For any business, investing in effective marketing campaigns that fill the top of the marketing funnel with prospective buyers is critical to generating long-term success — but it’s only the beginning of the battle. Once the lead-generation process is complete, boosting the bottom line requires turning interested consumers into paying customers.
Known as lead conversion, the process behind making this happen employs strategic efforts to nurture top-of-the-funnel prospects so that they move from the awareness and consideration stages along to purchase — and ideally to brand loyalty and advocacy. Doing this requires, among other things, developing a strong understanding of your customers and their needs, along with creating a compelling and easy-to-navigate customer experience.
And although these are lofty, big-picture goals that require hard work, consistent investment, and careful optimization over the long haul — and are topics for many more blog articles and even books — there are smaller steps your brand can take in the short term to greatly advance the cause. Consider these eight powerful conversion tips that are easy to incorporate and can help your brand move the needle toward more sales right away:
1. Make a compelling offer
Few things provide more incentive for consumers to make a purchase decision than offering them a great value. Providing discounts is one attention-grabbing way to do this. And freebies — especially ones that give consumers a small taste of what your brand’s products and/or services can do for them — are another great way to move consumers closer to making a purchase.
2. Employ clear calls to action
Every marketing message your brand delivers to prospective customers should be sent with a specific and strategic goal in mind, whether it be to drive them to your company website, have them call a company representative for more information, get them to follow you on social media or compel them to make a purchase. And by using clear and definitive calls to action in its marketing materials, your brand can nudge prospects toward taking the exact action you’re seeking of them — eliminating any need for them to have to guess at their next steps.
3. Highlight happy customers
According to research, nearly 90% of consumers read reviews before buying a product or service — demonstrating the faith that most people place in their fellow consumers’ opinions. By placing customer testimonials prominently in your brand’s marketing materials and/or on your website, you can deliver social proof that your offerings have provided positive experiences and value to other consumers, which can be a great motivator for on-the-fence prospects.
4. Create campaign-specific landing pages
Often, online marketing campaigns employ links that direct consumers to the advertising brand’s homepage. And although luring visitors to the homepage may be a fitting campaign goal — especially for brand-awareness campaigns — it’s often less than ideal when targeting consumers in other stages of the marketing funnel. But by creating ad-specific landing pages that work with and build upon each specific campaign and its messaging, your brand can direct consumers to pages that are more relevant to them, their needs and their current position in the marketing funnel, thereby boosting their odds of conversion. As a bonus, employing campaign-specific landing pages can also make it easier to measure the effectiveness of each of your campaigns based on the number of visitors they draw.
5. Identify and eliminate hurdles along the path to purchase
Doing business with your brand should be as simple as possible for consumers, with minimal pain. And by carefully reviewing and analyzing each step along your prospects’ path to purchase, your brand can identify hurdles along the customer journey that may be causing trouble for potential customers — and prompt them to abandon the process. Among the tools that can provide a big help in optimizing the customer journey include website analysis, user experience audits, consumer surveys, and usability assessments.
6. Choose the right communications channels
When it comes to communicating with brands and businesses, every consumer has his or her own preferred platform for asking questions, getting service reminders, placing orders, and more. And by using the specific communications channel that each individual prospect prefers, brands can increase the likelihood that the consumer will engage, respond and convert. Early in the consumer journey, be sure to ask your leads how they prefer to be contacted — and whether their choice is email, text, phone, or something else, listen to them and reach out on their communications channel of choice.
7. Thoroughly qualify leads and focus sales efforts on high-quality ones
For sales professionals, chasing down unqualified leads is a waste of valuable time and effort. To increase the efficiency of both your marketing and sales efforts — and to boost your brand’s lead-conversion rates — make sure that an effective system is in place for evaluating the quality of your leads. Then, by prioritizing the hottest leads for sales-team attention, you can ensure that fewer sales resources are spent on prospects who haven’t yet neared the conversion stage of their customer journey … and that your marketing team continues to nurture the colder leads as needed.
8. Follow up on leads consistently — and quickly
It may seem obvious but following up with leads is crucial to generating more conversions — and it’s most effective when done while your brand is still top-of-mind for the consumer. Follow-ups can make prospects feel important and cared about, and they help keep your brand connected with its target audience. Sometimes, simply making or phone call or sending an email to see if a potential customer has any questions can be enough to spark a sale. And even if an immediate conversion isn’t in the cards, following up can help leave a strong brand impression in the prospect’s mind so that he or she thinks of your brand when a need for your products or services arises.
Looking to turn more of your brand’s hard-earned leads into paying customers? At Brandon, our data-driven marketing experts are adept at not only generating leads but also turning them into purchases that boost the bottom line. To learn how you can put our team of lead generation pros to work for your brand, contact us today.
Nick McNeill
Interactive Director
Nick uses his talents in computer science and graphic design to grow the online presence of brands such as Santee Cooper, Southern Tide, frogg toggs, Farmers Telephone Cooperative and Blue Force Gear. A serial marathon runner, his steely determination shines through every brand he grows. As lead user interface designer of the GuestDesk software suite for online hotel reservations, he watched it explode from $1 million in reservations to over $400 million annually.