Now that your online presence and traffic channels are set up, you’ve finished the first steps towards creating a successful marketing and sales funnel for your business.
Most of the people who come to your website for the first time will not make a purchase immediately, though, so you must go further than the setup.
Rather than looking for the immediate purchase, convert them into leads by letting them give their contact information. Then use their contact information in a lead nurturing campaign.
For lead management or customer acquisition management, ask yourself these three questions:
- Who is my ideal customer?
- How will I acquire new customers?
- How can I reduce the cost of customer acquisition?
A qualified lead is the starting point for your sales funnel or sales pipeline. The idea of your sales funnel is to direct a person who is interested in your product or service (the qualified lead) naturally towards the closing of the sale.
By qualifying your leads, you optimize the entire sales process and help with the lead nurturing. Keep in mind that not every lead is ready to buy your product.
Two factors qualify a lead: lead fit and lead interest or behavior.
- Lead fit: Does the lead fit your ideal customer profile, target audience or buyer personas?
- Lead interest or behavior: What is the lead doing on your website/app?
A good lead qualifies in both by fitting your ideal client profile and demonstrating interest. That qualified lead is your starting point for your sales funnel. Moreover, when a lead is qualified, you can start nurturing that lead with your lead nurturing campaigns.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is a most crucial step in any marketing strategy; this is where you build relationships and trust with your customers while educating them about the product and its possibilities.
In today’s world, the buyer controls the buying cycle much more than the seller controls the selling cycle and that makes building relationships crucial for sellers. In fact, around 50% of qualified leads are not immediately ready to buy which is why lead nurturing is part of the lead and revenue cycle.
The goal of lead nurturing is to funnel qualified prospects toward the closing of sales by building relationships with them, regardless of their readiness or timing to buy. Lead nurturing uses email marketing but goes beyond email with content mapping and multichannel nurturing.
Funnel Optimization for Your Business
Website
When looking at optimizing your funnel, start with your website. You’ll want your website to be mobile responsive and load quickly. These two things will improve your user experience and even your SEO ratings.
Next, you’ll want to make sure your business goals are transformed into website goals. And have the right goals, that is one of the most important things in marketing optimization. Conversion optimization goals should be determined by your website goals and optimization should be focused as tightly as possible on revenue generation activities.
To go further, add some tools to your repertoire. Get your Google Analytics set up and make sure you create goals, events, and tailor your dashboard to your business and website goals.
Hotjar is another excellent tool that offers heatmaps and recordings to help you better understand your visitors and their behavior. If you want more tools beyond these, check out our article about conversion tracking and optimization tools .
Landing pages
Once you’ve optimized your website as a whole and put into place tools to track user behavior, you’ll want to look at specific landing pages. These pages are the first impression for any visitor to your website. Their job is to capture the visitor’s information to turn them into a lead; you want them to be efficient and effective. Make sure you pay attention to the content on these pages and test your value proposition for each. For more tips, check out our article with tips for landing page optimization.
Campaigns
Campaigns with PPC, social media, and email are your way of reaching out and grabbing people from the sidewalk – those visitors not on your website at the moment. Campaigns are extremely useful in lead nurturing because they remind and guide leads toward the next step on their journey with you.
As we discussed in article on how to set up a marketing and sales funnel for your business, you’ll want to use the AIDA model with your campaigns to create ad groups, ads, and audiences.
Also, don’t forget that AdWords is a great way to test keywords, value proposition and call-to-actions, information that you can use in the future for your marketing strategy.
These basics will get you set up, but you will need to revisit these steps continuously in your journey with your customers. Take these fundamentals and use them to build a successful marketing and sales funnel, one that adapts to you and your customers’ needs.