All businesses want to be profitable and see their numbers grow from year to year. To experience sustainable growth, however, businesses have to fine-tune and streamline their sales processes to attract, engage, and convert leads into customers faster than before.
Doing so can be difficult because of everything involved in getting prospects to the finish line. For businesses dealing with disconnected systems and inefficient processes, it can be hard to gauge where things went wrong, how to reel leads back in, and also ensure a seamless handoff when prospects are ready to talk to Sales or make a purchase. Many times, these organizations find themselves constantly putting out fires instead of focusing on driving growth.
Thankfully, with the right strategy, businesses can attract the right leads, provide them with personalized experiences that improve engagement, and ensure they have everything they need to make an informed decision when they near the end of the sales funnel.
So, if driving conversions and improving ROI are two of your business goals for 2020, you’ve come to the right place.
The following tips will help you engage your leads, keep them moving through the sale funnel, and win them over when the time to make a purchase comes around.
Use Segmentation to Personalize Your Marketing Efforts
Thanks to Google and social media, today’s customers are accustomed to accessing the information they need in just a few clicks. This puts the pressure on you and your team to deliver targeted information and experiences.
To meet this demand, companies are replacing their one-size-fits-all marketing with more tailored and targeted messaging and experiences.
Unfortunately, this has proven to be a very difficult, expensive, and time-consuming feat for many organizations. Not only are they trying to expand the number of campaigns they produce, but they’re also determining the most effective method to distribute their efforts to the right audience at the best time. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time is simple and effective when you leverage audience segmentation.
Segmenting your audience allows you to target based on characteristics like:
- Stage in the Sales Funnel: Leads need different information based on where they are in the sales funnel. Segmenting them in this way will help you provide personalized marketing that will encourage them to take the next step in the buyer journey.
- Industry: Depending on their industry, your lead might have a specific use case for your product or service. Segmenting based on industry can help you speak their language and provide them with relevant examples of how you can help them achieve their goals.
- Product or Service Interest: Knowing which particular product or service appeals most to your customers allows you to cut straight to the chase and focus on the features and benefits that make you stand out from the competition.
- Job Title: Knowing who your decision-makers, influencers, and users are can help you tailor your marketing to their particular concerns and interests.
Unfortunately, for many organizations, audience segmentation can be tedious and prone to error.
Investing in the right marketing automation platform can help you automatically group customers based on characteristics such as industry, title, product interests, and more. This convenient feature frees up your team’s time and resources, allowing you to focus on more important and impactful tasks.
How to Convert More Leads Into Customers
Nurture Your Leads to Guide Them Through the Sales Funnel Effectively
When used properly, email continues to be one of the most reliable and effective methods to engage your audience. To reap all the rewards this marketing channel has to offer, you need to focus your efforts on developing targeted nurture campaigns instead of one-off emails.
Unlike generic batch-and-blast campaigns and one-off emails, lead nurturing campaigns are designed to deliver targeted content and information to specific audience segments over a period of time. This model allows you to provide your audience with the resources they need to make progress through the customer journey instead of scaring them away with a hard sell right off the bat.
Developing targeted nurture campaigns requires a bit of a lift at the outset (mostly due to content creation), especially when you have multiple audience segments. But there are resources to help you manage them once they’re up and running.
For example, Act-On allows you to automatically enter contacts into automated nurture programs whenever they meet specific criteria or complete an action. This feature ensures your prospects and customers always receive the messaging and content they need to take the next step in the buyer journey and eventually make educated purchasing decisions.
Leverage Lead Scoring to Identify Qualified Opportunities
One of the things that companies find most challenging when it comes to optimizing their sales funnel is determining when a lead is ready to talk to Sales or needs a little more love to keep moving along.
In these instances, lead scoring can be a marketer’s best friend because it allows them to determine where leads are in the sales funnel and which marketing tactics are piquing their interest.
Lead scoring can sound a bit intimidating, but the process is actually quite simple. You assign scores to specific actions (such as downloading an eBook, filling out a form, or visiting a specific webpage). Your leads and/or accounts accrue or lose points as they complete these actions, which indicate where they are in the sales funnel – as well as their level of interest.
This information allows you to tailor your strategy to keep leads engaged and helps your sales team determine the best time to reach out to schedule a call.
Integrate Your CRM to Activate Your Sales Team
Sales and Marketing alignment continues to be a neverending struggle for many organizations. Despite their best efforts, most companies haven’t figured out how to improve collaboration and communication between the two teams.
Integrating your CRM with your marketing automation platform can help you streamline processes between Sales and Marketing and provide both parties with full visibility into the customer journey.
For example, Act-On allows you to set up automatic notifications to alert your salespeople as soon as a lead becomes qualified and is ready to talk to Sales. Your sales team can also look at your contact’s entire behavior and engagement history, allowing them to have more targeted and effective conversations.
Invest in a Tool That Helps You Take Control of the Customer Journey
This probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard of a lot of what we’ve covered here, but you might be feeling limited due to lack of time and resources.
The right MarTech stack can help you easily optimize your sales funnel, enhance your marketing efforts, and drive ROI. And with Act-On, you have everything you need to improve Sales and Marketing alignment, deliver personalized marketing efforts, and gain valuable customer insights.
Don’t just take our word for it, however. If you’d like to learn more about what we’re all about, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts. They can walk you through our platform and show you how you can use it to overcome marketing challenges and achieve your business goals.