WEBITMD NEWSLETTER VOL.40

STRUGGLING TO GET LEADS ACROSS THE FINISH LINE?  

You've laid the groundwork, developed all the right touchpoints ... but all of a sudden everything screeches to a halt, and your leads just aren't taking the final step to becoming a customer. 

Before we can address how you can get your leads over the last hurdle, we have to take several step backs and figure out how things get to this point to begin with. Typically, it's death by a thousand cuts: a combination of timing, improper lead scoring, and an oversaturation of leads that may not actually be a good fit. Let's take a closer look at the three major reasons you're losing out on potential customers.

THE THREE BIGGEST PROBLEMS

These are the most common challenges standing in the way of conversion:

• Bad timing: Once a lead submits a form like a demo request, time is of the essence. A study from Lead Connect found that there is a 391% increase in conversions if leads are contacted within one minute of submission. On the flip side, after five minutes of submitting a form, a lead's chance of being qualified drops by 80%.

• Messy lead scoring: If you don't have a well-defined qualification process, it's all too easy for leads that aren't the right fit for your company to slip through the cracks. While marketing automation can help mitigate this, errors in formatting—like using an "and" instead of an "or", for example—result in similar issues.
  
  
• Oversaturation: Poorly defined marketing-qualified leads distract from the ones that actually count. Even worse? They can create a sense of complacency, and potentially result in less aggressive followup.
  

HOW TO STOP LOSING YOUR LEADS

Now that we've discussed the challenges preventing you from converting leads to customers, how do we overcome them? Here are a few possible solutions:

• Re-evaluate your current qualification process: Make sure that you're using the right attributes to qualify your leads as a good fit—and check your automated workflows for potential mistakes or excessive complexity.

• Cut down your response time: If your response time is in the hours, you need to set a goal to get it down to minutes. In the instances where that isn't possible, consider developing a follow-up email immediately after form submission that lets the lead know what to expect now that they've sent a request.

• Use the right UTMs for data collection: In order to make sure you’re getting the most accurate and helpful data, be sure that you’re using the right UTMs on your landing pages.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Cutting through the noise is more important than ever as we wrap up the final quarter of the year and move into the next. Quantity can't replace quality, so you need to make sure you have the processes in place that makes it as easy as possible for each lead to step over the finish line and become a customer.

👀 TLDR: If you're having a hard time converting leads into customers, you may want to take a look at how you're scoring leads, how fast you're responding to them after they submit a form like a demo request, and whether or not you have too much noise in your current process. You can address these challenges by reducing the amount of time you take to reach out after a form submission and refining how you qualify leads.

Best Regards,
WEBITMD TEAM