Converting Leads to Customers by Customer Engagement
Inci Vardar
Introduction
You can build a business based on many facts and fantasies. For example, if you are planning to offer a product that’s already in demand, you can expect some customers to switch to your brand. This can be considered a fact. However, if you believe that a fancy landing page, a couple of flashy social media posts, and a discount offer for first-timers will create a “Shut up and take my money!” kind of demand, and help you with converting leads into customers; you’re living in fantasy land.
Your initial efforts can help you generate leads but leading them deeper into the sales funnel and turning them into paying customers requires more than increasing traffic to your website.
Stages of a Sales Funnel or “How Do People Buy Stuff?”
A sales funnel is the stage that a prospective buyer goes through before making a purchase and becoming a customer. The first step is awareness, where consumers learn that you put a product or service on the market. After this plain advertising part comes to interest, in which the consumer considers your product or service as a solution to a specific problem. In this stage, the consumer typically conducts online research to find out more about the brand, product, and its competitors. Then the consumer arrives at the third stage and makes the decision if your product is worth trying. And the last step is action, where the consumer takes the deal and makes the purchase.
Looks simple enough but it’s no magic trick. Each stage has its own challenges. Unless you track the results, engage with your prospective customer, and follow up after interactions, you can get stuck at a step and waste precious opportunities.
Let’s say that you’ve done your research both on your audience and the competition, set up a reasonable brand strategy, put your product or service in the market, and somehow grabbed the attention of consumers. Then what?
Measure, Analyze, Optimize, Keep Tracking Results, and Set KPIs
Grabbing a consumer’s attention means that they have visited your website or looked you up on social media in order to obtain more information. This leads to several questions on your side, such as;
- How many people visited your website?
- Who are those people?
- Where do they come from?
- Which actions did they take during their visit?
- How long have they stayed on your website?
- How many of them returned?
- How could you have made them stay longer, make a purchase or revisit the website for more?
- How can you reach them again?
Most of these questions have their answers in analytics reports. For more in-depth information, you can conduct customer surveys, offer newsletters, provide a white paper or ebook to explain yourself better. This will help you classify your visitors as the merely curious ones and the ones you can – and in fact, need to – pursue.
Results and KPIs differentiate according to business strategies; there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to either lead generation or customer acquisition. After building a business strategy, the process usually follows these 7 steps:
- Create awareness through SEO, PPC campaigns, social media, influencer marketing, etc.
- Generate leads either from your website or through social media platforms
- Analyze data according to your specific KPIs
- Start a fruitful dialogue
- Acquire more customers
- Keep them happy and turn them into regulars
- Set new KPIs according to new data and repeat from step 1.
How to Communicate with Your Leads?
Having a website or a landing page was about the only way to generate solid leads before social media platforms emerged. Now users can ask the price of a product on Instagram, request detailed information on email or through instant messaging, read threads on review sites, answer a poll that you’ve put on Twitter, or ask for an update on a YouTube comment. When an attentive prospective customer tries to communicate with you, it would be rude not to answer in a reasonable period of time. Also, it can cost you valuable leads.
Although increasing conversion rate is the ultimate goal, customer engagement plays an important role as a long-term strategy. When it comes to conversion, you provide incentives, such as first-timer discounts or special offers on the next purchase. It is the last step of your sales pitch; but in the customer engagement process, your role is to be the solution provider. If you help prospects to overcome their pain points or feed their interests, then they will have more reason to buy from you. If you get to know them better, then you can solve their problems and make them feel special.
Customer Engagement Tips for High Conversion Rates
- Collect information: Name and contact information are the basics but forms, surveys, and polls provide you with more relevant knowledge and data for you to create buyer personas and customized messaging.
- Use your time wisely: The buyer personas that you’ve created will put a name on your ideal customer and help you prioritize. A quick response leaves the potential customer less time to look for another solution.
- Follow up: Seems needless to say but if you can’t succeed at first contact, keep the conversation alive and remind yourself from time to time.
- Remember their choices: Consumers contact businesses from multiple platforms. Remembering their preferences and using the same platforms for further contact can increase your chances to get a positive response.
- Optimize your sales experience: Sometimes, all it takes is a little nudge, like placing a strong call to action here and a brightly colored button there, to make the conversion happen. Optimize the experience according to user preferences.
- Use images to attract more engagement: According to LinkedIn, posts with photos have a 98% higher comment rate than average. Tweets with visual content are 3x likely to attract engagement. Customers are more likely to communicate with you on social media and your website if you use images. But if you don’t have the design skills to make stunning graphics, you can check out Flaticon and its selection of free icons for websites.
Flawless Customer Engagement with Juphy
Imagine that you are generating huge amounts of leads from multiple platforms. Responding to all the prospective buyers in minutes with a relevant approach can be tricky. Unless, of course, you use Juphy.
Juphy is a unified inbox for businesses. It helps you take care of all customer queries, including email, social media, and reviews. With its user-friendly design and extensive feature palette, Juphy ensures that no important message will go overlooked and customer engagement will be performed at its best.
How Juphy Helps You to Engage with Your Customers on Different Platforms?
Juphy collects messages from multiple platforms into a single dashboard. You can track and respond to all your customer engagement from Facebook (Facebook page and group comments, Facebook Messenger, ads comments), Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google My Business, AppStore, and Google Play Store right from your inbox.
As an advanced customer support system, it helps you organize the processes with tickets, tags, and automation. The shared inbox allows you to allocate tasks and collaborate, so that you can provide the perfect answers to your prospective customers in record time.
Juphy’s Features for Increasing Your Conversion Rates
- With Juphy, you can monitor keywords on Twitter in order to collect user and competitor data. Then you can tweak your strategy and offer more interesting deals for conversion.
- You can set automation rules for incoming messages that contain the defined sentiment or keywords, so that they will be automatically classified.
- Using tags will help you sort, search and prioritize queries more quickly.
- For the first contact, you’ll need a brief introduction. Instead of writing the same message over and over again, you can create canned responses and save time.
- Juphy’s reports and analytics tools can help you define the challenging stages of your sales funnel.
Click here to try Juphy for 7 days and lead your prospective customers deeper into your sales funnel. It’s free and no credit card information is required. And if you have any comments about your experience, just contact us from any platform you like. Your messages won’t go unnoticed.