Converting a lead is the core process of revenue growth and company expansion. Leads are the actual potential cash crops of B2B marketing. This is why even if you run the most efficient lead generating campaigns for the best lead conversion rate, your efforts are next to nothing if they don’t convert into business opportunities.
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The reason for lead generation campaigns and B2B marketing is to help the sales team make a sale. Marketers spend a lot of time creating campaigns for inbound leads, but most of them struggle to convert those potential leads into customers.
One of the primary causes of this is most of the B2B marketing professionals don’t even know their lead conversion rate or have a fruitful strategy plan to go through with their campaigns.
By following these best practices below, you can grow your business more sustainably and also increase your lead conversion rate in no time,
8 Best Ways to Increase Lead Conversion Rate
1. Nurture Leads With Effective Campaign Generation
Lead generation takes place through many platforms – from email drip campaigns to social media programs, publishing blogs to creating killer landing pages. Once you generate leads from such campaigns, you need to nurture them through a funnel with a series of touch points that will move them closer to becoming qualified leads.
You can even use a lead nurturing program to help you better your lead conversion rate. It will capture all the leads for you, persuade them through various buying stages, and filter out the ones that are likely to convert. Rather than sending untested leads to the sales team, you can use list segmentation and target content according to the segments to filter away unqualified leads.
Also, Read: What is Lead Generation Process? [7 Tried-and-Tested Steps]
2. Quality Matters and Not Quantity
Marketers need to set higher quality standards for their leads as they often struggle to show ROI through their lead conversion rate. Thus, improving lead quality rather than the quantity of it is the top priority for all B2B marketers. For this, you need to let the sales and marketing team come together to share their respective ideologies for lead qualifications and clarify a framework for the buyer’s journey,
- What and where are the boundaries between MQLs, SQLs, and SALs?
- How do you define and recognize a “sales-ready” lead? (what actions and parameters indicate interest and intent?)
- Who holds the responsibility and accountability for the quality assurance process?
3. Tryout a Lead Scoring System
A lead scoring system is an excellent way to quantify your targeting requirements to increase your lead conversion rate. Lead scoring designates each leads a numerical value based on the criteria acquired during lead captures such as department, role, and company size.
Even the actions a lead has taken like browsing behavior, email engagement, downloads, social media shares help in this system. Once the lead achieves a certain threshold in the system, it is passed to the sales team for follow-up.
When setting up your lead scoring system, involve the sales team in the process. Since they get to be closer to prospects and know their needs and pain points better than marketers, it will help you finely tune your scoring system.
Also, Read: 4 Tips for Lead Acquisition to Conversion Turnaround Time
4. Introduce Your CRM With a Marketing Automation Platform
Many sales teams today use CRM software to move the leads through the funnel before closing the deals. CRM software stores information about each customer in your system, including behavioral and demographic data.
Marketers can use this CRM data on new leads by integrating the software a marketing automation platform to track close rates and other conversion metrics. You can customize messages to send to your prospects based on their interests, past buying behavior, and more. This allows you to deliver much more personal outreach, which will engage prospects better and increase your lead conversion rate.
5. Verify Data Collected Promptly
Marketers face poor data quality while capturing leads like missing form fields, invalid formatting of data collecting forms, duplicated data in the system, and other such problems. Working through such a database of lead profiles will make it not only difficult connecting with the leads but also next to impossible to get a better lead conversion rate.
However, you can prevent this from happening by using various types of data verification in your web forms. Many marketing automation solutions include features that detect an invalid email ID or phone number while a lead is filling the form. Also, the use of reCAPTCHA will reduce fake leads from capturing in your database, thus increasing the quality of leads.
6. Put Targeted Content in Your Lead Generation Strategy
Engaging qualified leads with email marketing and multichannel campaigns is easy because your marketing automation platform will reach you directly. But what about potential leads out there whose contact data you do not have? Targeted content comes into the picture here to help you communicate with potential prospects.
Posting killer content on your social media channels will speak for itself and extend the reach of your brand driving new leads to your website or blog. The best content doesn’t just attract visitors; it educates readers and uses their goals and priorities to shed light on latent buying needs. That means you will need to create a good pool of content topics addressing specific buyer personas and tailoring to different stages of the funnel.
7. Enable Marketing Team to Follow up With Sales Team on Leads
Most of the B2B companies keep their marketing and sales team segregated. This means once the leads are delivered to the sales team, marketing team members wash their hands of it and don’t follow-up in the sales development process.
Sales reps go through good-old-fashioned sales pitching, sales enabling materials like case studies, ROI calculators, product comparisons, and implementation guides to close a lead. As a digital marketer, you should collaborate directly with the sales reps to determine what kind of specific parameters or requirements are needed to let a lead make a final decision thus improving your lead conversion rate.
8. Keep Improvising Your Lead Conversion Rate Regularly
Measuring your lead conversion rate regularly will help you keep a finger on the pulse of your efforts. This is the ratio that will indicate to you the number of marketing qualified leads likely to convert into customers. If the sales team is turning in only five out of every 100 leads you send them across their way, then that indicates that you may be qualifying potential customers too soon.
You can prevent this by running a monthly scorecard that tracks all the metrics set for lead capture. That way, you will get to maintain insight into how well your lead conversion rate is working, fix what’s broken produce better results. You should also ask some question to yourself about lead qualification checklist. In these way you will improvise your lead conversion rate regularly.
Conclusion
Ultimately, your lead conversion rate depends on how much as a marketer you are willing to invest in the front end – may it be money, technology, time, people, and even training). It also depends on how easily you can adapt to changing market forces because no company can master all these areas. But with a little extra effort than your ongoing processes, you can start bringing in leads that are responsive, qualified, and ready to make a decision.
Chanchal Soni is a Growth Hacker and CRO Specialist at Appitsimple. She has experience in digital marketing, social media, content strategy, and marketing communications. Lover of huskies, the ocean & Boston sports.
