In a time when, for most businesses, having an online business is becoming more vital than having a physical shopfront, knowing how to improve your lead conversion rate is integral to ensuring that you keep getting potential customers visiting your landing page and staying on your website. The longer they remain on your website, the more they’ll see what you have to offer, which could turn into a sale. This is what lead conversion is all about, and is where a lot of businesses are failing. With this in mind, we’re looking at how to improve your lead conversion rate with 8 effective strategies.
1. Capture the Right Market
This cannot be underestimated. If you have a great product or service but are advertising it to the wrong market, you won’t make any sales, no matter how great what you have to offer is. Therefore, you need to have a thorough understanding of your target market, which includes their demography. For instance, you should know their age, gender, level of education, employment, location, region, country, life-style, social class, personality and attitude.
When you know what your typical customer is, you’ll know how to market your products or service. It’ll be good to hire a search engine optimization company that will know how to reach your potential customers. All this information will help you to cater content to them, so that it’s relevant and could possibly convert their interest into leads. When this happens, you then can work to make them a long-term customer.
2. Segregate Leads
Your business could generate hundreds of leads, month on month, but these may not go any further than a general interest in what you have to offer. These are therefore bad leads because they don’t go any further, and if you’ve wasted your time chasing them, or attempting to convert them into sales, it could mean that you may lose a potential sale in the process.
To help avoid this, sift through your leads, filtering the ones that have potential, and show general interest in what your business has to offer. Research into their intention and how they interact with your various platforms. Look at their sales, and see if there’s a genuine possibility of working with them. Doing this will definitely be a time saver.
3. Lead Scoring to Your Advantage
Say you have over 50 potential customers, and you’ve conducted your research, if you use a lead scoring system to syphon the value of each one, you’ll have a better idea of whom to target first. By doing this, you’ll get a gist of which businesses are more than likely to turn into customers.
4. Communicate with Your Leads
Leads are not customers. They’re close to being them, and whether they convert into customers will depend on how you grow your relationship with them. The long-term goal is to have them as repeat customers, establishing a good relationship that will go from strength to strength over time. But to achieve this, you have to move fast to get those foundations developed.
When you communicate with them, be open and honest, answering all their queries, and delivering what you’ve promised. Give them options about whether they’d like to receive updates or offers about products or services. There’s nothing wrong with the odd call or communication to see whether the product or service you’ve provided is meeting their needs, and whether they require anything or have any further questions.
5. Use Effective Communication
With the amount of social media platforms, you’re bound to find most of your customers on them, and a lot will be happy to communicate with you online. However, you may have one or two that would prefer speaking to you, which you should be able to accommodate. Others may want to communicate via email. Whatever their preferred mode of contact, you should ensure that you’re flexible enough to make contact in the way each customer prefers. They’re more likely to interact than avoid you if you take heed of their preferences, which means the lines of communication are open and are being used.
6. Keep in Contact with Your Leads
Contact doesn’t stop after a sale, as we discussed in point 4, there’s nothing wrong with the odd call or email, for instance, to see how your customer is getting on with the product or service you’ve provided them. What’s more, you could use this as a lead in to other products you may think could be of use. But be careful when offering this, as some customers may be put off by you calling them with the intention of selling them something. You could follow up this initial communication with an offer, rather than hit them with it, especially if you haven’t been in contact with them for a while. This is where getting to know your customers is so important.
7. Work Quickly to Keep Potential Sales
If possible, have dedicated individuals chasing sales and those dealing with existing customers. This way, each team becomes experts in their respective fields. However, for most businesses, we appreciate this may not always be possible. For many of you, you’ll be doing everything yourself, or delegating both existing and potential customers to just one person.
Regardless of how you’re doing this, you’ll need to make sure that potential sales are not left too long so that customers aren’t left wondering what to do or look elsewhere. The main thing is to forge a long-lasting relationship with customers, once you have their interest, but you can’t do this if you lose their interest.
8. Showcase Happy Testimonials
Nearly 75% of online customers will look at testimonials and reviews from others. You can use them to your benefit. Use your previous customers’ testimonials and reviews on your website in a way that potential customers will get to read them, and in places where they’re likely to see them. So, have them dotted around your website, rather than in one place, including your blog and home page.
These 8 tips will help you improve your lead conversion rates, and should form part of your online marketing strategy. Look at your competitors, see how they do things, and look at how your business can improve on it. Your lead conversion rate will increase if you’re critically looking at how your business currently operates and approach each tip with an open mind. Being adaptable and open to change, will help your business to become a market leader in its field.