In this series we will explore the different ways you can generate solid leads for your business. In the first lead generation post we discussed ads, chat bots, and forms. In this post we will dive into understanding your leads through contact website activity and list segmentation.
Contact Website Activity
When those leads start rolling in from all your inbound marketing efforts it’s important to take the time to analyze and understand the prospect behavior on your site. Doing so will serve to drive the direction of your future web content, offers and calls-to-action.
Track and record each of your landing page offers, calls-to-action and links. Keep a running report on the performance of each, and when you changed or modified content. Take note of which offers and which wording resonates the most with your audience. Use that wording across your brand, including on social media.
Let’s say you have a pop-up form on your site that offers to answer questions as a visitor browses your site, or maybe you even have a live chat option. Keep a report on the types of topics your visitors are asking about on pop-up forms or chat. Categorize the topics and you will begin to see trends in the data. If there are topics that are repeatedly brought up, perhaps your website isn’t giving enough information on that topic. You can use this insight to modify your web content.
Another way that you can learn about your web visitors is through analyzing their demographics and characteristics. As you reach out to your leads you will discover information such as their occupation, where they live, their pain points, their goals, their interests, and more. All this information will help you narrow down your buyer persona and understand who you are marketing towards.
List Segmentation
Customizing your marketing communications is a valuable exercise in inbound marketing. It doesn’t reflect well on your company if you are sending out communications that are obviously one-size-fits-all and not tailored to your prospects and customers. For example, let’s say you are a landscaping company. You have a form on your website when someone wants to contact you for more information. The form gives options as to what areas the person is interested in such as rock, mulch, trees, water features, etc. Let’s pretend your lead checks rock and trees as their areas of interest. This goes into your CRM and is ready to be utilized as list segmentation. But if you don’t use it, and your next several emails to them are all about water features, you’ve missed an opportunity to connect with a prospect on the exact topic they are interested in.
Here’s another example: Let’s say a prospect becomes a customer and hires your landscaping company to install rock and edging in your yard. But you don’t categorize and segment your customers in your CRM, they are all just in one list. You decide that for the coming month you are going to offer a discount on rock installation. You send out an email blast (and that’s where the term blast came from – when it’s like a shotgun approach, rather than targeted) and it arrives in the customer’s inbox who just paid their bill for their rock landscaping, and it definitely wasn’t discounted. Also, it doesn’t look good that you don’t seem to know that the customer just recently purchased rock and wouldn’t be doing it again anytime soon.
Instead, if you had the customer on a list of those who had purchased rock in the past, you could target your communications with messages about incorporating trees and plants into rock landscaping, or using rocks in water features.
Further, you might have a list of prospects who said they were interested in water features, but they have not purchased from you yet. You could target them with a video about water feature design, or offer a free site visit consultation.
Overall, list segmentation makes the customer feel like you actually listened to what they are interested in and what brought them to you in the first place. It allows you to target your communications, making them much more effective in hitting the mark.
More examples of contact lists that you could have in your CRM include:
- B2B prospects
- B2C prospects
- Prospects in a certain industry
- Prospects in a certain state or country
- Customers who have purchased more than X amount of times. You could reward them with discounted or free product for being a loyal customer.
- Customers who purchased from a certain line of products. You could market add-ons, accessories, or complementary products to the one they have.
When it comes to capturing and then converting leads it’s important to take the time to be strategic about the information you are gathering. This will help you work smarter and be more appealing to your potential and existing customers.
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