How to turn leads into customers
Who doesn’t recognise the Nike swoosh? While the multi-billion brand is now synonymous with athleisure wear and its ‘Just Do It’ tagline, the original product, Nike shoes, were first sold from the boot of co-founder Phil Knight’s car.
Nike sold its first 50,000 pairs of shoes through word of mouth alone. Phil Knight and Jeff Johnson, Nike’s very first sales employee, would go and meet with prospects, talk to them, and turn them into customers and later loyal, raving fans.
Together, Knight and Johnson went out and got customers. They would keep an index card for each customer, noting down details such as shoe size, favourite distance, contact details etc. Before long, they had a growing database of customers and prospects which they used to keep in touch with customers, promote Nike shoes and close more sales.
This process of meeting with potential customers, talking to them, getting them interested in your product that eventually leads to a purchase is called a sales funnel.
While Knight and Johnson used the old school method of knocking on doors and chatting to coaches, running clubs and potential customers, the same steps to make a sale still apply to many businesses today, but with a whole new spread of methods and platforms to choose from.
You don’t have a business if you don’t make sales. And you won’t make sales if you don’t market your product or service. People won’t know where to find you if they aren’t aware of your brand.
To make any sale, you need to channel Knight and Johnson and market your product or service.
This will attract people who are interested in what you have to offer, with the possibility of them becoming your customers.
You need to build out a killer sales funnel to bring in prospects who are genuinely interested in your product, and are likely to buy.
How do I start building my sales funnel?
65% of businesses say generating traffic and leads is their biggest marketing challenge.
That act of attracting potential customers to buy your product or service is called lead generation. When done well, it can bring in 113% more revenue than companies who don’t focus on it.
A lead is someone who is interested in what you have to offer. They may have walked into your shop, visited your website, or signed up for your newsletter.
It is only when they purchase something from you that they become a customer.
While you start off by broadcasting your product or service to as wide a range of audience as possible, your sales funnel will gradually filter out those who aren’t interested in your offer, or who aren’t prepared to buy. That’s where the funnel metaphor comes in -- you narrow down your potential customers to turn them into paying ones.
When selling Nike shoes, Knight and Johnson often went the extra mile to really connect with their customers. They took the time to get to know them, sent Christmas and birthday cards, and gave them free t-shirts. The more they knew about their customers, the better they could sell.
The same goes for any business. Know your customer well and your sales funnel will have a solid foundation to build and improve on.
Do the groundwork, aka research
Less than 40% of marketers are using consumer research to drive decisions.
This probably explains why 46% of 20,000 consumers from 20 countries broke up with a brand because they were receiving “irrelevant content pushes”.
Businesses are losing customers simply by not doing proper, ongoing research, which is arguably the only way to truly understand them.
So don’t even think about planning your sales funnel without doing deep research! The more you know about your customer and what they want, the more specific and effective your messaging will be.
Don’t base it on intuition or past experience either. Remember -- this isn’t a guessing game, and just imagining yourself in your customer’s shoes isn’t going to cut it. Taking this step lightly can result in an ineffective sales funnel, leading to a huge waste of your time!
To start, take a closer look at how your business is run. Alexander Osterwalder, a Swiss business theorist and consultant, came up with a “business model canvas” to help business owners better understand how their business works and their value proposition.
To do so, ask yourself the following questions:
Who are our most important customers?
Which one of our customers’ problems are we helping to solve?
What are our customers really willing to pay for?
What do they currently pay for?
What key resources do our value propositions require?
Through which channels do our customer segments want to be reached?
How do other companies reach them now?
Think of these steps as the essential building blocks to map out your sales funnel. It’s often all too easy to jump straight to posting ads, sending email promos and making small tweaks as you go along. Not having a clear direction or research-backed strategy can often result in targeting the wrong audience or using the wrong messaging channels.
Also, don’t try to jump on every hot marketing tactic or trend and shoehorn it to fit your brand. Really understand your audience, competitors and business to figure out the opportunities and strategies that work for your brand. Once you have that, you’re already one step ahead of the competition.
After getting a clear idea on your business model, you can start to do more specific research about your audience and competitors.
I recommend focusing on these three main areas. You’ll probably find that they intersect anyway. For instance, uncovering the motivations behind your customers’ purchasing decisions may lead to key insights that influence the market and your competitors.
The main point is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- don’t skip the research part, and don’t breeze through it either!
Here’s what to focus on for the rest of your research:
Lock down your goals
Concrete, specific goals are the guiding flag posts for any good sales funnel. These will help you track progress and give you some useful insight towards your marketing strategy.
Your sales funnel goals should align with your business objectives and be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).
Take into account your average sales cycle, upcoming revenue goals and how many customers, on average, will be needed to reach those goals. This will help you define how many leads you need to bring in per month.
Understand the competition
Whatever industry you’re in, by marketing you are competing for the attention of your audience. Competition can be fierce, especially with so many marketing channels on offer today.
While competitive analysis isn’t exactly thrilling to do, it is necessary to stay on top of your game and discover reasons why customers should choose your product over everyone else’s.
Start by listing down your competitors and categorising them based on how similar your products are, and whether you are targeting the same audience.
Next, take a closer look at how they position themselves in the market based on their social media platforms and websites. What is the brand messaging like? How does that influence their pricing? How do their customers feel about their business?
Collecting this information will help you create better strategies to dominate the market, and give you helpful insight towards your sales funnel messaging and planning.
Know your target audience
Whether you do online research, customer interviews or surveys, you want to collect data from lots of people. Knuckling down and doing some serious market research on your customers will help you fine-tune your marketing efforts and create more personalised sales funnels for them.
Customer research isn’t a one-time thing. It should be something you continually develop and review to learn more about your customer’s ever-changing habits and preferences, and your target market.
Building out your sales funnel
Research done and dusted? It’s now time to gather all that you’ve learnt and outline your sales funnel. This means mapping out the actual actions you’ll take to achieve your objectives.
You can use this sales funnel as the starting point for your business needs, and refine it as you learn more about which messaging channels or tactics are a better fit for your audience.
A sales funnel can be broken down into these stages:
Each stage will bring the lead closer to becoming your customer.
How do you attract the right people to your product, and turn them into leads and - hopefully - customers?
Give visitors an offer they can’t resist
To find people who are interested in buying your product, you need to tell people about it and how great it is.
Advertising is the first step to get you leads. Whether that’s using social media, paid ads, blog articles or your website, your main aim is to tell people about your products and brand, but with an added twist.
You want to attract visitors by giving them something of value. Remember all that research you did earlier on? This is where it really comes in handy. Knowing what is important to customers and how they choose your product will offer serious clues to this.
You want to offer these people something that they can’t say no to. Something that piques their interest and is worth parting their email address for.
This offer is called a lead magnet. As the name suggests, your offer acts as a magnet to draw leads in. It convinces them to stay in touch by giving you their name and contact info in exchange for it.
Your advertisement should hint at this offer, and persuade visitors to click on the link and become a lead for your business.
Deciding on what your lead magnet is will depend on your research findings. What do your customers think about your product? How can your product make their lives better, healthier, or more productive? How can your offer amplify your product’s value?
Maybe it’s an e-book, a checklist or an educational video series. Whatever you decide, make sure it’s something your prospect will find useful and remember your brand by.
Once you have your offer locked down, you need to place it somewhere that visitors can easily get it in exchange for their contact information. That’s the second stage of your sales funnel.
Where do visitors turn into leads?
Your ads paid off, and there are people who are interested in taking you up on that offer. Having a landing page, or single web page dedicated to your offer, comes in handy here.
Setting up a whole new web page, writing copy and designing it can seem like a lot of work just to get new leads. In fact, a 2018 report by Omnisend found that although landing pages are the least popular type of signup form, they have the highest conversion rate of 23%. Meanwhile, popups, the most popular signup form, have the second-lowest conversion rate of 3%.
Setting up a landing page may be more tedious than a Facebook lead-gen form, or a website popup, but the leads that do come through will be of higher quality and are more likely to become paying customers.
Think of it this way. The quicker you make it to get your offer, the more people will sign up because there’s less friction. Whereas if people go to your landing page, read its content and still opt in, you know that their intent is high with a bigger chance of them being interested in your product itself. While it’s not set in stone, it’s still a useful way of weeding out low quality leads.
Remember how Knight and Johnson went to each potential customer to showcase their Nike shoes personally and follow up on each lead? A landing page essentially does the same job, just online.
That’s why having relevant, persuasive copy is so important. Coupled with good design, your landing page is your salesperson that never sleeps.
Keep in touch with your leads
With your leads’ contact information at hand, you can now build out your email list -- the digital equivalent of Knight and Johnson’s index cards they kept for each customer.
Email lists should be the main star of your marketing efforts, as they have a significantly higher ROI compared to other forms of marketing. In fact, email marketing has a median ROI of 122%, with a return over four times higher than other marketing strategies!
Make emails your best friend. With them, you can directly engage with your customers with personalised, friendly content that will keep your customers loyal to your brand. Keep delivering value to your customers and they will be more likely to stick around.
In this part of your sales funnel, you can send out drip emails, or automated emails sent on a schedule. For example, the first email could be a welcome note, thanking your leads for downloading your offer. A few days later, you could send another email with more information on your product and its benefits. The third one could be a discount code for them to use, and so on.
With the average order value of an email being at least three times higher than that of social media, emails are the best way to make sales online.
Measure, improve, and optimise
Once your funnel is up and running, measure its performance based on KPIs that directly relate to the platforms and tactics used.
Use these metrics as a starting point for your sales funnels:
Advertisements (e.g. social media posts, paid ads)
Click-through rate
Landing page
Conversion rate
Bounce rate
Pageviews
Time spent on page
Emails
Open rate
Click-through rate
Conversion rate
Review how well each part of the funnel did, and improve based on the data. If you missed your lead target number by a significant percentage, go back to the drawing board and re-look at your offer. Maybe you didn’t quite get to the heart of what your prospects want. Otherwise you can easily identify the weak spots in your funnel by looking at the key metrics for each channel. If your landing page click-through rate is low, consider changing the headline or lead with a stronger call to action. Or if your email open rate is down, it’s probably time to relook at your subject lines and make them more relevant and engaging.
Just remember that there is no winning or losing here! Either way, you get to learn more about your prospects which will only help you refine your marketing strategies more, and build a stronger sales funnel.
Take a value-first approach
Your sales funnel will only work if you really understand your prospects and what they want. Once you’ve got that figured out, it’s all down to coming up with a great offer, and persuading them with engaging copy and valuable content.
As a final note, don’t sweat too much about the specific platforms you will use. Figure out your message and offer first, and take it from there. The key thing is to keep your customers’ needs in mind, and make sure that your product really does help them in some way. A big part of Nike’s success was the dedicated attention Knight and Johnson gave to their customers, turning them into fans. They went out to find them, listened, and made them fall in love with their product as a result.
Your sales funnel can replicate that process, and extend its reach to a much wider audience in a shorter amount of time. Taking a value-first approach will make your leads more likely to purchase from you, and create the start of a lasting connection with them.
By: Tan Shing Yi
Conversion Copywriter at Lightwork Labs