So far we have seen that live chat benefits a business in a number of ways. It can help reduce the bounce rates and site abandonment rate, boost sales and build strong customer relationships. There’s one more benefit of using live chat on your website. Wondering what it is? Well, live chat if used appropriately can increase your business’s conversion rates. Want to know how? Read on.
Continue reading “Live chat for conversion: Here’s how it boosts your business’s success”
Lead generation refers to the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline. It is very important to have qualified leads so as to have qualified leads.
Lead generation is all about brand awareness, pulling down leads and making sales. Therefore, employing the best lead generation strategies can prove to be beneficial for any business in the long run. Here we have piled up the best lead generation strategies that you can leverage to boost your lead generation:
Continue reading “Top 5 lead generation strategies for a highly successful business”
The quality of customer service you provide to your customers plays a vital role in the success of your business irrespective of its size. Therefore, almost all companies try to improve their customer service performance by employing the best strategies. Also, a productive support team will be consistent at all times. Here are the best strategies employed by the most successful businesses in order to maximize their performance in customer service:
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In our previous article, we made you familiar with the concept of power dialing system. Now let’s have a look at the benefits that this highly efficacious technology can provide to the call centers:
1. Enhances the lead generating and nurturing process:
Filtering out the blacklisted numbers is one of the main advantages provided by the power dialing system. When power dialing system is clubbed up with lead management software, it helps in eliminating the wastage of time due to useless calls. Power dialing is quite useful for organizing all the sales information, lead data, and customer history. It also helps in organizing the call-back info with the help of a CRM and can quickly pass it on to the agents, thereby obtaining more successful leads. Thereafter, it efficiently takes care of lead nurturing, such that it intelligently manages the journey of your leads, prospects, and customers across their engagement cycle. This further enables the agents to sort and prioritize the generated leads.
2. Improves your right party concerns:
Power dialing system has a provision for retry strategies. Since there is always a possibility that agents cannot get connected to all the numbers in the lead list in the very first try, so, it becomes quite necessary to contact such leads again. Retry strategy is the best solution for such instances. Based upon the last dialer details, you can set different retry strategies for different occasions. As an example, you can try a “No answer” after 3 hours, “Abandoned” call after 72 hours, a ‘Busy” call after 5 minutes etc. This eliminates the chances of missing any important lead and increases the probability lead sale conversion rate. Moreover, it takes into consideration, the compliance norms and improves your right party connects by over 10%. Hence, it helps in boosting your revenue growth.
1. Content Marketing:
Content marketing refers to the marketing focused on creating, publishing and distributing content to online targeted audience.It is a crucial element for B2B lead generation. It is often used by businesses in order to attract attention, generate leads, expand their customer base, generate online sales, increase brand awareness or engage an online community of users. While pursuing content marketing, the main focus of the businesses should be the needs of the prospect or customer.
Once a business has identified the customer’s need, information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video,white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. The appropriate type of content for any business will depend on the business’ goals and target customer.
2. Search engine marketing:
Search engine marketing includes both paid search results (using tools like Google Adwords or Bing Ads, formerly known as Microsoft ad-center) and organic search results (SEO) and plays a crucial rule in B2B lead generation. It includes the following steps:
In the previous post we talked about B2B lead generation and its components. Now let’s take a look at the strategies that can be employed to generate leads online:
1.Email marketing:
It refers to sending a commercial message to a group of people (typically potential or current customers), using email. It basically inculcates the use of email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be carried out using:
2. Social marketing:
This type of marketing involves leveraging social media to generate leads online. Businesses can use it to generate and nurture millions of dollars worth of leads. As a matter of fact, one of the most obvious ways to generate B2B leads from social media is using LinkedIn. Since social media is an integral part of content marketing, and to some extent, search marketing, so, your blogging or info graphics can be extremely successful if you are active on social media platforms.
In order to integrate social networks into their marketing strategies, companies have to develop a marketing model. One such model includes the following steps:
B2B lead generation refers to the process of finding new business customers. It includes various stages such as determining suitable target companies, approaching new prospects and eventual conversion from lead to customers. However, you need to know that generating leads isn’t easy and trying to acquire leads in the B2B space makes it all that much more difficult. B2B lead generation inculcates the following terms:
Prospects: It is a marketing term used for describing a potential customer. In case of B2B a prospect is a company interested in your product, service or brand. A prospect may not necessarily be familiar with your company.
Lead:
It refers to a company which meets the criteria you define as being valuable to generate new business. Leads can be:
i) inbound – generated e.g. through form fills or direct calls made to inquiry about products.
ii) outbound – leads can be classified as ones which sales teams may categorize based on certain conversations they had.
Customer:
A customer is a lead that now uses your products or services.
Inbound marketing:
Inbound marketing is a technique for drawing customers to products and services with the help of content marketing, social media marketing and search engine optimization. Inbound marketing provides detailed information, an improved customer experience and builds trust by offering potential customers information they value through company sponsored newsletters, blogs and entries on social media platforms.
Outbound Marketing:
Outbound marketing is a form of marketing where a company initiates the conversation and sends its message out to an audience. Rather than taking a passive approach, companies actively push their message to potential leads, whether or not these potential leads are actually looking for them at that time. Telemarketing is one such method whereby companies pro-actively call customers to offer their products or services.
1. Demonstration:
In case of marketing, a product demonstration refers to a promotion where a product is demonstrated to potential customers. The sole purpose of such a demonstration is to introduce customers to the product to make them familiar with it in hopes of getting them to purchase that item. The products offered as samples during these demonstrations may be new products, new versions of existing products or products that have been recently introduced to a new commercial marketplace. Basically, the idea is to introduce your offerings, utilize them as lead magnets and demonstrate their capabilities.
2. Creative contact forms:
Creative contact forms are a better version of contact forms that you offer to customers. They are used to enhance the effectiveness of simple contact forms by using them to showcase your company’s personality. You need to be conversational and inviting to your audience.
3. Out of the box deals:
You may offer free two-day shipping or deals such as buy-one, get-one-free and much more in order to lessen the purchase anxiety that every customer experiences while purchasing. Since, it adds value to the transaction so it is an effective lead magnet.
4. Forms gating charges:
Consider gating price and other information if your goal is to target hot leads. Hiding your pricing behind a form can be an effective tactic as this particular form will help filter out unqualified leads, and capturing their information will help you follow up with targeted prospects.
5. Tests:
Tests or quizzes encourage prospects to measure themselves against your expertise or industry standards. This will give you an opportunity to give feedback and ideas. Also, the prospects will determine their need for your product or service.
6. Limited-time free trial:
Give prospects the opportunity to experience the benefits of your product or service, including a deadline to the offer at the same time. This will make them realize they can’t go another day without it.
7. Cheat sheets:
They are generally very short and cut straight to an ultra-specific point and can be delivered as checklists, mind maps, or blueprints. Mostly, they are just a page long in length.
8. Resource list:
A toolkit or a resource list is an easy to consume lead magnet. Depending on your niche, toolkits can be a good introduction for your target audience making them familiar with your products and in most favorable cases increasing sales and building long-term relationships.
As mentioned in our earlier posts, a lead magnet is an incentive in the form of free e-books, webinars, whitepapers or something of that sort given away to someone in exchange for their email address. It can even be considered as a bribe that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address, or other contact information.
There are a number of lead magnets that you can employ to capture traffic and convert efficiently. Some of them have been mentioned below:
1. Drip marketing:
Drip marketing refers to a communication strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. Drip marketing is carried out in various forms such as:
i) email: This the most commonly used form of drip marketing is email marketing due to its low cost and high efficiency.
ii) direct mail: This technology relies on digital printing, where low-volume print runs are cost efficient and the variable data can be merged to personalize each drip message.
iii) social media: Various social media marketing tools employ the principle of drip marketing to schedule a series of updates.
2. RSS feed:
RSS refers to rich site summary and uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information like blog entries, news headlines, audio, video and much more. An RSS document includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author’s name. Once a user subscribes to a website, RSS removes the need for the him/her to manually check the website for fresh, updated content. This is because the browser constantly monitors the site, informs the user of any updates and can also download the new data for the user.
3. Membership:
People loved to be treated specially. So, all you need to do is invite them into your VIP group, and give them free information so they feel a part of your club. You need to know that loyal fans and followers have the power to convert others as well.
1. Ensure relevance between your PPC ad and landing page content:
When online users have queries related to a particular topic or want to know more about a product or service, they search the required information using specific keywords. Also, if your ad is focused on the desired certain keyword or topic, it is expected that your landing page would provide more information about that particular keyword or topic. The users would definitely be turned off if your landing page content talks about everything else except what’s mentioned in your PPC ad. Therefore, your content should be optimized in such a way that it entices landing page visitors to become a lead or a customer.
2. Employ convincing tools to support your ad claims:
For effective lead generation support your PPC advertising campaigns with evidence. This will help you gain the trust of your target audience. You may employ convincing tools such as customer testimonial, slideshows, white papers, and eBooks. these tools could support your claim as a reputable product or service. You can also feature prominently trusted seals from organizations or agencies that will increase your credibility, gain your targeted audiences’ trust, and convert them into long-term customers.
3. Entice your visitors with giveaways:
You may entice your visitors by including rewards and offers that you would give them in exchange for their sign-up information to a blog or newsletter. These giveaways may include webinars, ebooks, videos, presentations and more. Make sure that these rewards and offers are well-designed to give your web visitors something of value that will tempt them to know more about your brand, product or service. Also, it is suggested that you place your offers near your lead generation form, with customized graphics and text that will convince people to make a response to a particular call-to-action.
Pay-per-click marketing refers to the way of using search engine advertising to generate clicks to your website, rather than earning those clicks organically. The basic idea is, every time your ad is clicked, sending a visitor to your website, you pay the search engine a pre-decided fee.When your PPC campaign is well-designed and running smoothly, the visit is worth more to your business than what you pay for it. PPC has the strongest potential of helping you achieve your goals, so, you need to know the tactics that’ll help you leverage PPC for your business:
1. Landing page is the way to go:
Firstly, what actually is a landing page? It is a single web page that appears whenever a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement is clicked. You should direct your prospects to a well-designed landing page instead of your homepage. The landing page usually displays directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link. The actions that a visitor takes on a landing page is what determines an advertiser’s conversion rate. You can actually leverage your landing page to generate a direct action from a website visitor that will convert them either as a business lead or a paying customer. The key here is to directly go to the point and focus everything there in your landing pages with the only goal of lead generation in mind.
2. Put up relevant fields in your contact forms:
Your forms should be focused only on the most important items that you need to know and avoid form fields that would ask a bunch of questions that are really not that relevant enough for your purposes. Since, lead generation forms are created for an important purpose, and that is to collect important information about a web page visitor and convert them into valuable leads. Therefore it becomes very important to have your forms designed with lead generation as its primary focus.
The sole aim of individuals involved in digital and outbound marketing and sales is to segment leads into, one of two categories – qualified leads and unqualified leads. Leads can switch from one category to the other with the aid of nurture campaigns.
A qualified lead is a potential customer who has expressed interest in a product or service and meets general buying criteria.
A qualified lead is a person:
i) with need, budget, and purchasing authority.
ii) Working for a company that meets your customer profile for being a customer.
iii) With a buying timeline that falls within the time horizon of the sales representative’s commission plan.
It only takes a few minutes for a true sales professional to qualify a lead. And lead qualification can be done anywhere at a busy tradeshow or on a golf course, provided you have an efficient marketing team.ave completed, or are in the process of
Basically, qualified leads are the ones which have completed, or are in the process of completing your nurture campaign cycle.
Qualified leads are in control of their own buying cycle, completing self-education research who have brainstormed and listed their exact needs in a solution. They have a clearly defined budget to work with and are researching solutions within their means. In addition to this, they have low churn rates because they close on their own terms.
On the other hand, unqualified leads are the ones who have not been nurtured enough to close their sales cycle. They are often unsure of what your company offers and don’t know what they’re looking for in a solution. Unqualified leads may also be the ones for whom your product or service is out of their price range. Though it is possible to convert unqualified leads into customers, the churn rate is comparatively high.
1. Sales and marketing alignment:
For sales and marketing alignment, the shared expectations, responsibilities and goals for this collaboration between sales and marketing should be outlined in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). Creating a formal sales and marketing SLA will help the two teams hold each other accountable for converting leads and effectively nurturing them into paying customers in the long run.
2. Multiple touches:
According to a research, on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter the top of funnel until they’re a closed won customers. The most successful lead nurturing strategies deliver content that helps prospects progress through the buyer’s journey by addressing common questions and concerns such that they are contented.
3. Maintain permission to keep prospect updated:
Maintaining permission to keep a prospect updated is important because if a prospect loses interest in your messages, they’ll disengage by unsubscribing, marking your messages as spam, or emotionally unsubscribing – reflexively ignoring or deleting your messages.
4. Guide your prospects efficaciously:
There is a possibility that a potential buyer who you’re nurturing may not enter a buying process for a long time. But during the lead nurturing phase, if you can educate prospects and guide their thinking to incorporate specific requirements and ways of thinking about the market, your company and solutions will be much better positioned in their minds when they finally decide to make purchases.
5. Study the Digital Body Language:
Digital Body Language is the aggregate of all the digital activity you see from an individual. Each email that is opened or clicked, each web visit, each form, each search on Google, each referral from a social media property, and each webinar attended are part of the prospect’s digital body language.Just like the body language is read by a sales person managing a deal, digital body language is an amalgamation of all the digital touchpoints. Digital Body Language can help you understand where your prospects are in their buying process. As they progress through the process, they’ll reach a point at which your lead scoring system tells you they’re ready to engage with the sales process.
You should know how to create efficacious professional brochures and fliers that effortlessly sell for you by educating your prospects about the benefits you offer. These brochures and fliers should be capable of addressing their questions and their needs for your product or service. Basically, your brochures and fliers should help boost lead generation and bring in as much profit as possible.
Podcasting is a concoction of ‘broadcasting’ and ‘i-pod’. It is a form of audio broadcasting on the Internet. The reason it became linked with the iPod in the name was that people download the broadcasts (audio shows) to listen to mostly on their iPods.
It is a medium for businesses to globally distribute their ideas and create a following of like-minded fans. It is beneficial for industries such as journalism, education, and entertainment allowing anyone to freely create and distribute news and media as it helps in an enormous lead generation in the long run.
The Lead generation offers, gifts and premiums are irresistible bribes that give a piece of valuable information to the sales prospects in exchange for their contact information. These are positioned on the landing pages of websites.
If most of your sales and profits occur when customers repeat purchase from you again and again, you should make it a point that you are doing everything possible to motivate as many customers as you can to make their initial buying decision as quickly and easily as possible. Making it easy and enticing for the customer to start doing business with you by adding extra incentives or by making your initial sale at break-even or a small loss, means that you will benefit sooner rather than later from all the repeat business.
This is a marketing strategy that directly engages consumers and encourages them to participate in brand development. Experiential marketers believe that consumers should be actively involved in the production and co-creation of marketing programs.
These are the major lead generation strategies that will boost up your sales in the long run.
Trade shows, exhibitions, and fairs are such events where many serious prospects will be present. Such events are great opportunitues to strengthen you lead generation efforts. But there is an art to successful exhibiting which, if learned, generates immense rewards. There are few other sales forums where prospects and clients come to you. Also, you can use this opportunity to get valuable opinions on your products and services.
Besides attracting new business, exhibitions can be used to introduce existing customers to additional products.
Trade showsDatabase marketing is a systematic approach to the gathering, fortification, and processing of consumer data (both for customers and potential customers) that is maintained in a company’s databases. With the aid of database marketing, much more consumer data is maintained, and that the data is processed and used in more sophisticated ways.
Among other things, marketers utilize the data to:
i) learn more about customers
ii) identify and focus on target markets for specific campaigns (through customer segmentation process)
iii) compare customers’ value to the company and
iv) provide more dedicated offerings for customers to live up to their expectations.
Since database marketing provides an extended access to potential customers so lead generation becomes much efficient.
Sweepstakes and contests with large grand prizes tend to attract more entries regardless of the odds of winning. Therefore, the value of smaller prizes usually totals much less than that of the top prize. Firms that incorporate target marketing such as Publishers Clearing House and Reader’s Digest, have also found that the more involved the entry process, the more entrants. Businesses often obtain marketing information about a customer from sweepstakes entries which leads to an active participation further leading to a boost in sales.
A card deck offer is a product description on an individual card. The card is about the size of a postcard generally placed within a pack along with 50 or more other cards. It’s a quick and enticing way for many busy people to “shop” through a variety of product offers. You can normally target and send your offer to a large number of carefully selected prospective customers.
This method is less costly as compared to other marketing techniques. On the other hand, inserts give you a direct approach to both homes and businesses in the desired geographical area, giving you the flexibility to drop any number at any time.
Social media makes the process even easier because of all of the information that people readily share, and also because of the large number of users on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and more! 40% of people spend more time socializing on social media than face to face in today’s era. So needless to say, social media makes for the perfect place to identify your target audience and turn them into new sales leads benefiting your business.
Well, in the simplest language, lead generation is the most important aspect of marketing which means initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. It is basically a process of collecting names and contact information about qualified prospects which will be contacted by the salespeople for generating orders. It involves direct response advertising and telemarketing.
Leads may come from various sources or activities, for example, digitally via the internet, through personal referrals, through telephone calls either by the company or telemarketers, through advertisements, and events. A study from 2014 stated that direct traffic, search engines, and web referrals were the three most popular online channels for lead generation, accounting for 93% of leads.
We know that a steady stream of leads is an essential component of keeping a business afloat – but coming up with original and efficient ideas to attract and convert qualified leads is easier said than done. Here are some of the proven and actionable ideas to energize your lead generation efforts:
Stepping into the shoes of a searcher you will realize that most ads just suck. They’re boring, they’re indifferent, and one isn’t any more enticing than another. Betwixt such a chaos where everything looks the same, there’s a huge opportunity to come in with something exceptional and blow the competition away! Writing better ads can raise your CTR above the expected average, giving your quality score a hike.
Researchers have proved that 65% of us are visual learners. As a matter of fact, product explainer videos can generate leads at a rate of up to 33%. When done correctly, videos can keep us engaged and can inspire us to take an action. So, videos do not need to be long and complex.
The top 10% of landing pages have conversion rate 3x to 5x average the average. As an answer to “How do they make it possible?” – by giving better offers and fewer choices. Moreover, as per Hick’s Law – fewer choices mean less confusion, resulting in more leads. As an inspiration – “MySiteAuditor” decreased the options on a free trial sign up a page from six to one and saw 25% jump in their conversion rate.
You can present numerous opt-ins by turning every blog post into an opt-in page. You can give away PDFs of your blog posts, worksheets, webinars, free reports, live demos, resource guides and what not! Instead of placing the opt-in in a sidebar, make a pop-up. You can’t make the visitors say yes, but there is no point making it easy for them to say no. According to a research, this tactic increased leads by 32 %!
Privacy is a major concern for all the visitors landing on your page. It is absolutely fine to reassure privacy but you should prefer doing it in a fun manner. In other words, assure privacy without using the word “SPAM”. In case of any doubts, you may run A/B tests to be sure your sign up forms are optimized for conversions.
Remarketing is an efficient way to connect those visitors to your website who may not have made an immediate purchase or inquiry. It allows you to present targeted ads in front of a defined audience that had previously visited your website – as they browse elsewhere around the internet using YouTube, Google or even Facebook. Remarketing using the Google Display Network gives you 92% reach in the U.S., across millions of websites, videos, and devices.
Live chat provides many benefits and it does improves the site performance. It does provides excellent customer support, addressing to customer needs in real time. It also provides : increase conversions, customer service and lead generation. Continue reading “Live chat – Lead generation”
There are many benefits that come with live chat and the way in which it can improve the site performance. Here we are going to discuss the benefits of live chat in increasing conversions. Continue reading “Benefits of live chat : Increase conversion”
Welcome to the age of customer, where businesses survive or fail just based on the customer service they provide. According to studies it has also been revealed that 66% of the customers are going to spend more if a company offers excellent services. Continue reading “When it comes to online shopping, live chat drives conversion [Infographic]”
If you are thoughtful about putting live chat to work on site, for lead generation, enhancing conversions and customer service, than live chat has to go beyond click to chat. It is witnesses that the apical amount of engagement with website visitors come from proactive chat rather than reactive. Continue reading “How to use live chat effectively?”