3 Steps to Optimize Your B2B Lead Conversion Rates

The B2B sales cycle lasts longer and your prospects will buy your product or service only if they are assured that you are the right choice for them. Before they make this commitment, the prospects will make extensive research and the decision will involve one or more decision-makers. This leaves you in a position where you need to avoid even the smallest of mistakes that could potentially harm your lead conversion rates.

Sending personalized email messages and delivering relevant content is a great start. But, in the long run, you have to try out many different tactics. In order to optimize your B2B lead conversion rates, we outlined three steps to help you stand out from the crowd and make successful sales.

1. Encourage Micro-Conversions

Three-quarters of the B2B sales cycles take at least 4 months to close, while almost half of the B2B sales cycles take 7 months. It lasts long enough so that you need to keep your prospects engaged and informed all throughout the cycle until they make the buying decision.

This is where micro-conversions have a big impact. Ideally, these small commitments would motivate the prospect to take on a bigger one, which in this case is buying from you.

Here are a few micro-conversions to consider for your marketing strategy:

• Signing-up for newsletters
  72% of B2B leads are not sales-ready. Having your prospect’s email will give you the possibility to talk to them more openly and offer them more targeted solutions. Also, you will be able to present new content, services, etc.
• Following on social media
  Motive the prospects to follow you on social media. It gives you the chance to distribute relevant content and share positive experiences from customers. The more engaged your prospects are, the better chances you have for moving them forward in the sales cycle. Plus, it puts your brand upfront and more present in the social media lives of the prospects.
• Watching a video
  Video content is a powerful form of micro-conversion action that can increase your brand awareness. If prospects watch the video, it proves that they are willing to learn more about your brand.

Instilling trust in prospects with micro-conversions will be of great benefit for your B2B lead conversion rates strategy. If you earn your prospects’ trust in the early stages, you will have an easier time moving forward with them through the sales cycle.

2. Retarget Prospects

92% of consumers visit your website only once without buying anything and then never come back. If you want to reach them, you might want to consider retargeting as your strategy.

Retargeting will remind prospects of your brand, and if you impressed them well enough the first time they visited your website, they might as well buy something from you. Here are a few ideas on how to use retargeting in your favor:

• Retarget with reviews
  Use the positive reviews that customers give you. Potential leads can feel motivated to explore your brand more if they see that others had a positive experience.
• Post-purchase retargeting ads
  Once your customer bought something, you can use this data to retarget them again. For example, do this by showing ads about buying the same product, to cross-sell other products or services, or to even upgrade from free to paid versions.
• Create separate landing pages
  If you failed to bring prospects back to the page they visited before, then it’s a good idea to create separate landing pages. If prospects didn’t like what they’ve previously seen, then maybe they will like the new landing page more, find it more useful and make a purchase — or at least schedule a call.

PRO TIP: Set frequency caps to not overexpose with retargeting. The goal is to transform prospects to long-term customers, not to chase them away with your ads showing up all over their online space.

Retargeted ads work best as a complementary technique. Include them in your overall marketing strategy to make sure that more and more consumers keep coming back at your brand in a steady, but a successful path.

3. Optimize Call Analytics

In the digital age, most of the information is sent through email or other types of online messages. It seems like the days of phone calls are gone, but this isn’t true. In fact, 65% of Fortune 500 companies state that phone calls are their highest quality lead source.

Most of the time when prospects are calling you is because they are almost ready to make a purchase — they just need more info to make their final decision. This is a very crucial moment for your sales team, as this is when the prospects convert to customers. You don’t want this chance to slip away, and one of the best ways to provide excellent customer service is to make sure your calls are of high quality.

This is where call tracking makes a difference. Using a call tracking software or call tracking service can optimize your marketing strategy in many ways:

• Call tracking shows you which of your campaign ads is the most successful in bringing you leads. Therefore, you will know which channels to invest in more, and which to take out of the equation. With this, you will also save money.
• Call tracking will provide you the best practices by showing you the pain moments where your team needs to improve their call practices. Also, it shows how to optimize your communication with the prospects so that they eventually convert to customers.
• By improving your call practices with analytics, you can rest assured that you will have your return on investment. Once you cut the budget on ineffective marketing practices and invest more in those that make a difference, it is then that your ROI will increase.

Call analytics will definitely bring you closer to successful conversions. You just need to improve where the analytics show that you’re failing.

Conclusion:

These three steps will bring you closer to the desired B2B lead conversion rates. However, in order to achieve them, you need to test, test, test. It is the only way to find out what works best for you, and therefore use the data to improve.

What is equally as important as putting the effort in the right techniques, is that for your conversion rate to be optimal, you also need to filter out the prospects that most likely won’t convert. At least half of your prospect base isn’t a good fit. So, you need to focus on the other 50% that are likely to convert.

Nurturing leads and guiding them through the sales funnel isn’t easy. It has its own ups and downs, but if you do it properly your lead conversion rates will increase in the long run.

We, at Alite International, have been working with multiple large organizations in supporting their move towards full marketing automation & executing cross-channel marketing strategies. If you need any additional information, do not hesitate to send me an email on kiril.jakimovski@alite-international.com. Or you can visit our website and read more: https://alite-international.com/.