Lead generation conversion plays an essential role in driving sales through digital marketing, working well as part of a holistic multi-channel approach. Incorporating a number of strategies, optimising your lead generation campaign for conversions is often seen as something that is complicated and time-consuming. When it is done right, it can help you see a significant increase in clicks, follows, and sales. The first step is to find a user-friendly strategy or few that will help you get the most from your conversions in your lead generation campaign without getting side-tracked.
Lead Generation Conversion Strategies to Get You Ahead
If you have been battling to get a steady flow of conversions from your lead generation campaign, maybe it’s time to relook at your strategy completely. Many businesses treat lead generation as a quick fix or a secondary way to drive sales. In reality, when done correctly, this strategy can help you gain more customers, get more sales, and, ultimately, grow your business. It is useful not only for customer acquisition but also customer retention, helping you retain customers and drive loyalty.
Rather than seeing lead generation as something complicated and time-consuming, it helps to focus on a few tried and tested strategies that have been proven to deliver results. Some of the best ways to drive conversion with lead nurturing include the following strategies.
Make sure your website is optimised
One of the most important steps in your strategy is to ensure that your website is fully responsive and optimised for all devices – desktop and mobile. One of the quickest ways to lose conversion opportunities is to have leads arrive on your site from a mobile device, only to struggle to read content, navigate the website, click links, view images, and use the website to its full extent.
Over and beyond mobile optimisation, your website also needs to be optimised for capturing and nurturing leads. To achieve this, you need to ensure that you have done plenty of audience research so that you know your audience well. You will need to plan your content as well as the overall structure and design of your website so that it is optimised to meet the needs of your target audience. For example, if your main goal is to move leads to the next stage of the funnel, your website needs to make that happen in as few steps as possible. This is where conversion optimisation and other strategies are worth considering.
Perfect your lead capture approach
On the topic of lead capture, you will need to think very carefully about how you capture leads once they arrive on your website. Traditionally, lead capture forms have always been somewhat cumbersome, with leads filling out names, emails and other information. Today, there is a shift towards faster, simpler captures. One such example is a capture that requires only an email address to get leads into the funnel.
The advantage of a simple capture is that it makes it easier for leads to get started without having to enter a large amount of information. This, in turn, can help to build trust from the start. If you’re worried about losing out on lead information, there are many chances to get such information once the lead is officially in the sales funnel. Simplifying your lead capture is the first step to getting them there in the first place, which will remove barriers to entry.
Create the right lead magnets
Something that goes hand in hand with lead capture is, of course, lead magnets. Leads arrive on your landing pages or primary website from a number of sources. Some may arrive from ads (social media or SEM). Others may find a blog post or a landing page while doing a search online for the topic you are writing about. Then there are those who arrive from your email marketing campaigns or even your mobile campaigns. However they arrive, many are enticed by some sort of freebie. This is where lead magnets come in to help capture leads.
Offering something that has little or no relevancy to leads is a waste of your time (and your leads’ time, too). Think carefully again about your audience. What are their pain points? What are they hoping to find on your site? How can you address these needs? What sort of guide, ebook, webinar, short course or freebie would help to add real value? What would make leads want to get more information from your business once they have downloaded and accessed the lead magnet?
Add genuine value to your content
This is why it is so important that all of your content adds real value for lead generation campaign. If you have a great lead magnet, but your website and landing pages are lacking in useful information or they are not geared towards your target audience, you will run the risk of losing your lead. Likewise, if your content gives away a great deal of information without giving any sort of incentive for leads to click through or search for more information, you will also lose out on a chance to convert.
To add real value, once again you will need to go back to your lead profiles. Think carefully about how you want your audience to react to your content. Are you aiming to educate? Are you targeting leads who are in a buying stage or in a browsing stage? What are your conversion goals for your content? You can read more about how to improve your content with our guide to landing page conversion.
Split test your calls to action
Calls to action play an essential role in all lead nurturing campaigns. Although there are many that can be effectively used across various industries with a high chance of conversion, others may not have the same effect. In reality, calls to action should never be treated as a generic cookie cutter text. These small snippets of text have great power and can even make the difference between a lead clicking on to your contact page or free download page or leaving your site. Adding in calls to action without doing any sort of research is one way to see what will happen. Luckily, there is a far better way to find the right CTAs.
Split testing is a highly effective way to test calls to action to find out which ones perform better with your audience. With this approach, you will test two versions and then track the number of clicks that each one receives. You will then be able to perfect your CTAs to find the one that gets the best response.
Develop a lead scoring strategy
Finally, it is also worth looking at a lead scoring strategy to save time and effort. This will allow you to focus on the leads that show the most potential for conversion. When you put your focus on leads that show such potential, you will prevent wasted time on leads that have not shown much interest beyond your free lead magnet.
To get the most from this strategy, it’s worth defining your benchmarks first so that you know exactly what you are scoring against. This will help you identify leads that are likely to convert, and you can target your campaigns more strategically.
Effective Lead Generation Conversion
Done right, optimising for conversions in your lead generation campaign is simple and effective. When you stop to remember that the basics are all you need to get started, you will soon see that simpler is almost always better. Rather than wasting your time on complicated strategies that seldom work, stick to the basics and see how your lead generation campaign improves.
