Lead generation is a crucial way for marketers to develop a broad customer base. Top industries shell out thousands of dollars every year just to gather leads.
But remember that the whole point of lead generation is to convert those leads into paying customers. So no matter how much you spend per lead, it is a waste if your lead conversion rate is low.
There are plenty guides and tools you can use to calculate your lead conversion rate. But knowing your conversion rate is only half the battle. It is also important to identify opportunities for boosting your rate.
Metrics and analytics are some of the best tools for improving your lead conversion. Let’s take a closer look at how to use these to your advantage?
What is Lead Conversion?
Before we look at strategies to improve your lead conversion rate, let’s discuss what exactly lead conversion is.
Defining Lead
Any successful marketer must start by identifying their business’s target market. These are potential customers in a certain demographic to whom the product or service will likely appeal.
A potential lead, then, is a specific individual who fits into a business’s target market. An individual becomes a lead when they become connected to and show interest in the business.
Where Do Leads Come From?
Because leads are a potential source of revenue, finding, or generating leads is an important part of a marketer’s job. The goal of lead generation is to attract prospects to your business who have the potential to become leads, and eventually customers.
A popular way to develop leads is by driving prospects to your website. There are many strategies for promoting your website, including paid ads and social media.
Evidence shows that one of the main ways consumers find sites is through search engines. For this reason, it’s important to consider search engine optimization (SEO) when developing your website content.
SEO is the process of tailoring your website content so that your page will rank higher on search engine results pages. This will make it easier for potential leads to find you.
Crafting Great Content
For both SEO specifically and your lead conversion rate as a whole, developing engaging content is essential. When your website produces great content like blog posts, videos, podcasts, and webinars, this will help attract potential leads.
When visitors to your page like the content they see, they are more likely to stay on your page longer. The longer they stay, the more likely they are to make a purchase. That’s one more lead converted!
Prospects will not only engage with this content themselves, but they will also share it with their own networks. This will help you reach an even wider network of consumers in your target market.
From Generation to Conversion
As we mentioned above, lead generation is only half the battle. For your efforts to be successful, it’s important to nurture your leads so you can work toward converting them.
That said, keep in mond that many leads never convert. For this reason, the best way to improve your lead conversion rate is by targeting your efforts at the right leads. A good way to identify these leads is through metrics and analytic tools.
Understanding Your Conversion Report
Before you can start using analytics to inform your lead conversion rate strategy, you need to know how to read your conversion report. Interpreting this data is key to shaping your approach.
Terms
First, let’s look at the terms you will see in your conversion report. These will help you to understand your lead conversion rate as more than just a single number.
- Goal Completion: Your goal is to convert leads into customers. Goal completion tells you how many times you have done that.
- Goal Value: This calculates the value of your goals by multiplying the number of conversions by the value you’ve assigned to them.
- Abandonment Rate: The rate at which prospects abandoned your page.
- Assisted Conversions: The rate at which a particular page helped produce conversions.
A Closer Look at Goals
When you click on goals, you will be able to see the pages on your site where conversions have occurred. This will help you identify which pages are the most effective, and should, therefore, be promoted.
You can also see if these pages have features that other pages lack. This could help you redesign current pages, or map out new ones to improve your lead conversion rate.
Conversion Path
Looking at the reverse goal path will show you what steps the customer took to get to the page where they finally converted. This can give you insight into the logic that a customer used when looking for a product. Also, if this path seems needlessly complicated, you can look for ways to simplify it so you can improve lead conversion rate.
If your business requires customers to go through multiple steps before making a purchase, you will definitely want to use the funnel visualization tool. This will show you the point in the purchasing process where the prospect dropped out, rather than converting.
Time to Conversion
In some cases, a customer may visit your page multiple times before they convert. This is especially common when making larger purchases. Sometimes, businesses can improve their lead conversion rate by gently nudging these procrastinating prospects.
Time lag and path length will help you see how many days elapsed from the customers first visit, and how much time they spent on your site before conversion. This will help you determine when an appropriate time might be to follow up with prospects who have visited your site but have not yet converted.
How Metrics Can Help with Lead Conversion
Once you understand how to use and understand your metrics and analytics, you will have valuable information for improving your lead conversion rate. Here are some ways you can use that information to better optimize your web page.
Pay Attention to Your Landing Page
One of the biggest threats to your lead conversion rate is your bounce rate. Your bounce rate measures how often visitors come to your landing page but never venture any further into your website.
This is why it is so important to invest in developing a strong landing page. It would be a waste to spend on efforts to drive visitors to your website, only to greet them with an uninteresting home page that causes them to bounce.
Where are Your Customers Going?
When looking at your analytics, don’t just look at your bounce rate. Also look at where your customers who don’t bounce are going. This will help you understand what pages and content your visitors are most interested in.
The pages that customers visit most often should be clearly highlighted and easily accessible on your landing page. These topics should also be used in other lead generation efforts, as they will be more likely to entice other potential prospects.
Also, think back to the pages that had the biggest impact on your lead conversion rate. Are these pages some of the top pages that prospects visit when they come to your site? If not, then it’s time to find a way to make that happen.
Where Do Your Visitors Come From?
While it’s important to see where your visitors go, it’s also crucial to consider how they find you in the first place. This will help you determine which lead generation strategies are worth investing in, and which provide the best ROI.
For instance, let’s say you’re spending on advertising banners, but you find that the majority of your traffic is coming from email, social media, and search. Cutting back spending on a less profitable generation strategy will help improve your conversion rate. This way, you can instead use those dollars on a strategy that you’ve seen more returns on.
Perform Tests
When determining what kinds of web page designs engage your customers, there’s no need to play a guessing game. Rather, you can get real-time feedback on what is interesting to your visitors by performing usability testing.
One of the most useful types of testing for web pages is A/B testing. Also known as “split testing,” this method tests two versions of the same website to see which one has better performance. A/B testing can help you identify how small differences like header text and button placement affect visitor engagement.
That said, the results of A/B testing are not absolute. Marketers should continue performing testing to see if visitors’ preferences hold up over time. In some cases, features that a visitor responds favorably to in the short term grow stale over the long term.
The best way to evaluate the results of your testing is to conduct research over the course of several months. This way, you can get real data about how certain features perform, and what kinds of results they bring in.
Simplify Your Purchase Page
One of the main reasons that prospects give up on web pages is confusion. If a customer has difficulty figuring out how to make a purchase, they are likely to choose a competitor instead. So, when performing tests on your site, make sure to test versions of your sales pages for usability.
Keep in mind that usability is not just about having easy access to the purchase button. Rather, they should also have easy access to pertinent information about the product to help them make a decision.
That said, make sure to avoid the temptation of overloading your prospects with too much information. Having too many choices could overwhelm your customers, leading them to make no decision at all.
Differentiate Your Customers
In marketing, we often talk about target markets and key demographics. With this big picture focus, it can sometimes be easy to lose sight of the individual.
Remember, your customers are not a monolithic entity that thinks in a single way. Rather, your customer base is made up of unique individuals, who are interested in your product for similar but distinct reasons.
So it is important to use your analytics to discern these subtle variations in your customer base. One way to do this is to see what type of content generates leads most frequently on each platform.
For instance, don’t just look to see whether email blasts or social media posts generate more clicks. Instead, look for patterns in the specific content that customers click on in each scenario. This could give you a better picture of what content is best to promote in each medium available to you.
You can also look for patterns in how customers behave based on the devices they use. For example, while it is important to have a mobile friendly site, you may notice that most of your revenue comes from purchases made on PCs. In this case, it would be advisable to make a mobile version of your site, but not to neglect the standard version.
Optimize Your Content
We talked briefly in the previous section about engaging potential leads with great content. But if you want to use content to improve your lead conversion rate, you will need to create your content with analytics and metrics in mind.
When you look at search engine analytics for your website, pay attention to the search terms that lead prospects to your site. These are important key words to focus on when creating content like blog posts for your site.
Writing blog posts about relevant key words is a great way to boost your lead conversion rate. For one, including blog posts on your site will increase your key word usage, which will improve your ranking on search engines. But this content will also help educate leads about your products, which can help nudge them toward conversion.
Boosting Your Lead Conversion Rate
With these tips in hand, you will be able both to track your lead conversion rate and to identify ways to improve it. This way, you’ll get a much better return on investment on the dollars you spend generating leads.