In my last couple posts I’ve been taking a dive into the proper process for implementing a conversion process into your website and then how to go about automating your lead qualification. Today we’re going to bring this discussion full circle and learn what to do with those website conversions after they give you information about themselves.
The old way of thinking was having your system send a sales team member an email with the information so they can follow-up and qualify the lead. If you’re more advanced you likely are doing something where you are sending the information into your CRM (such as Salesforce) for sales team member to access, and again chase the lead. The issue lies in that no matter what, you’re spending valuable human resources on chasing a sales lead that you’re not even sure if they’re interested. Instead, you need to take the intermediate step and qualify the conversions through marketing automation.
The first area to start is the platform. There are many out there but we lean toward Act-On because it integrates seamlessly with our preferred CRM (Salesforce) and our preferred CMS platform (Newfangled’s CMS) allowing for easy pushing and pulling of data. Once you have your marketing automation platform in place, the next steps are:
List Segmentation: Every conversion your website receives should be for a specific reason. Maybe they downloaded a white paper, presentation, or other piece of content that you had gated behind a form. Maybe it was a sign-up into a newsletter or blog digest. Or maybe just a general contact us form. Whatever it is, you need to create appropriate marketing lists based on the conversion point. The whole reason is you likely are going to market different messages to someone who who comes in and registers for a webinar on one topic than the person who comes in and registers to receive a blog digest.
Marketing Automation: Lead qualification starts with consistently trying to figure out how interested a prospect could be in your service offering. Just because they consumed a piece of content doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy. Instead, create automated email campaigns that cross-promotes content, encourages sign-up into a newsletter, promotes webinar registration, invites them to an event, etc. Whatever it is these programs should have an end-goal purpose and have multiple setups based on user behavior. This way when a prospect converts and ends up in one marketing list based on a certain activity, you can try to get them to do something else that illustrates more interest in your business. All without having a sales team member spend energy physically chasing them.
Lead Scoring: Within your automated platform you should have the ability to start lead scoring based on behavior. Working off of a point scale with various thresholds assigned by you based on behavior. It might be the first content download is 10 points. The 5th is 200 points. A direct contact me form conversion is worth 500 points. Maybe 200 points to someone visiting a certain page in the site deemed highly valuable to interested buyers. Whatever the scale and point assignment the purpose is to trigger your system to automatically tell you it’s time to personally reach out and begin the sales dialogue because they’re spending alot of time with your company online and with your content.
To quickly summarize my last three posts remember the purpose of your content marketing effort. You need to produce meaningful and valuable content to get lead conversions. To attain those conversions and learn about the consumer you gate the important content behind various forms in your site. You then progressive profile your forms so they’re not as intimidating with lots of information based fields but still allows you to get the information you want over time. You then send that information into specific segmented marketing lists within your automated marketing platform. All with the final purpose of converting that person through your automated email programs. This will allow you to pre-qualify whom your sales team should spend their effort on rather than chasing every lead that comes in (a lot of which could end up on the wrong side of the dialogue).