What are sales leads?

In the business world, a sales lead is an organisation or a person who may eventually become a potential client. Finding sales leads is the first step for a business.

keep in mind that a sales lead is not a sales “prospect”, and because of that it is important to understand the interest and intent of a potential client. 

Quest to find sales leads over the years

The process of finding sales leads and converting them into clients has changed over years. For example, back in 90’s traditional marketing tactics like Newspaper ads, door to door salesman, radio ads, telephone sales etc, were some of the common ways to find sales leads.

Different companies have different sales pipelines. A typical Sales funnel like above shows all the stages from finding a lead to closing the deal. As you can see there are many factors that come into play while finding the right person.  

The era of digital sales leads

Today, digital marketing is a major backbone of businesses. The Internet is the biggest means of communication with around 4.5 billion people connected worldwide in 2020. Just having the right tools can give your business a significant boost in terms of presence and sales.

Let’s talk about one of these tools; A website.

A website allows you to:

Measure your brand awareness and visibility

Business visibility and reach can be analyzed by measuring numbers of visitors to a page and number of emails collected. Time spent on each page and user interaction like click events on page is a good sign of engagement.

Measure you sales conversion

Businesses focused on sales will want to pay attention to conversion through the sales process, that is the process from sign-up to check-out. To understand visitors habits, analyze time spent on each page, number of product page visits per user and returning visitors.

 

How to generate sales leads from a websites?

 

Content Marketing

Content marketing helps companies create trust and brand loyalty by  creating and sharing free valuable content.

Unlike many traditional forms of marketing, content marketing does not involve direct sales. Instead, it provides useful and relevant information to attract prospects and generate leads.

The idea of content marketing is that a brand must provide something valuable to get something valuable in return. The content or information should be delivered consistently and must be valuable to your prospects to help them resolve their issues.

Content marketing has been used since the late 19th century. For example:

In 1888, Johnson & Johnson released two publications that contained tips for the medical community. They also introduced a publication called “Modern Methods of Antiseptic Wound Treatment” targeted to doctors that used bandages.

Many organisations today like spaceX, TED, Microsoft, IBM, including us, use content marketing.

Key Reasons and benefits of content marketing:

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate Leads
• Improve sales
• Increase brand credibility
• Build an online community

 

Optimize your Homepage

If you really want a good first impression then start with improving your homepage. A website’s homepage is the most important page since that’s where most of your visitors are going to visit.

It’s important to have a homepage that looks clean, professional and easy to navigate around. Showcase your skills and projects, and present very clear information about what your business does and why should people invest in your business.

Make sure that your homepage ( and your whole website in general ) is fully responsive or dynamic. Meaning that a web page should automatically adjust and adapt accordingly to the screen size. Avoid using bright colors that are difficult to look at, use combinations of soft colors that are not hard on eyes and be consistent with color themes on all pages. This can greatly improve website design and looks more professional compared to a site that is using random colors. 

Also, keep in mind that you are using appropriate <h1>-<h6> tags for headings and subheading. It gives your page a logical structure that allows crawlers to understand the content and rank your website accordingly.  

 

Implement Live chat for quick sessions

Live chat is a customer support feature which allows your visitors to communicate with you in real time using chat .

There are several reasons why many businesses have moved towards live chat in the past few years. Not only is it a faster way to communicate but it is also cheaper and cost effective. 

By using live chat your leads can ask questions, you can understand the intent of your leads and make everything clear. If a lead is qualified as a prospect then you can move it down in your sales funnel.

A sales team can answer multiple queries at the same time, this technique known as chat concurrency. With proper training a sales agent can handle multiple chats simultaneously. 

We often combine live chat with bots. A bot can be programmed to answer and behave accordingly in different scenarios. For example, you can programme the bot to send a greeting message whenever a user visits your website. All the process happens automatically which saves a lot of expenses that can be used somewhere else.

Customer service is a very important aspect of every business. Many studies have been done in the past and unsurprisingly live chat is the way to go for many customers. People are more likely to trust a business that keeps everything transparent and provides answers to their queries.

Live chat increases the overall credibility of your business and sets it apart from the competition. But, keep in mind that results depend on what strategy you use. It’s important that you choose well trained sales agents who understand and answer everything thoroughly.

Here are some of the tips you can use

• Make sure that the live chat feature is easily visible on your website.
• Depending on the type of website, you can also apply a live chat feature on every page.  
• At Least one person should be available to answer the queries. 
• Enable instant notifications so you can get notified whenever someone visits your site.
• Use bots for greetings and to answer common questions regarding your business.

 

Use google analytics to improve conversions

Google analytics is a web analytic service provided by google and it is a powerful tool that can track website traffic, session, sales activity and performance etc, for absolutely free.

With google analytics you can use something known as goals to measure conversion rates. A conversion occurs when a website visitor completes a desired objective. Examples include a completed sign-up for a new account or an item purchase that contributes to the success of your business.

When a visitor to your site completes a desired goal, analytics record that as a complete conversion.The conversion data is used for a number of purposes. You can apply goals to specific pages and screens, goals like how long users stay on your site, how many pages they view per session.

There are exactly 4 different types of goals

 

Funnels for Destination goals:

Difference websites have different end goals or main goals. These types of goals are known as macro conversions. The success of a business can be measured in terms of macro conversions.

For instance, The main goal of an E-commerce website is to sell products. so whenever a user makes a purchase transaction, it is qualified as a macro conversion.

Just like that we also have something known as micro conversion. A micro conversion is an action taken by a visitor towards completion of a macro conversion.

Going back to our E-commerce website example, a user simply searching for a product or adding a product to cart is a micro conversion.

By using google analytics Destination goal feature, you can specify enter and exit paths that you want your traffic to take on the way towards your macro conversion or goal. This is known as funnel.

For example, let’s say your website has two pages in a funnel, a blog page and a news page. 

Your blog page receives more traffic but for some reason a lot of traffic leaves before completing the goal. On the other hand your news page doesn’t receive as much traffic as your blog page, but visitors complete the desired goal. 

This indicates the problem with the step, maybe the path to conversion is long or maybe it’s difficult for users to navigate around in the blog page.

With the help of funnels and Destination goals, you can easily track your leads and which parts of your website have high and low conversion rates, by knowing that you can take appropriate actions to improve website overall conversion rates.  

 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the most traditional way of marketing. Email Marketing is the act of sending Email messages with the intent of increasing relationship with customers, acquiring new customers or encouraging a current customer to purchase something.

Email marketing can be used to send advertisements, newsletters, request business, useful content (content marketing) etc. The Primary focus of Email marketing is to build trust, loyalty and increase brand awareness.

There are two different types of Emails:

Direct Emails:

Direct Emails is a method of email marketing that involves sending promotional emails to a targeted list of customers. Companies usually collect a list of prospects emails to send direct promotional messages to.

Transactional emails:

Transaction email is the type of email that is usually triggered based on a customer action with a company. Emails like password reset, account notification, transaction receipt are some examples of transactional emails. 

Transactional emails have higher open rates and because of that many emails newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which allows you to send messages automatically.

Benefits of using Email marketing:

• Email marketing is much faster and cost effective since it does not require any advertisement rates or print cost.              
• Email marketing campaigns can be analyzed with the help of an email service provider. The information includes valuable metrics like subscribers retention,click rates,open rates and other insights to help businesses understand and make use of customer behaviours.  

 

Conclusion

A website is a great tool that can be used together with other various tools. If you already own a website try using some of these features to help your business grow. If you want to learn more about the importance of a website than click here.