Top 5 Tips to Maximize Lead Conversion

Top 5 Tips to Maximize Lead Conversion

When it comes to business strategy, maximizing lead conversion is at the top of the priority list. You need leads before you can have customers, and customers are what bring in those dolla dolla bills y’all. 

But the whole journey of lead generation, nurturing, and conversion is quite the process, to say the least. And while everyone has their own opinion and ideas regarding best practices, there are some tips that are just too good to be ignored.

Interested? Check out our top five tips to maximize your lead conversion rates. 

Hold Up, Just What Exactly is Lead Conversion?

Lead conversion is the process in which the sales and marketing team work together to convert leads into customers by means of nurturing. This is accomplished by effective contact and follow-up methods, strategic content, and general relationship-building (direct contact, social media use, etc.).

Lead conversion is not to be confused with lead generation, although some processes often overlap. Lead generation focuses on finding prospects and turning them into leads, while lead conversion then takes those leads and works to convert them into customers. 

AIDA (AKA Yet Another Business Acronym)

If you’re here reading an article on maximizing lead conversion, it’s likely that in your quest for business knowledge you have at one point or another stumbled across a lovely little business acronym known as AIDA.

AIDA stands for:

• Awareness
• Interest 
• Decision
• Action

Lead conversion is accomplished within the I and D of AIDA. You are generating interest in your company, products, or services, and prompting your lead to move down the sales funnel, ultimately coming to a decision that turns them into a loyal customer.

Every company will have their own “secret sauce” for converting leads into customers. No two plans are alike, and an effective marketing and sales team will understand their own leads well enough to construct a strategy optimized for their specific audience.

What is a Good Lead Conversion Rate?

Conversion rates are generated by taking your total number of conversions, dividing that by your total number of leads, and multiplying the result by 100. The number you are left with is your LCR (lead conversion rate).

So let’s imagine you generated 200 qualified leads, and out of those you landed 17 new customers. Following that formula, your LCR would be 8.5%.

Conversion rate metrics will vary depending on your industry. However, the average landing page conversion rate is usually around 2.35%, while the top 25% of businesses convert at 5.31% or higher. The very best of the best boast conversion rates of 11.45% and up—making up the elite 10%. 

To make it simpler, a 2%-5% conversion rate is considered average, 6%-9% is above average, and if you reach 10% or more you are truly sprinkled with stardust, my friend.

And Now, the Moment You’ve All Been Waiting For…

So anyways. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty (bonus points if you recognize that sentence as a direct quote from Nacho Libre. Extra special bonus points if you repeat it in your best Nacho impersonation. Right now. Go on. We’ll wait). 

What are the best ways to maximize lead conversion?

• 1. Understand the Customer Journey

Every potential client is on a journey of discovery…Discovering your brand. While they might not be ready to convert right off the bat, there are ways to nurture and build brand awareness in the meantime.

Take the time to really study your leads. Use social media to your advantage. Find out where your leads are posting, what they’re posting, what they’re reacting to, what their struggles and pain points are, their favorite ice cream flavor…

Maybe not quite that stalker-y but you get the idea. The more you know about your leads, the better you can nurture and engage with them. Strategic engagement through social media and targeted content will keep your brand in the forefront of your leads’ minds, so when they need your product or services, you are the first one they think of. 

Boosting lead conversion begins with brand awareness. Trust in business is more important now than ever, and when you build a strong brand that consistently engages and provides quality content for your leads, you form the foundation of a strong relationship. 

Consider yourself a respectful but persistent suitor leaving random (metaphorical) chocolates and flowers and love notes for your leads to find, so when it comes to time to ask them out an a (metaphorical) date they don’t just look at you and ask, “…who are you again?” They’ll remember you. They’ll know you care. And they might just say “yes!”

• 2. Evaluate and Update Data and Analytics

Your company’s analytics guide your performance and give you a means to troubleshoot your process. Are your leads dropping off after they are transferred to sales? Perhaps marketing isn’t qualifying their leads as well as they could be. Are leads not responding to your email campaigns? Maybe your email pitch needs a stronger call to action. 

While investigating analytics may be tedious work, it is necessary to know where you have been, the outcome of your efforts, and where you want to go from there. Know what works and  has a high conversion rate, and what is tanking your conversion process.

And don’t forget to really dive into your data. Insufficient data quality is one of the biggest roadblocks to successful marketing endeavors. Data ages quickly, and an up-to-date database is key to implementing an effective conversion plan. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark…or shooting at a target that isn’t even relevant anymore.

Treat yo self to some high quality marketing automation software and data verification tools. This will significantly streamline the process and your team will love you for making their lives that much easier. 

Even once you have all the numbers in front of you, remember that lead conversion is an inexact science. Leave some room for experimentation. You never want to stagnate and stop improving your process with your team and conversion strategy. Plus, experimenting helps you gather even more helpful data on your leads, what they like and what they respond to. 

• 3. Quality Leads Trump Quantity

When it comes to gathering leads in preparation for conversion, quality matters far more than quantity. In fact, an overload of crummy leads will only bog down and frustrate your sales team, while costing you valuable time and money in the process.

Consider implementing a lead scoring model to help track, sort, and qualify high priority leads. When aligned with your data, this will prove to be a powerful tool to boost lead conversion and quickly move high-quality leads down your pipeline. 

A lead scoring system inputs demographics such as job titles, company size, and industry, and then takes that “score” and aligns it with lead behavior and what actions leads have taken already. This tidies up your lead data, shows you exactly where each lead falls in your sales funnel, and what steps you need to take to continuing nurturing your top leads.

It’s important to clearly communicate with your team before hand on what your company’s specific distinctions and guidelines are for MQL’s (marketing qualified leads) and SQL’s (sales qualified leads). Providing a baseline of expectation will make your team work more efficiently as they sort and prioritize leads.

• 4. Build Up Your Landing Page and Content Marketing Strategy

A huge part of lead conversion involves a user-friendly experience. And your website is a key point of contact during the client journey. If your site isn’t, clear, simple, and easy to use, your lead will bail. 

This is a pretty simple exercise: imagine you went to a website and quickly discovered that

• You could watch the entirety of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” in between pages loading
• You have to read through blocks of rambling text and you still don’t know what the company does exactly
• You can’t find a clear “call to action” button
• Site navigation is clunky and counter-intuitive
• It looks like it was created back in 1999 by your cousin Rick who needed a quick $100

Would you be eager to do business? Or would you run, Forrest, run?

A clean, updated, and user-friendly site is a huge component in boosting lead conversion.

A beefy content marketing strategy is another way to make a big impact on lead conversions. And we’re not just talking about blog posts alone (although those are important). We’re talking social media posts, press releases, videos, webinars, case studies, podcasts…the list could go on. 

This ties back into building brand awareness. The more content you routinely and strategically distribute, better chances are your name will be circulating and you’ll be seen as an authority in your industry. 

Take into consideration where your clients are spending their time and where they are in your sales funnel, and create targeted, relevant, informative and entertaining (when applicable) content. Create an editorial calendar or content plan to keep your team efficient, consistent, and on track. 

• 5. Optimize Marketing and Sales Process

Last but certainly not least, you should optimize your business strategy by taking on a true sales experience partner like Squeeze to make the most out of your sales and marketing teams. In most cases, sales and marketing are butting heads over the majority of the lead conversion process. 

Marketing may not be qualifying leads thoroughly before sending them over to sales, who hate wasting time on time-consuming tasks that take them away from closing and making money. Data sharing and reporting between the two is often conflicting, insufficient, and frustrating. Marketing feels like sales should be accomplishing certain tasks surrounding the lead conversion process, while sales thinks marketing isn’t doing their fair share.

When both teams are unable to really focus on their specific jobs—marketing on marketing, and sales on sales—your business suffers and loses money on a daily basis. Plus, your team is demotivated and times and resources are wasted. 

When a business partner like Squeeze bridges the gap between your teams, your process is instantly optimized for success. We integrate fully with your team and take over those clutter tasks that bog down both sales and marketing, freeing them up to actually do their own jobs and do them well. We are experts at nurturing leads and making sure only the best, high-quality leads are passed on to your sales team. Plus we dive into your data and report comprehensively to ensure you are the making the most out of every single lead.

So What Are You Waiting For?

Are you ready to “squeeze the day”? Contact us and start maximizing your lead conversion rates today!