Digital Transformation and Marketing for Franchises: Fundamental Steps
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The correct management of leads. Here we list the best practices within the industry.
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We increase the budget by 100% and the amount of leads generated increases 120%. The investment was optimized! However, sales go up only 50%. Marketing Sherpa has revealed: 79% of leads never convert into sales. The key? The correct management of leads. Here we list the best practices within the industry.
Generating leads is common currency in any Digital Marketing strategy.
A cup of coffee in the morning and we turn on the lead generation machine. It’s the bread-and-butter of a digital marketing team, whether via Internet advertising, email marketing or web positioning (or why not all three together?)
But those who already know online marketing know that prospecting is not enough.
After all, we are not a delivery of leads…
Rating, nurturing, managing leads. That is the question, as Shakespeare would say.
Actually, this is simple: if the goal – your goal – is to get customers through digital marketing, then you need leads (a.k.a: potential customers).
And you need many.
Through lead generation processes – via email marketing, web positioning or Internet advertising – the idea is to get people interested in your business to convert and nurture them until they become customers.
Would this be your problem? Never! Your problem might be holding a database full of leads without knowing what to do with them or where to start.
It’s useless to collect leads as figurines of an album if we don’t know how to manage them so that they fall in love before our products or services.
Of course, it’s common to find yourself at the crossroads of how to increase the conversion rate or what resources available to increase sales and accelerate decision making.
Imagine: we increase the 100% budget and the amount of leads generated increases 120%, which optimizes our investment, but sales increase 50%. What happened?
This challenge does not respond to the generation of contacts but to the lack of lead management.
According to the company 3PuntoCero, only 52% of companies have turned to digital marketing as their strategy to generate leads.
And that contradicts the fact that, according to Comscore, seven out of 10 people refer to the Internet to advise on the purchase of products and services.
The big question would be (which we intend to address in depth throughout this note)…
We all know that a lead is a person who gave us their contact information through a form, because in one way or another, is interested in what we offer.
But what we offer is not necessarily our services. You could have downloaded an eBook without feeling a real need rather than learning. Hence, it is essential to manage leads to rate them.
Finally, as a result of their actions, this person goes to join the database of our company.
Another fact that we all know is that a lead is not a client. It’s someone who wants to be up to date with your content, offers, and promotions.
Let’s say it is in an initial phase of the purchase cycle.
And yes, we all need a lead in the world of digital marketing to advance in that cycle.
This story, however, has a sequel. Once the lead is generated, you must follow a process until you become a customer.
And that’s why we put all our experience on the best lead management on the table.
If the question is how to manage leads, in the world of online marketing the answer would be through lead scoring.
From Zenvia Conversion, we use a labeling system to rate potential customers according to their proximity (or distance) to the sale and what we have called Intelligent Assignment Rules, which consists in distributing the different leads among the sellers.
This Anglo-Saxon term is the process by which we give a score to the leads we have in our database to know if they are cold, warm or hot.
And this has nothing to do with temperature. Fortunately, we do not need a thermometer.
In content marketing there are three concepts to rate leads according to the instance in which they are unemployed within the purchase cycle:
Oh! But they need a push and that is what we are going to see in detail through this note, because from Zenvia Conversion we have witnessed 1,001 times the good, the bad and the ugly of lead management.
And when it comes to rating leads for their management, it’s key that the sales department and the marketing team are 100% aligned.
Do you see what we meant by labeling leads?
This is one of the peculiarities of which we are particularly proud in Zenvia Conversion, given that it perfectly strings the sales team and the marketing team through a single application, but later we will discuss this in more detail…
Many companies don’t have the necessary means to serve all potential customers who enter their Digital Marketing machine.
And that’s when it becomes priority #1 to rate those who have more sales opportunities.
In addition, knowing in depth your potential clients will allow you to personalize the messages to capture more interest and generate more chances of success.
Truth is that within the management of leads, the rating supposes an increase in the efficiency, because it focuses the efforts solely in the leads with greater probability of generating income.
Your team will waste less time and money in selling and more in closing sales.
We are going to review some of the most successful sales strategies available to direct marketing when generating more potential customers.
We all want the same thing: reach the largest number of people by investing the least amount of resources and obtaining the greatest amount of benefits.
Whether you have a physical store or an online store, Internet advertising is the way to promote your business in an accessible way.
Imagine that you have a shop with an attractive showcase in one of the most central streets of your city, open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Not only that. If you create good online advertising campaigns, you will regain the budget invested.
And that’s when the possibilities open up: search engine advertising (Google, Bing or Yahoo), on social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn) and…
If you ask the younger ones, they will probably tell you that this Internet advertising strategy is annoying and intrusive.
But never ineffective…
Email marketing is a strategy that works very well both to convert visits to a website in customers, and to increase sales in any business.
Why?
It is a way to reach the buyer directly by sending an email and you can customize what offers you send to each subscriber.
For example: if you have just launched a product that fits men between 18 and 30 years old, through this strategy you can segment subscribers into a list.
And so you are targeting a more concrete group that has a real interest in what you offer, and is more likely to make a purchase.
Of course, for this it will be necessary to collect emails from people who have reached your web page.
And if Internet advertising is not an option, it opens…
First requirement of web positioning: patience.
Unlike the previous points, through web positioning (SEO) you do not see immediate results.
If you have an online store and your page appears first in the Google results with certain search terms, it is safest to visit you and not the one that appears second.
In fact, it is the right time to remember an old saying: if you wanted to hide a body, the best place would be the second page of Google results.
If your products are attractive, surely the person will make the purchase at the time or save the link to place an order later.
How to enhance this marketing strategy?
The answer is content marketing…
Publish content such as articles, images, games, presentations or eBooks, that are related to the product or service you sell.
That is the key.
And it should be done frequently until Google indexes your content and is able to appear in the first search results.
The path ahead is clear…
Marketing Sherpa draws it clearly: 79% of leads never convert to sales.
That is, we have to make a huge effort in attracting and capturing continuously to convert some leads into sales.
And from Zenvia Conversion we have helped to reduce that gap between leads and sales, through tools such as tagging, personalized templates or intelligent allocation rules, a job that, performed manually, is usually a real nightmare.
Sectors such as automotive, financial and banking services, health sector, telecommunications, real estate, tourism, education or ecommerce…
In each of these, there is someone looking for information before hiring services and, in most cases, the purchase is not made at that time, but different options are investigated, prices are weighed or advantages / disadvantages are weighed.
Why manage these leads well?
According to Forrester, the companies that manage their leads properly generate 50% more leads at a 33% lower cost.
Gartner, for its part, indicates that companies that do good lead management see a 10% increase in their profits over a period of 6 to 9 months.
The truth is that the advantages of a good lead management program are:
After those arguments, everyone will want to nurture those leads as if they were their own children, but since it’s not enough, then we back it up with figures.
An InsideSales.com study found that between 35% and 50% of sales go to the provider who first responds and HubSpot confirmed that response rates decrease as the age of a lead increases.
To make matters worse, 66% of buyers indicate that the consistent communication provided by the sales department is a key influence in the choice of a supplier, according to Genius.com.
The perfect culmination: Market2Lead indicated that well-targeted leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle.
So…
Ok. A visitor became a lead. Its management is that relationship initiated with the contacts of the database, through the sending of mails or communications through other channels such as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.
The idea is to send you content that is related to your time of purchase, looking to guide you until you reach the final stage: yes, the sale.
By the way, it is not just email marketing, also advertising on the Internet through the famous remarketing or retargeting.
This consists in segmenting paid ads on social networks to offer our leads the relevant content at the right time.
Maybe you’re thinking how tedious it must be to do all this…
And that’s why we love the automation of processes, which clearly makes any sector more productive and efficient.
Of course, it is likely that until now some have asked themselves: how to know when to approach a client?
A proposal must be presented only when the lead adds a series of characteristics based on its profile and interest, and that is done through lead scoring.
Of course, a tip: if a lead receives an offer and does not buy the product, it should not be discarded, because they can continue in the funnel until they are riper.
Have you ever saved a telephone contact in the following way: “Mariela Dietetics”?
I think we’ve all done this sometime…
And it is a good associative technique for our memory, but when we manage a business it can be a bit complicated to apply.
I mean, how would we do?
Carlos interested in buying socks? Or Susana asked for a Nissan?
Don’t!
For that there are the labels of WhatsApp Business, a tool capable of categorizing potential customers in each of the stages.
Remember when we talked about cold, warm or hot clients?
This is perfect for rating a lead.
To add labels to a potential client within WhatsApp Business it is necessary to click inside the menu button on the customer’s chat page, choose a label and click on “Save”.
If we want to go beyond the simple labeling of WhatsApp Business, Zenvia Conversion is an app that integrates with a lot of apps and can:
But imagine that additionally you can take notes within the conversation (without the potential client seeing them), to note important issues.
What happens is that Zenvia Conversion is framed within the omnichannel and, therefore, allows reviewing all communication channels and sales, simultaneously, as well as organizing leads in one place.
If something has been 100% clear throughout this note is that it’s not enough, under no circumstances, to generate a lead and start to strafe with offers to sell at any cost.
The ideal way is to classify, nurture and, clearly, manage that lead.
And for this it is essential that we classify those leads according to the phase in which they are inside the funnel of purchase.
In order to achieve our objectives, we have a wide range of possibilities, but we focus on three: Internet advertising, e-mail marketing or web positioning.
And of course, Zenvia Conversion was manufactured just to manage leads. For this reason, our app allows you to schedule calls, meetings, classify prospects or write mails, as well as upload quotes, choose which means to communicate with the potential customer and label them according to their level of interest.
