Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

By Henry Brown

Generating online customers often involves encouraging leads to follow a trail. This could involve clicking on an advert, visiting your website and then buying your product. Some consumers will follow this trail, however many will get lost along the way. It’s worth considering why you’re losing leads and at what point you’re losing them. This post can help you to identify the stages at which you’re losing leads and what you can do to fix this.

Your emails?

Many companies rely on marketing emails to build customers. When sending out emails, it’s important to know how your emails are performing. Are people opening them? Are people replying? Are people clicking on links in your emails?

Email tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact and Sendinblue can allow you to track analytics to figure out exactly how people are engaging with your emails. Getting people to open your emails is the first important step. This includes making sure that your email isn’t triggered by spam filters and that it has a click-worthy subject line. If you’ve got a good open rate, but can’t generate any replies or link clicks, you may want to consider improving the content of your emails. You’re never going to get everyone who opens your emails to turn into a customer, however you should be able to convert at least some customers.

Your ads?

If online advertising is a big part of your marketing strategy, you should also consider the performance of your ads. Only by tracking analytics can you determine whether your ads are actually working.

The average click-through rate for PPC ads is about 2%. If you’re not achieving this, you may want to consider improving your adverts – either by editing the ad itself or changing who you are targeting your ads at. Make sure that your ads are high quality, that you’re launching campaigns at the right time and that you’re choosing the right keywords.

Your search rankings?

Search is a great form of leads. If you’re able to generate customers through search engines, it means that consumers are going out of their way to look for your product or service.

Quite often, your ability to generate customers through search engines comes down to your search rankings. If you’ve got low rankings, you could find that consumers searching for your product or service don’t stumble across your listing, and therefore don’t visit your site. Investing in SEO (search engine optimization) is the best way to improve your rankings. This should then lead to more website traffic.

Your landing page?

Once people have clicked on links in your emails, clicked on your ads or clicked on your search listings, they will likely be taken to a page on your website. Your next step is to turn these visitors into sales.

You can usually use analytics to work out exactly how much traffic your landing pages are getting and where this traffic is coming from. The ‘bounce rate’ can often tell you how long people are staying on your webpage. If your site has a high bounce rate (anything higher than 70%), this is evidence that you’re losing leads once they reach your landing page. This could be due to a variety of reasons such as poor visual design, slow loading times or unhelpful product information. Good website design should be able to lower your bounce rate. Consider if it’s worth paying to redesign your landing pages so that visitors want to stay and proceed.

The checkout process?

For many eCommerce businesses, the checkout process is the final hurdle. If visitors are adding products to their shopping cart, it shows that they are seriously interested in your product. Don’t be alarmed however if many customers abandon their shopping cart. Studies show the average cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. Many website analytics programs are able to tell you your cart abandonment rate. If it’s more than 69.82%, you may want to consider looking into this.

There are a few different reasons as to why customers abandon online shopping carts. The process could be over-complicated or there could be hidden fees added during the process. Consider taking steps to improve your checkout process.

Not all businesses have a checkout process – for some businesses, it’s more of a case of getting people to complete forms or call your phone number. Make sure that you are tracking these actions if they are important to your lead generation process.

__________

Henry Brown is an online marketing executive. When he isn’t talking shop, he’s roaming the streets of London, uncovering the extra-ordinary in the ordinary.