Many businesses are focused on increasing lead conversion rates or the traffic to their website as the primary objective of their online strategy. To be sure, this must be part of the overall goal. In much the same way as a store located in a high-traffic area where no one ever enters will not be successful, massive online traffic with no conversions won’t help you. The lead conversion process includes investing in search engine optimization, utilizing your sales and marketing teams, and social media marketing to improve the success of your sales funnel.
Lead vs Conversion: What is the Difference Between the Two?
The difference between a lead and a conversion is fairly simple: leads are potential customers that have shown interest in your business’s services or products, and conversions are customers that took the action you wanted them to take.
In order to convert leads in your sales funnel, your digital marketing and lead conversion strategy should naturally guide potential customers through the sales funnel. Key elements to consider as you work on conversion strategies include:
- Lead Generation: This is the first step in your lead conversion strategy. Your lead generation strategy should include identifying your target audience and the different marketing tactics that will bring leads to your website. You want to consider existing lead sources in addition to new ways to bring in leads.
- Lead Qualification: Just because you have a lot of leads coming in, that doesn’t mean they are all going to become your customers. Qualifying these leads with lead scoring helps you evaluate the level of interest each lead has and their readiness to convert.
- Lead Nurturing: Once you know which of your leads is likely to convert, you’re ready to start nurturing their interest in your products or services with email marketing, personalized content, and offers. Establishing a relationship by providing relevant information will move them toward making a decision.
- Conversion Rate Optimization: You may have nurtured your leads into making a decision, but if your conversion paths are too complex or take them in a circle, they won’t convert. You should analyze the landing pages you direct them toward, the CTAs you have on those pages, and the overall user experience of the page for points of friction or confusion. This ensures leads are not prevented from converting.
- Sales Engagement: At some point in the process, your sales teams will want to be ready to speak directly with a new lead. Your sales team should be aware of a lead’s history and have a tailored sales pitch that meets the needs and desires of each person they interact with. The sales process should include providing your sales team with contact details or previous communications.
- Evaluation and Analysis: Continually improve your conversion funnel by tracking key metrics such as lead conversion rate, the average time to conversion, cost per lead, and cost per conversion.
Leads: Increasing the “Right” Traffic to Your Site
Traffic isn’t everything. It’s important to understand the amount of lead vs conversion traffic you are getting.
When analyzing your website’s statistics, you first must remove visits from robots so that you can isolate traffic from actual human beings. Then, you can filter out visitors that would clearly be irrelevant to you. If you only do business in a specific geographical area, any visits that originate far outside that particular source area are not likely to ever become a customer. You can also filter out traffic that is not likely to be of great quality based on language.
What remains, after you have removed traffic that is clearly not relevant, is the group of visitors who had the potential of being converted into paying customers. These can be considered your leads.
Getting More Leads
In order to be successful, your online strategy must focus not only on increasing your overall traffic to the website but increasing the right kind of traffic, that being the number of visits from real people who appear to have the potential of becoming a customer for your business.
This can be achieved through search engine optimization strategies and online marketing campaigns like pay-per-click advertising. These two digital marketing tactics help to increase your visibility for people who are searching for, or are interested in your products and services.
What Is A Conversion?
Often, people think of conversion only as a visit that ends in a sale. In fact, the conversion can be defined in any number of ways to suit your company’s goals, conversion strategy and objectives. They can include a visit that results in a phone call or email sent to you, one that leads to a proposal being issued or virtually any other desired action taken by the visitor.
Your conversion rate, then, is the total number of purchases, phone calls and emails or proposals divided by the total number of leads (real website visits by potential customers).
Improving Your Conversions
Increasing your leads is still only half the battle. If they’re getting to your website and consistently not converting, then the effort and expense that has gone into increasing lead conversion rate and your good quality traffic are all for naught.
For that reason, it’s a good idea to begin the conversion process now by having a comprehensive audit and evaluation of your current website done by an expert SEO firm. They will be able to make suggestions and recommendations on improving your website’s ability to convert visitors.
At the end of the day, your best chance for improving the overall performance of your website is to adopt an online strategy that is not solely focused on increasing the sheer number of visits per landing page. Instead, aim to increase the number of right visitors for your business as well as implement practices that will increase the likelihood of them converting from prospect to customer.
Convert Your Leads with Lead to Conversion
To ensure your marketing spend has the highest return on investment, partner with a digital marketing agency with extensive experience in crafting marketing campaigns that turn a website visitor into a paying customer.
If you’re looking to turn leads into more conversions for your organization, then contact the team at Lead to Conversion™ or call 855-473-6582.
