Tag: Communication Strategy

It doesn’t matter how many leads you can generate if you can’t close a deal. Effective lead follow up is vital to make the most of the leads you attract, and ensure your lead generation efforts are not wasted by low conversion rates.

These 5 tips will help you find and convert your most valuable leads:

1. Get More Info from Lead Generation

Ensuring your follow up messages are relevant and focused on your lead’s needs right from the first contact gives you the best chance of getting a response. This means you need ways to collect information about your leads before sending the first message:

● Lead Capture Forms

More than 49% of marketers say that online forms generate the most leads, so it makes sense to avoid wasting these leads by knowing nothing about them.

Give your leads the opportunity to explain their needs and interests when completing your lead capture forms. Making contact forms too long or asking for irrelevant information can reduce their conversion rate, so identify a few key data points that will enable you to make informed decisions about how to follow up with a lead. For example, including checkboxes that can be ticked to indicate areas of interest, or drop-down lists to select their industry and the size of your organization.

For example, Bounce Exchange keeps the information it asks for to a minimum by simply requesting a company URL.

This ensures little effort is needed from the lead at this stage, but Bounce Exchange will be able to thoroughly research their business anyway. While this approach is more labor-intensive, the form also asks for the lead’s annual revenue so that Bounce Exchange can make an immediate assessment of whether leads are worth the work.

A text box to describe their needs in detail is great for high-value customers interested in premium products and services, but can be too much effort for the average lead, depending on your target audience. They also take more time to process and segment leads using this data without a text analysis app, especially when handling large volumes of leads.

● Surveys and Questionnaires

Text surveys and questionnaires let you get into a lot more detail about your lead’s needs, enabling highly focused lead follow up later down the line. These can be incorporated into lead generation by offering to help a visitor identify their needs through a survey on your site, and presenting a contact form along with the results.

Boutique productivity consultancy Building 20 uses this technique with their Remote Workspace Assessment tool, which helps leads self-identify issues holding their team back before offering to arrange a follow up.

This serves the dual purpose of showing leads the problem they need to fix, and ensuring the conversation can begin with a good idea of how Building 20 can help.

Besides giving you a lot of useful information about a lead, providing this help upfront boosts leads’ confidence in your subject area. As a result, providing information and advice to leads makes them almost 3 times more likely to see buying your product as an easy decision.

● Browsing Behaviour

Analyzing each site visitor’s behavior on your website can tell you a lot about what they need from you. By tracking this data from their first visit, when they decide to get in touch you can base your approach on the content they viewed and the parts of your store they visited, enabling you to open by addressing what they are looking for. Understanding consumer behavior is critical to following up effectively with leads.

2. Time Your Contacts

The frequency of your lead follow up messages requires a careful balance. Follow up too often and you will annoy your lead, too little and you might lose their interest. This typically takes a lot of optimization based on past performance to get right, as the ideal frequency is different for every audience and also for each contact method. Using a sales CRM to track past performance and automate future follow ups can increase sales by 65%.

Creating SMS and email triggers based on site visitor actions give you the best chance of getting in touch at the right moment. These enable you to send follow up messages based on what your customer is thinking right now. For example, sending a follow up email after a visitor reads a number of blog posts on the same topic, or immediately after they view specific products or services.

Doing this means you will send highly relevant messages at a time you know your customer is online and thinking about your business, increasing the chance they will check out your message.

3. Continue the Marketing Funnel

A content marketing funnel ensures that you are sending the right information to leads at the right time for it to have an impact. Following a marketing funnel ensures that you don’t overwhelm new leads with too much detail before they are certain what they need from you. At the same time, it also ensures you won’t lose the interest of engaged and educated leads by sending entry-level information they already know.

Marketing funnels can be separated into 3 distinct phases:

At the top of the funnel, your follow up messages should help leads identify their problem or need. They can’t decide if they want your product without a clear idea of what they want to do with it.
In the middle of the funnel leads are evaluating solutions to this problem. This is the time to discuss solutions to their specific problem, explain how your business would fit into the picture and compare competitors.
At the end of the funnel is the purchasing decision (hopefully!). Leads who get this far know they have a problem to solve, and they know you have an ideal solution. Focus on the specific features that can help them, and provide extra incentives to take the final step such as free trials, discounted pricing and onboarding content.

Most leads will independently research your business to some extent before providing their contact details. As a result, not all of your leads will arrive at the same stage of the marketing funnel. In order to immediately engage each contact, you need lead follow up plans that can pick up from every stage of the funnel instead of starting again or skipping straight to the sale. In essence, using the marketing funnel to inform your follow up strategy keeps the conversation focused on what is most important to your lead at each stage of their journey, nurturing your leads instead of pushing them to buy before they are ready.

4. Score Your Leads

Scoring leads by adding or removing points to their user profile according to their interactions with your business and website helps identify the most important leads to focus on. Scoring leads separately for their interest in each product or service will give you a deeper understanding of the problem they are trying to solve, instead of simply gauging their interest in your business as a whole.

On average, lead scoring leads to a 77% boost to your lead generation ROI.

Negative scoring is just as useful as positive scoring. Removing points for actions that indicate a visitor is unlikely to buy avoids wasting time on follow up conversations that won’t go anywhere. For example, you can use negative scoring to predict if your business is out of a particular user’s budget, or if they are trying to solve a problem your product doesn’t fix.

5. Share Content Marketing

Including your content marketing in lead follow up lets you show leads your expertise without the pressure of a sales pitch.

Content explaining how your product works or giving industry insights they can benefit from, raising their confidence in the subject. Demonstrating relevant use cases can show leads how your business can help them in a way they immediately understand.
A picture paints a thousand words, or so the saying goes. Infographics, videos and other visual content can convey how leads can make use of your business faster and with greater impact than a text-only email or SMS.
Automated marketing reporting can tell you exactly what kind of content your audience is looking for online. This enables you to easily identify past content that will be useful to a particular lead, as well as spotting opportunities to tweak old content to appeal to a new audience. As a result, content discovery and using automated marketing reporting lets you create follow up campaigns with an immediate impact instead of relying on trial and error to find the content your leads want.

Conclusion

Effective lead follow up focuses on what your lead needs, not what you want to sell. This starts with understanding their current situation and how they found you in the first place.

You also need to get across what they need to know about your product and business. Without this, it is difficult to have a productive conversation about what you can do for them. From here, you can ensure that you follow up leads by providing them with the help and information they need to feel confident about buying from you.

Why Social Network Is a Crucial Part of an Omnichannel Client Experience

Due to the fast development of web technologies today it is almost impossible to find a company that does not use the omnichannel principle of development. This event has affected almost all sectors of advanced companies, which for example led to the mass use of artificial intelligence, as well as a more productive search for employees with the help of HR-software. Thus, this method allows you to analyze much more data than it could.

Social Network Assists You Offer Wonderful Client Service

It’s no secret that social networks occupy a huge part of your customers ‘ lives, so when developing an omnichannel marketing strategy you need to follow clear standards to achieve maximum results. As a rule, sites such as Instagram are an illustration of your brand or product, as customers first of all pay attention to your profile, and specifically to the photos that reflect your brand. In other words, people pay attention regardless of whether your product is placed on the website or not, ie your goal is to give them the opportunity to see the specific prospects of your project.

The key feature of the use of social networks in this area is its simplicity and ease of use. Since a person spends a lot of time on social networks, it is more convenient to contact you there than to go to your site. If you take these arguments into account, it becomes clear that social media is an integral part of the client environment, and more importantly, it allows you to improve the level of service, despite their niche.

Customer Reviews Matter for B2B Brands

According to the TrustRadius resource, most of the decision-makers in the field of b2b (about 60%) do not immediately agree to make a purchase, before that they try to read some reviews. This means that user reviews are one of the most important tools for gathering information about the upcoming transaction. Typically, more than 90% of shoppers are more predisposed to make a purchase based on reviews from sources they trust according to a G2 Crowd study. But the whole resonance is that according to this resource, only about 20% of companies use reviews as a marketing tool.

Potential customers are usually aimed at obtaining p2p information. In this regard, there is a well-managed customer feedback program that allows them to get the information they need before making a purchase. As a result, many b2b brands could gain good competitiveness in the market, as the number of companies using a good feedback program is negligible.

By asking for feedback, you build some kind of relationship with your customers, get interaction, improve your offerings, and find potential topics for some kind of research and feedback. Positive feedback in the future can become an integral part of your social media or email marketing campaign. It follows from this that the more reliable your feedback program is, the more trust your brand builds around itself, which means that customer feedback can play other roles within the B2B marketing program.

It is worth understanding that customers first pay attention to fresh reviews, according to G2, so you should always have an influx of new reviews so that you always have feedback and some interaction with customers, as this is most important to them. Managing multiple review channels, as well as maintaining profitable marketing programs aimed at creating a stable flow of new reviews requires a lot of time and other resources. Based on this, such programs work best within the omnichannel method of attracting potential buyers which in turn uses automation to be more productive.

Social Media Contribute to Existing Clients

Let’s say your product is quite complex and raises a lot of questions for people. In this case, social networks are ideal for providing support and resolving any issues with existing customers. A good bonus is that you do not need to attract new people to your product page, you just need to notify your existing customers about the existence of this group, as well as its advantages and opportunities.

Social Network Helps You Gain Trust

First of all, please note that if you do not have a page in the social network, then, in general, you do not exist. Initially, people always collect information about the company they heard about for the first time. They immediately look through the reviews section of your company and study other people’s opinions, specifically what people say and think about this product or project.

Social Network to Show Your Values

The number of companies using social networks every day is only growing. Judging by this, it can be concluded that companies form a certain ideology, which in turn forms a number of tasks that help solve simple consumer issues, as well as in general has a positive impact on the world. At the same time, this ideology contributes to the increase of reputation, commercial benefits, as well as the protection of your market position and increase demand, which proves the commercial effectiveness of the use of social networks.

Conclusion

Once your customers feel confidence in your brand, as well as feel the seriousness of your approach to the social network, the result will not be long in coming. Thus, you will create a base of regular customers, and they, in turn, will play the role of promoters of your business, which will further affect the increase in sales and revenues. Social networks will be a great tool for sharing experiences between customers for any business. As a result, we can conclude that you can not talk about omnichannel customer experience until you start to cooperate with social networks. The potential of social networks, as a rule, has no boundaries. You can use them both to increase your brand awareness and to develop your business as a whole.