In 2017, I sold my first website on Flippa (the experience was incredible). My website was in the general health and wellness niche and attracted up to 60,000 visitors each month. While I could sell my site for 15X the highest month’s revenue, I know I left a lot of money on the table by not optimizing my site for monetization. My primary way to generate revenue from the site was through in-content advertising, but with so many monthly visitors pouring in passively from organic traffic, I could have benefited (and improved the site’s value) from building an email lead funnel. Lead generation is one of the most difficult things for businesses to automate, yet if you can effectively do this, your business can grow exponentially. While my website was built with a B2B focus, the same will apply for B2C websites as companies that automate their lead generation process report a 10% increase in revenue in as little as 6-9 months. 

When surveyed:

• 65% of businesses stated their greatest marketing challenge as lead generation.
• 71% rate increasing lead to customer conversions as an important priority.
• Yet, 68% of these businesses have not identified their lead funnel.

What is a Lead Funnel?

A lead funnel is a system that helps you generate new leads for your business, also known as a lead generation funnel. It is a systematic representation of how a business turns its audience into paying customers.

An effective lead funnel has various steps that the lead (or people in your audience) goes through before purchasing from the business.

Why You Need a Lead Funnel for your Business

According to Salesforce, 79% of the marketing leads generated by a company never convert into sales.

The Adobe Digital Index 2020 report shows that the average sales funnel conversion rate in most industries is 3%. The health and pharmaceutical industry has a 4.6% conversion rate, and the consumer electronics industry draws the baseline at 1.4%.

Using these powerful tips to optimize your marketing campaign, you can significantly increase the conversions for your lead funnel. You will turn more leads into paying customers and increase your company’s bottom line.

Powerful Tips to Increase Lead Funnel Conversion

1.    Leverage Social Media

The first stage of the lead funnel is creating awareness. A global survey discovered that 37% of brand marketers have brand awareness as a top priority.

Statistics show that there are currently over 3.6 billion social media users. The same statistics project this number to grow to over 4.41 billion social media users by 2025. With this large pool of potential customers, there are few better places to look if you want to increase brand awareness.

By carefully choosing the social networking platform suitable for their business, marketers can focus their awareness campaign more objectively in ways that appeal to their target audience.

For B2B businesses, building an awareness campaign on LinkedIn can be considered a logical strategy. A company-generated report showed that 80% of B2B lead generation comes from LinkedIn.

It is best to find a platform that is most suitable for your business before commencing an awareness campaign on social media. Using paid ads to reach potential leads on your chosen media platform can speed up a successful awareness campaign.

2.    Build Targeted Landing Pages

An awareness campaign is best followed by a landing page, a single webpage detailing your core offers, and Call-to-Actions (CTAs) to guide your leads into taking an expected action. 

Gary Simpson from Green Religion Digital says, “It’s extremely important to be hyper-focused and intentional with your CTA’s above the fold of your landing page. Be bold with your copy and colors to incite action and keep the customer engaged. Finally, ensure that your CTAs are optimized for all devices so you can maximize the amount of engagement.”

To increase your chances of growing the number of leads that interact with your brand, you need to build a landing page – regardless of where you focus your awareness campaign, the interested portion of your audience (leads) must be directed to this single webpage. This webpage presents all the information they need to know about your product and outlines the associated benefits.

When running for his first term, President Obama’s campaign raised $60 million in funding using a landing page with integrated A/B testing. With compelling copy and the appropriate Call-to-Actions on your landing pages, your lead conversion rate will improve.

You need to keep testing to figure out what works best for your company.

While it is a known fact that companies with 10-15 landing pages see a 55% increase in lead generation and conversion, nearly half of all existing businesses have fewer than six landing pages. This is unfortunate because companies with over 40 landing pages collect 12 times more leads than those with less than six pages. 

Simply creating more landing pages puts your business at an advantage of converting more leads because you can be specific in your targeting for each page.

Furthermore, you should integrate opt-in forms into your landing pages. Optin forms are used to collect information from your leads (email addresses). 

This draws the lead closer to conversion because, with their email address, you can add them to your mailing list and follow up with offers that eventually lead to sales.

To optimize conversions, consider designing your opt-in as a pop-up form. According to survey data, top-performing pop-up forms convert up to 9.3% leads. 

Collecting emails with opt-in forms brings you closer to your customers –and into their inboxes.

3.    Harness the Power of Drip Marketing

Drip marketing (also known as a behavioral campaign) is a group of automated emails sent to leads on a set schedule after they:

a.    join your mailing list,

b.    sign up to do business with you, or

c.  are actively doing business with you.

For new leads, it takes more than one email to convert them into a paying customer. On average, your business is required to get in touch with a customer more than ten times before they eventually buy from you.

With Drip marketing, subscribers can be kept in the loop regarding the next steps expected of them. Also, they will receive timely updates about your product offering.

Building tools and calculators are a great way to build your email list. My SEO Sucks built an SEO pricing tool that provides valuable analysis and delivers it to the visitor’s inbox in exchange for their email address. They then follow-up with interested leads through a drip marketing campaign.

It is important to note that bombarding new prospects with too much information about your product can be overwhelming. Using Drip email software, you can break the information into batches, with each email delivered at intervals.

Because Drip emails contain offers and Call-to-Actions, statistics show that this strategy can generate “50% more sales-ready leads” than mass email blasts.

Every customer loves it when businesses give them personalized attention. 

Businesses using Drip campaigns excellently experience 80% more sales at 33% less cost.

4.    Create Email Reminders and Targeted Offers

Oftentimes, leads may show an interest in your product; they may view it and even add the product to their shopping cart but somehow leave without completing the purchase. This is called cart abandonment. According to statistics, the total cart abandonment rate across industries is 88.5%.

An email reminder sent to these leads can be useful in converting them into paying customers. You should ensure that your reminder emails are well crafted and offer value.

Offering free shipping or discount coupons to owners of abandoned carts can often encourage them to complete the purchase. However, repeated reminders can increase this rate significantly. According to a study, sending reminder emails to each customer three times has generated 69% more revenue than sending a single email reminder.

5.    Be Warm and Welcoming

Customers are humans.

74% of generated leads expect a welcome email after signing up for your newsletter. It is a simple courtesy.

Welcome emails are not only about being warm to your leads but are also shown to be more effective than regular newsletters. Welcome emails show four times more open rates and five times more click-through rates than regular email marketing campaigns.

When new leads join your mailing list, ensure that you set up an automated welcome email campaign to express your interest in serving them in the best ways possible. Including CTAs and offer to give them a tour of your website.

By merely offering a tour to help leads navigate your website and browse the various available offers, businesses can keep visitors on their website 5-10 times longer. With more than 55% of website visitors leaving a website within 15 seconds, offering a tour to keep your visitors engaged on your website will give you more exposure, click-throughs, and, consequently, more sales.

Conclusion

A lead funnel is an important marketing tool that helps you direct your marketing efforts properly and measure your progress at each stage of the funnel. However, it is becoming a growing challenge for marketers to build brand awareness and increase company sales. With over half the world’s population on social media, marketers need not look too far for a starting point in their awareness campaign. Building an email list is the best advice I can lend if you are looking for ways to monetize your first website by building an audience that will increase the value of your brand in the long-run.

Leads generated on social media platforms must be directed to a landing page where they can learn more about your offer and find ways to stay in touch with your business.

Interested prospects that wish to keep in touch are excellent candidates that can be easily converted to paying customers when done properly.

Leveraging these powerful tips can help you generate and manage high-quality leads with higher conversion rates which will immensely improve your company’s bottom line.

Start today and grow your conversion rate above your industry’s average with these proven strategies.