-defined request), you provide value that can lead to a conversion from prospect to customer.

Here are some examples that are used as sparks:

  • A prospect submits a web form, which triggers an email sent to the prospect with more information and distributes the lead to your sales team
  • A link within an email is clicked, which triggers and alert to the lead owner and creates a task in your CRM for that lead owner
  • A hot prospect (measured by lead score) visits your pricing page, which triggers an email to the lead owner.
  • A lead is converted in your CRM from Lead to Contact, which updates the fields and status in your CRM

A Spark can trigger multiple activities, reducing redundant processes and increasing your spectrum of response. Research has shown that prompt response and value delivery rank high among reasons buyers purchase from a vendor. Using Sparks to trigger events in response to inbound activity shows your leads that your brand acknowledges their interest and wants to provide value in their customer experience.

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How B2B Lead Nurturing can Convert Even Seasoned Buyers

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How B2B Lead Nurturing can Convert Even Seasoned BuyersSeasoned buyers have higher standards and are typically harder to convert without an effective lead nurturing strategy. It makes you wonder, how B2B lead nurturing can convert even seasoned buyers? The longer someone has been purchasing for a company, the less susceptible they are to sales pitches and traditional closing tools. The only thing that is going to convince them to buy is hard facts and solid proof that it is a worthwhile or cost effective investment. Buyers will ask themselves whether or not your solution will help them make money or save money.

The foundation of B2B lead nurturing is building trusting relationships with potential buyers, so they want to willingly give a company their business out of respect and appreciation. Nurturing leads means creating a lasting connection with a potential buyer using worthwhile content and then allowing them to come to their own conclusion once they are ready to commit. It is not a series of forceful or obvious promotional pieces that are used to rush them into a decision.

Seasoned buyers are the toughest customers which is why B2B lead nurturing has to first brand the business as being an expert in their field. By regularly providing a purchaser with free and useful information, they will experience the benefit of the relationship prior to making a purchase. It will make the lead view the business as a valuable resource instead of a vendor who is only trying to score a new deal.

B2B lead nurturing has to be cleverly disguised as an attempt to inform and educate the buyer rather than as a sales promotion sent to everyone in hopes that someone will bite. Always focus on how a product or service can make their job easier or their business more efficient. Don’t try to directly sell the product or service. The emphasis should be on how it will benefit the purchaser without actually suggesting they buy. It is a delicate balance that takes time to perfect.

A company loses credibility if every article or blog ends with some catchy sales phrase trying to convince the reader to “act now, before it’s too late.” Someone who purchases for a living will find this offensive, since they know the same offer (or a similar enticing offer) will be made whenever they are ready. If B2B lead nurturing is done right, the buyer will decide on their own when they are ready to move forward with a purchase.

Seasoned buyers are not easily persuaded, but that is what makes lead nurturing so effective on them. They are looking for established and helpful companies that are focused on creating mutually beneficial relationships. The foundation of lead nurturing is developing mutually beneficial relationships which is why nurturing leads can convert even the toughest customer.

So, if you are interested in Lead Liaison to help increase your company’s revenue act now, before it’s too late! Just kidding!

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Ten Tips for Lead Conversion – Part 2

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Five More Tips for Lead ConversionYesterday we posted Part 1 of our Ten Tips for Lead Conversion series. We learned to qualify leads, get their permission to stay in touch and/or offer them a chance to opt-out, use automation for personalized responses, offer instant value, allow interaction and listen to the lead! Here are five more tips for lead nurturing to help you get the most out of your marketing automation and revenue generation software:

6)       Give the Lead an Opportunity to Interact. Website pages, Facebook chat, Twitter, a dedicated phone number or a direct e-mail address should be offered to the lead for fast and personal contact. Make it easy for them to connect to a live person that will respond quickly.

7)       Keep Track of What is Working. It is crucial that a company understands what lead nurturing campaigns work and which were unsuccessful. Make sure to track the results of all interactions and calculate which articles and emails had the greatest effect on converting leads in sales. Use prospect profiling tools or dashboards to display who’s hot and who’s not. Integrate alerts to notify sales people when hot leads engage with a nurturing campaign. Use real-time lead tracking tools to identify who’s visiting your website and what they’re looking at.

8)       Ask for their Business. Once a prospect has been qualified and has shown interest, it is important that a sales person recognizes potential and attempts to close the deal. If it is not in person or done over the phone, a call to action request to buy is also appropriate. Most lead nurturing programs have an action that will automatically schedule a task in your CRM.

9)       Inquire about a Referral. A company does not need to wait for the sale to close to ask for a referral. If a lead seems particularly impressed and satisfied, ask for the referral as soon as possible. Solid referrals are priceless.

10)       Learn from Mistakes and Adjust. Lead generation systems and lead nurturing campaigns should always be assessed and tweaked if it fails to achieve pre-determined objectives. Not everything is going to work and modification will be necessary, since the market is constantly changing.

Have any additional tips for lead conversion? Please let us know and leave a comment! Alternatively, you can contact us by using the short form at the top right hand side of this post.

Lead Liaison

Ten Tips for Lead Conversion – Part 1

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Five Tips for Lead ConversionSales lead nurturing is essential for lead conversion in today’s fast paced market place. The ability to convert leads into revenue is a critical factor that affects the success of every business. If a company is spending a significant portion of their marketing budget on lead acquisition or generation, it must earn the reward of that investment by converting a high percentage of those leads into sales.

Here are five tips for lead conversion.

1)       Qualify Leads First. Quantity is less important than quality when it comes to successfully converting leads into revenue. Use a leads online history to judge if they are worth pursuing with a lead nurturing campaign.

2)       Ask Permission to Stay in Touch. Give the lead options to receive follow-up by email or phone and then follow through by staying in touch without coming on too strong.

3)       Utilize an Automated Response System. Create an automated e-mail acknowledgement that alerts the prospect that they will be contacted and give them a method of contact if they require something urgently. Advise them of a specific time period when they will be contacted and make sure to always respond to the prospect within the agreed upon time frame.

4)       Offer Instant Value. This should be information that they can use even if you are unable to convert the lead into a sale. It may be done in the form of a “how to” guide that is carefully crafted to inspire a purchase or an entertaining piece that is relevant to their interests.

5)       Listen to the Lead. This can be done electronically by scanning e-mail communications and online history to understand what the prospect is seeking or why they visited specific pages and links. This step includes organizing and analysing all relevant information, which can be easily achieved by a lead nurturing software program.

By using these five tips for lead conversion, a company will be more likely to generate new revenue streams by converting qualified leads into sales. A lead should never be wasted which is why effective lead nurturing is fundamental to improving a business’s conversion rate.