Your company blog gets 10,000 visits per month. Of these, 2,000 visitors sign-up for your email newsletter. However, only 18 sign up for the free trial and only 12 end up purchasing your product. What does all of this mean? It means that your sales/marketing funnel is leaking.
A sales/marketing funnel is depicts how your target audience progresses from being visitors (people who are aware of your brand) to leads (people who have given their contact details to you) to prospects (people who have shown affirmative interest in buying your product) to loyal customers (people who have purchased your product).
Leakages occur when a disproportionate number of your leads drop off the sales/marketing pipeline midway, and fail to progress to the next stage
Here’s how you can address the leakages at each step in the funnel:
Leakage 1: From ‘Awareness’ to ‘Leads’
Are you getting a lot of website visits, but hardly any free trial sign-ups? Is your blog buzzing with traffic, and yet you barely have any subscribers? Are your Google and Facebook ads getting views and clicks, but not persuading visitors to submit their contact details?
This means that your marketing/sales funnel is leaking at stage 2 and a lot of the people who are aware of your brand and are interacting with it are not turning into leads.
To fix this leakage, use a lead capture automation platform. Using such a software, you will be able to automate lead capture from all sources, thereby eliminating human inefficiencies (such as forgetfulness, mistakes in noting down details, delayed follow-ups, etc.) that are bound to occur if you choose to manually capture leads.
Secondly, make sure the offers that you are using to convert visitors into leads are relevant to the medium they are placed on, and carry high value.
For instance, here’s how it can be approached:
- Website: Chat pop-up + Free trial sign-up
- Blog: Downloadables within each blog post + E-books on the sidebars + Webinars on the top bars + Newsletter subscriptions at the bottom.
- Google & Facebook Ads: Free trial sign-up
If we offered free trial sign-up on our blog, where people come to access free marketing and sales resources, we wouldn’t be able to capture them as leads and our funnel would start leaking.
It is only because each of these offers is relevant and valuable to the visitors on that medium that they are willing to share their contact details (and thus be captured as leads), in exchange for accessing what the offer promises.
Finally, make sure that the soft elements (placement, copy, navigational ease, etc.) of your offer or the landing page that it directs to, are persuasive enough. For instance, if the landing page for free trial sign-up on your website has too many form fields to be filled up, you will deter your visitors and create a sure-shot leakage point.
Leakage 2: From ‘Leads’ to ‘Prospects’
if you have 2,000 subscribers to your newsletter, but only 18 of them show interest in your product by signing up for a free trial, it means that your sales/marketing funnel is facing this kind of leakage (that is, a disproportionately large number of your leads are failing to convert into prospects).
To fix this leakage, firstly, make sure you’re attracting the right kind of audience to your content or ads. Are you attracting sales executives to your blog, when the decision-maker for your product is the sales manager? This means you need to shift focus and create content on topics that more experienced people search for. Are the Facebook ads for your B-school being wasted on arts graduates, who are relatively less likely to opt for an MBA? This means you need to tighten your Facebook targeting to reach out to the engineers and the commerce graduates.
Secondly, make sure you are pitching your product to your leads correctly in terms of timing, personalization, copy, and call to action. Are you sending out a pitch too soon, without the lead being sufficiently nurtured and confident about your brand? Does your pitch have copy that is too complicated for your lead to understand? Are you sending across generic, impersonal sounding emails to leads from all the industries that you cater to? These are all recipes to create huge leakages in your funnel.
Experiment with your timing, copy, personalization and CTAs by using multiple pitches. Identify the ones that work and eliminate the ones that cause leakages.
Leakage 3: From ‘Prospects’ to ‘Customers’
This is the kind of leakage that occurs when your prospects show affirmative interest in your product, but fail to purchase it.
To fix this leakage, make sure you are attracting prospects who have the financial ability to purchase your product. For instance, you may be marking leads who sign-up for a free trial of your product as ‘prospects’, but if they cannot afford to pay the price of your product, they will obviously not advance further down the sales cycle. Hence, you need to ensure that you are attracting only the people who can afford your product. This can be achieved by changing the nature of your content or the targeting of your ads.
Also, make sure you’re connecting with the right people at the right time. What if you’ve marked the leads with the least interest in purchasing your product as ‘prospects’, while the ones that do have interest are lying neglected in your system? You can avoid this by using a marketing automation platform, which helps you prioritize your leads on the basis of quality and engagement scores.
Finally, this leakage could also be an indicator of a product-target mismatch. It could mean that your product is not satisfying your target audience as well as it should. This is a serious problem and can be fixed by either consistently adapting your product according to the incoming feedback, or finding newer, more relevant target markets for it.
Keep monitoring the conversion ratios at each stage of your funnel and fixing the leakages you’ve identified–your lead volume and sales are bound to shoot up.
This article was originally published at Channelworld.in by author Nilesh Patel, founder and CEO of LeadSquared
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