To maximize your ROI, you should strive to generate more leads. The term "lead" denotes a person who might be eager to purchase your goods or services. In this article, we'll list the most efficient strategies for lead generation. These recommendations should come in handy for companies of any size and industry.
Search Engine Optimization
The aim of the optimization is to improve your website's rankings in search engines. Ideally, your site should appear on the first page of search results that are relevant to your keywords. Only 25% of users will check the second page, let alone the third and others.
To make the most of your SEO efforts, you should:
Please mind that search results prioritize images. One-half of consumers rely on visual content to make purchasing decisions.
To identify the optimal keywords, you might want to use the Keywords Everywhere extension for Google Chrome. As you type in a search query in Google, this tool will show related keywords and trend data.
Marketing Automation
Marketing processes consist of various tasks, some of which are tedious and repetitive. It would be wise to automate such tasks and enable skilled professionals to focus on high-priority ones that can't be automated.
Here are a few examples of tasks that you can automate with the help of marketing software:
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Placing pop-ups on your web pages to offer discounts or capture lead information
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Creating landing pages with web forms to capture new leads and add them to your marketing list
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Sending marketing emails in bulk to extend the reach of your brand
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Getting insights into leads' web activity to personalize your marketing outreach
A bit later, we'll recommend you top-notch software that you can use for this purpose.
Web Popups
Popups can appear on various pages of your website to encourage users to share their contacts with you, finalize their purchases or perform other simple actions. Here are some helpful ideas on how to use pop-ups:
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A consumer has added a product to their cart but hasn't finalized the purchase yet. The algorithms of your website have detected that the person is about to leave. A popup appears in the center of the page to offer a personalized 10% discount to this client. They will have 10 minutes to finalize the purchase and there will be a countdown timer in the popup.
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A user is viewing various pages of your product catalog but doesn't add anything to the cart. A popup can inform them about your bestsellers and the trendiest products. Or, it might feature two buttons: one of them will lead to the page with your newest collection and the other to discounted products. You should help this person narrow down their choice.
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If a product is currently out of stock, a pop-up might invite the consumer to share their email address with you. As soon as the item is back in stock, the person will receive a notification in their inbox. The pop-up should emphasize the value of the product. It should include a visually appealing photo of the item and a few words that accentuate its most attractive characteristics.
You won't need to ask for a designer's help to create popups. You can build them yourself, using dedicated tools. You'll be able to choose from an extensive collection of templates and customize them in a couple of clicks.
Personalization
When composing marketing messages for your clients, you should take into account the personal needs and preferences of each individual. Imagine a situation when a consumer receives an email where you inform them about a new collection of items that don't fit their body size, lifestyle and budget. You shouldn't expect too many conversions from such emails. To motivate your customers for the purchase, you should gather data about leads and their interests and inform them only about products and services that fit their profiles.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Just like SEO optimization, this lead generation strategy enables consumers to see the link to your website on the first page of a search engine. But PPC campaigns work on different principles than SEO. You pay for the search engine to prioritize your website. Consumers can understand at a glance that this recommendation of a search engine is not a result of organic ranking. You set keywords for your PPC campaign and you pay for each click on your website's link. The more popular the keywords you use, the higher the price. If no one clicks your links, the search engine won't charge you anything. PPC campaigns deliver the best results in niches where the competition is not too fierce.
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Inbound Content
The term "inbound" means that this content was created to educate consumers and not sell products to them. 70% of customers prefer to learn about goods or services from articles and not ads. If your brand resorts to content marketing, you might be able to increase your conversion rates by 6 times. You can share your inbound content through the following channels:
Let's imagine that you produce and sell healthy snacks. You can create inbound content about nutrition, dieting, wellbeing and a healthy lifestyle. Readers should start perceiving you as an industry expert. Whenever they have a question related to your competencies, they should think of you. Inbound content is a highly efficient tool for boosting brand awareness. To make the most of it, you should deliver new content consistently, keep experimenting with new formats and measure the results of each experiment.
Social Media Marketing
Here are three informative facts that might inspire you:
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In total, over 4.2 billion people use social media
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Every day, each person spends almost 2.5 hours on social media, on average
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Roughly 80% of consumers will be curious to research the product more and make a buying decision after seeing the product on Instagram
You should create your brand profiles on such social platforms that are relevant to your products and the characteristics of your target audience. On each platform, you should stick to a schedule of publishing new content. For instance, on LinkedIn, it makes sense to publish no more than one article per day. On Twitter, you can make 3 posts per day. Consumers will be glad to see the following types of content on your social media pages:
If the platform permits, make your posts shoppable. This means users will be able to buy your goods or services right from the post. Pinterest and Instagram, in particular, have this functionality.
To increase your number of followers, you should include links to your social media profiles to your website, emails, inbound content and purchase confirmations. You don't need to be creative with the text that accompanies the buttons: it should be enough to say simply "Follow us".
To motivate people to share your posts on social media and tag their friends, you can organize giveaways, contests, lotteries and other similar types of promotional activities. Consumers tend to trust the content that was recommended by their acquaintances much more than random ads. Plus, you can encourage people to generate their own content that fits your brand concept and accompany it with your tags. For users, that will be an excellent opportunity to showcase their talents — and maybe get a reward if it's a contest.
Email Marketing
Every dollar that you invest in email marketing can bring you an ROI of up to 4400%. You should keep growing your email list consistently. But tricks that used to be efficient a few years ago might fail to deliver results today. If you simply invite users to sign up for your newsletter, they might discard this opportunity. There are too many brands around and most of them have newsletters. To convince consumers that your company and products deserve their attention, you should offer your potential subscribers some value in exchange. For instance, you can let them know that they will get access to the following perks if their share their email addresses with you:
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Invitations to exclusive sales
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Personalized discounts for simple products
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Detailed tutorials for more complex products
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Free access to educational materials that you normally sell
The best way of collecting consumers' email addresses is building popups (as we've already mentioned in this article). You shouldn't show a popup to the user as soon as they open your website. Instead, you should give them some time so that they can explore your product offerings. If a user has spent at least one minute on your site, it means they're genuinely interested in your goods and services — and it might be the right time to offer additional value to them.
Remarketing Campaigns
Imagine that a client has visited your website but left it without finalizing the purchase. A bit later, this person comes across your ads on social platforms and third-party sites. These ads won't make them come back to your online store immediately and buy your products — but they will remind them about your brand. Once this person thinks of your industry, they will remember you. Remarketing is a great way of improving your brand awareness and increasing your ROI in the long run.
Cookies
As you enter many websites today, they ask you whether you can accept all types of cookies or only selected types. This tool allows site owners to gather and store data about a user's session. You'll be able to see which of your products this person paid attention to and which ones they added to their cart. These statistics are vital for retargeting people who have visited your site previously. You can display personalized ads to such clients, showing them the products they're interested in. Your remarketing campaigns should be based on the information from cookie files. Retargeted users have a 70% chance of converting, on average, and retargeting campaigns get approximately 77% more clicks than other ads.
Lead Scoring
The term "scoring" means that you should award points to your leads as they take specific actions. For instance, they might open and click your marketing emails or visit high-value web pages on your ecommerce site. Leads won't see their scores. Only you and your team members will get access to this data to detect hot leads and focus your efforts on them. A lead can be characterized as hot when they accumulate a certain number of points. To motivate them for the purchase, you should analyze their behavior on your website and create personalized marketing messages for them. For instance, you might offer an individual discount to them if you notice that they spend a lot of time browsing goods of a certain category but don't buy them. To make this ecommerce strategy work, you should rely on dedicated software. It would be impossible to track all the statistics manually.
Conversion Rates Optimization
If your website traffic is high but people make too few purchases, it means you should improve your conversion rate. You need to find out why consumers leave without buying anything. Here are the questions that you should ask yourself:
Is the quality of all the images on your website high enough?
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How long does it take a page to load?
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Is the navigation intuitive?
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Are buttons easy to click?
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Are there enough reviews?
Before improving elements of your website, it would be wise to A/B test the options.
Discounts and Deals
We've already explained how and when you can offer deals and discounts to your customers. Now, let's specify the essence of a perfect deal:
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The discount doesn't need to be enormous. It's enough to offer 10% or 15% of the initial price.
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Feel free to set a minimum threshold for activating the deal. For instance, you might give a 10% to consumers who make a purchase of no less than $50. At first sight, it might seem a bit illogical because you encourage people to spend more instead of giving them a chance to cut down their expenses. But this approach can help you to get more leads nevertheless.
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If your industry and business concept are compatible with the gamification principle, consider adding a wheel of fortune to your website. It will determine the sum of the discount and other terms of deals for each of your clients.
Make sure to update the list of the available promotional offers frequently to create a sense of urgency and scarcity.
Mobile Optimization
Depending on your industry, mobile ecommerce might generate up to 70% of your income. You should make sure your website nicely adapts to mobile displays of all sizes. It should offer five-star user experiences on all devices, regardless of their brands and operating systems. Here are the most important parameters that you should pay attention to:
You might want to rely on the Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool to ensure your site is properly mobile-optimized.
Simplify the Checkout Process
The easier and the more user-friendly the checkout process, the more people will finalize their purchases. Here are a few helpful tips:
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Enable one-click purchase. Consumers might lack time to finalize the checkout processes. Or, they might have questions about the product. You should get in touch with them, consult them and help them to buy the item.
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Let users browse your site and add products to their carts without registering. If the person is not sure yet whether they would like to buy your product or not, you might discourage them from the purchase if you ask them to sign up immediately.
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Use a progress bar to let the consumer know how many stages they still have to complete to finalize the purchasing process. For instance, this process can consist of four phases: review the characteristics of the product in your cart and confirm the purchase, choose a delivery option, select a payment method and pay for the purchase, see the final confirmation of the purchase.
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Try to offer various payment and shipping options. Inform consumers about your shipping policies before they confirm the purchase.
Let's imagine that a person has added a product to their cart but hasn't finalized the purchase. If you already have this client's email in your database, you should send them a followup message. If you don't have their contacts yet, you can show them a popup to encourage them to share their email address with you. In both cases, you should offer extra value to the consumer (such as a personalized discount for a limited period of time).
Which Software to Use to Execute Lead Generation Strategies
To follow the recommendations from this article, you might want to install Bitrix24. This powerful and versatile solution should help you to maximize the efficiency of your marketing efforts. It features a highly user-friendly CRM that can store unlimited amounts of data and allows you to flexibly customize its cells. When getting started, you won't need to type in all the data manually because you'll be able to import the information to the CRM from the tools that you already use (such as Excel or Google Sheets). As soon as you make a new interaction with a client, the information in their cell will be automatically updated. When you need to send out emails, Bitrix24 will let you compose compelling messages and personalize them, using data from the CRM. You'll be able to schedule your mailings and monitor such key parameters as open rate and click-through rate. Thanks to the statistics from the CRM, you can offer highly personalized deals to all of your customers.
This software can come up with insightful reports that you can use to analyze your clients' behavior. Plus, it allows you to build a website from scratch with minimum effort even if you lack coding and design skills. You'll be able to choose from an extensive range of customizable templates. All your web pages will be fully mobile-optimized.
Bitrix24 is perfect for lead scoring. Besides, it will allow you to optimize your task and project management. You'll be able to visualize your workflows and rationally distribute tasks among your employees. It will be easy for you to detect potential bottlenecks and take measures to avoid them. At a glance, you'll be able to assess how busy each of your staffers is and whether they're ready to take up more work.
Whenever you need to discuss the process of generating leads with your team members, you can rely on the built-in contact center of Bitrix24. It enables you to make audio calls, host video conferences and exchange text messages. You'll be able to share files and edit documents collaboratively.
You can start using the basic functionality of Bitrix24 at no cost. At any moment, you'll be able to upgrade to one of the three paid plans. The most affordable one costs $39 per month and accommodates 5 users. The most premium one costs $159 per month and accommodates an unlimited number of users. Bitrix24 has a cloud and an on-premise version as well as a mobile app for iOS and Android.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, you found this article informative and now you have a better understanding of how to make the most of lead generation. You should consider search engine optimization, marketing automation, web popups, personalization and pay-per-click advertising. It would be wise to resort to inbound content, social media marketing, email marketing, remarketing campaigns, lead scoring and conversion rates optimization. Plus, you might want to focus on cookies, mobile optimization, simplifying the checkout process and offering discounts to your clients. When choosing the optimal software to achieve your goals, you might prefer to opt for Bitrix24.
