Leads are lost throughout the buying cycle, but if you recognize where and why your audience is drifting away, you can do something about it. By making small changes to improve the customer experience and retain leads, you can substantially improve the speed and rate at which leads progress through your marketing funnel. Today on the blog, we’re identifying three stages in the buying cycle where you may be losing a significant number of leads and what you can do to improve in these common problem areas.
Many people will share their information in exchange for your downloadable content or some other offer. Few of them will ever proceed further down the sales funnel. Some were never a good fit for your offering in the first place, but others may have forgotten why they were searching for your content in the first place and simply won’t move forward without more nurturing.
Solve this problem with marketing automation that reminds prospects of your organization and re-engages those who have been inactive. Tailor marketing messages based on the type of content they engaged with originally, how much they engaged with your business before becoming “lost” and how long it has been since they last interacted with your content.
If you deploy marketing automation strategically, your business will see real results. According to the Annuitas Group, “businesses who use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.” Tailoring the content to your customers’ needs will improve the customer experience and overall engagement rates.
In 2011, professors James B. Oldroyd and Kristina McElheran, along with David Elkington, chairman and CEO of InsideSales.com, shared the results of their study in the Harvard Business Review, finding:
Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.
In 2015, plenty of opportunities are still lost when a prospect reaches out to your business, is not contacted promptly by the sales team and fails to qualify as a lead. Keep your marketing funnel from leaking by encouraging the sales team to follow up with prospects when your business is still top-of-mind for them, which is right after they make contact. Your prompt response will improve the customer experience and show that your business is attentive to customer needs.
You may be engaging leads with strong educational content throughout the buying cycle, but if it doesn’t spur your audience to action, what are you gaining? It’s not enough to get prospects on your email list or following you on social media if they aren’t interacting with your content and following it through the marketing funnel.
The best way to create content that converts is to incorporate strong calls-to-action at every stage of the buying cycle. Use design and copy to direct viewers to one or at most two calls-to-action (CTAs) per page or content piece. Make it abundantly clear what you want your audience to do next. CTAs can improve the customer experience by helping content consumers figure out how to act on the information they’ve been given. Without strong CTAs, your content consumers may regularly engage with your content but without any direction: you’ll be wasting an opportunity to lead them where you want them to go.
In what other areas of your marketing do you find leads slipping away? This is a great opportunity to use the data you’ve collected to determine your marketing’s strengths and weaknesses. If these aren’t your trouble spots, investigate where your problems do lie. Then, consider the changes you could make to help engage and delight leads in each of those areas.
Learn more about how Movéo can help your business increase sales productivity with a sales activation program:
Photo by Europeana EU via Flickr Creative Commons
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