How Agile CRM Helps Small Business Improve Lead Quality to Increase Customer Conversions

Multinational telecommunications company, Level 3 Communications, began a large and expensive marketing campaign in late 2012. The highly visible email campaign delivering 80,000 emails to tech companies, but came up shorthanded when results revealed an open rate of 7.1% and just seven forms completed without leads.

Why did this happen? The problem was a failure to match messaging to the target audience:  Non-technical execs were receiving technical messages.

Though the campaign reached a wide audience, it didn’t result in more sales. What happened?

The moral of the story was this: Spending time and money generating a thousand leads if none are interested isn’t productive; It’s more beneficial to generate 100 leads that may turn into Wins than a thousand that will never convert.

The lesson is that you have to be cautious when it comes to executing marketing campaigns, and you need to focus on improving lead quality in order to increase closing rates. Dropping 30,000 or 100,000 emails all at once without testing on a smaller audience isn’t effective. The process should be to test key variables first – and then roll out. Otherwise, the risks are much too high as we see above. And this applies to your small business.

The Conversion Rate

Small businesses run on conversion rates. And in order to increase them, we need to devise the kind of campaigns that enable us to track prospect activity, understand what sales cycle stages leads are in, and devise lead nurturing campaigns to increase lead quality. But many small businesses are missing the mark: According to Econsultancy, only about 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

Monitoring this critical KPI is helpful in assessing performance and efficacy, but it is much more than that. When we monitor the conversion rate, we see which resources should be allocated where in order to focus on what works.

Before we can hope to increase the rate at which people take an action, we must understand what causes that action to occur.

So how does Agile CRM help small business improve lead quality to increase customer conversions? Below is a list of 5 actions you can implement to your marketing campaigns in order to increase lead quality, and convert more prospects into paying customers.

1. Use more calls-to-action

As we already noted, quality matters far more than quantity. For instance, it’s far better to create one powerful thought leadership piece over a hundred ones that aren’t up to par. In order to tie in conversions with the importance of creating quality leads, one way of ensuring this can happen is to have calls-to-action throughout our site. By including opportunities wherever we can, like signup through popup offers, downloads, and calls-to-action in the body of emails, we entice prospects to leave information behind, increasing the likelihood of converting in a shorter period of time.

2. Limit the information you request

The conversion process works when it’s possible for users to easily interact and understand us. The fewer options we offer to customers, the more straight forward the offer. Reduce the number of fields required to fill out in your landing pages. Too many fields can be a nuisance, which makes audiences abandon the signup process altogether.

3. Keep your language simple and easy to follow

The average consumer’s reading level is relatively low. That’s why the simpler we write, in an easy-to-follow language and tone, the more we appeal to audiences. Knowing your customers is critical when it comes to the way we write, but the general rule is that the simpler the language, the easier it is for customers to make a purchase decision.

4. Show off your social following

Social proof has become a critical concept in the age of digital marketing. The concept is that we have to demonstrate our worthiness through customers and peers that vouch for our brand. There is no better way to convert a consumer than seeing their friend use our product. By advertising statistics like how many people “like” us on Facebook, and how many people follow us on Twitter, when we embed our social media posts in our content, we show how much our content has been shared and our sales can increase as a result of this social proof.

5. Offer a free trial

We want to reassure our audiences that they’re going to get their money’s worth, and fast. If you are selling a service, you may want to give your users a risk-free trial for a certain period of time. Or, if you sell a product, you may want to consider sending out a free sample before your customer commits to making a bigger purchase.

Improving lead quality with LinkedIn in Agile CRM

Agile provides Chrome extension that works to extract lead details from social media. For example, with LinkedIn, it becomes possible to move contact information directly into Agile. This way, the more information we have on a lead, the more details we capture and the better we understand the customer’s needs. And when we understand that, we know how to nurture leads in the right way to increase customer conversion.

Key takeaway

Although our conversion rate won’t become perfect overnight, we have to commit to improving it by focusing on the quality of our leads rather than the quantity of them. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, but if you continuously experiment, it’s possible to find a formula that works for your small business. Lead nurturing is a key process to increasing lead quality. According to Market2Lead, nurtured leads experience a 23% shorter sales cycle. This should be our goal: Focus on producing quality leads, and the conversions will come.

How effective is your CRM at improving lead quality? Agile can help your small business improve lead quality and increase customer conversions using an all-in-one CRM to impact your bottom line, head-on.