Digital Inbound leads are easy to get through various digital marketing channels, such as SEO, Google PPC, and social media, but most digital marketers convert customers at an average rate of 2% - 10%, but there are others that can convert their leads, as high as 25%, according to Invespcro. Many of these varied conversion rates are due to the various industries, but many more of the reasons are due to digital marketers not focusing on the conversions throughout the funnel from cold leads to MQLs to SQLs to SALs.
How to Maximize Conversion Rates
Implementing and utilizing a Marketing Automation software platform is one of the first steps to building a process to converting leads more successfully. By utilizing products, such as Pardot, Marketo, HubSpot, Act-On or Eloqua, some of the manual digital marketing processes that require a great amount of resources to launch email campaigns, test, and track the campaigns become automated, which allows the digital marketing team to focus on how to improve conversions with each campaign launch.
The next step of converting digital leads, should be the focus on bringing cold leads to the MQL stage of the qualification process with lead scoring. Many digital marketers make the mistake of sending cold leads directly to the Inside Sales teams without any qualifying, which reduces the likelihood that the leads will move to the SQL stage of the funnel. This is where lead scoring becomes a key component on converting more quality leads. Lead scoring is a tool within a marketing automation platform that scores every action of a lead, as they move closer to becoming qualified, to move to the MQL stage.
Many marketing automation tools have a pre-built scoring system, so for the newbie utilizing these products, they can use the scoring system to set-up baseline metrics, and as they use the product more, change the lead scoring to suit their target audience for their industry needs, as well as, the content available at the website.
Customer Response Matters
Lastly, but most importantly, the best practice in converting inbound leads, is how quickly your Inside Sales team responds to the leads that are moved to the MQL stage of the sales funnel. I have seen several B2B and B2C companies that I have been brought into advise on improving their sales conversion rates, not respond in a timely manner to the leads. Leads that are reviewing your company's product information is in "research mode" and as they are, are not just looking at your company's products, but your competitor's products too.
If your company is not responding quickly with an email and phone call to requests from leads, then your competitor will, and you've most likely lost that lead forever. Leads that reach out are the best leads that you can acquire and if your company's Inside Sales team are not responding, then the ROI will much be less and the halo effect on your company's brand will be tarnished for bad customer service.