lead conversion

How can marketing help with profits during an economic downturn? What must businesses do to get started? Read on to find out.

The current economic crisis is prompting businesses to change directions. Many are now focusing on qualifying and converting leads and delivering value to existing customers. What’s more, with the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, businesses are now more equipped to understand their customers better to achieve the aforementioned goals.

How can businesses use marketing to improve their profits, especially amid an economic crisis? What steps should businesses take to get better results? Check out our tips below.

Reexamine your lead scoring strategy

Your lead scoring strategy is what helps you qualify your leads and determine which potential customer is most likely to make a purchase. Lead scoring is a critical step in lead conversion strategy. 

Messing up with your lead scoring can impact your lead conversion results. This is why it’s important to reexamine your lead scoring strategy and check if it’s working well.

Some companies automate lead scoring so their sales and marketing teams can focus on more important tasks. By automating using a system, sales and marketing teams can automatically identify which of the incoming leads they need to focus on.

Focus on converting qualified leads

According to surveys, more than 25% of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) do not get a follow-up from sales. This is a wasted opportunity for driving sales. And in an economic downturn, every dollar counts.

To prevent this from happening, it’s important that, as previously mentioned, you can screen out the leads that are more likely to make a purchase, so you can focus on them and help them make a purchase as soon as possible.

You can generate qualified leads with content marketing, conduct follow-ups, connect with them through email marketing, or use positive customer testimonials and reviews to help speed up their purchase decision.

Work on your CTAs

Your CTAs are also crucial in your lead conversion strategy. CTAs may make or break your marketing campaign. If a CTA doesn’t match the customer’s needs or preferences, they may end up exiting from your website or from your other sales and marketing channels.

For example, having “Learn More” as a CTA may discourage customers that are looking to make an immediate purchase. “Buy Now” may not be effective if the customer needs more information about your product or service.

The point of CTAs is to convince users they need to take action immediately or you risk losing them, but this only works if the CTA matches the stage of the buyer in the buyer’s journey. 

Assess and evaluate your value chain

The final thing that you should remember is to add value for your customers. This can be done only when you understand how your value chain works and determine whether they’re giving value to the end users (your customers).

You can conduct a value chain analysis by doing the following:

• First, identify all your value chain activities. You can do this by having a list of each activity in your company that is essential in the creation of your company’s finished product.

• Second, calculate their costs. Costs such as rent, utilities, and manpower often play a role in value creation.  By identifying your value chain activities and their costs, you can see an overview of how your company is running and which parts are taking so much of your dough.

• Third, determine what your customers perceive as value. This is where it’s important to gather data and feedback from customers to help you understand them better. To get you started, gather data related to why and how your customers make purchase decisions. This helps you understand their intent and what they perceive as valuable.

• Fourth, compare with your competition. Understand the marketing effectiveness of your competitors. Compare how your competitors carry out tasks, what their business strategies are, and their revenue (or other performance) outcomes.

• Lastly, decide on a competitive advantage. After making your comparisons, you’ll already know which parts you are performing better compared to your competitors. It can be the cost, the perceived value of the brand, or the accessibility you provide to your customers.

Gather data from your customers now

Do you want to know how you can effortlessly gather data from your customers to understand them better? Book a FREE demo with our sales and marketing experts now to learn more.

Email metrics are important to assess whether your email campaigns are working to your advantage. Read on to find out more about email metrics and how you can improve your lead conversion with them.

Email marketing is one of the most used strategies nowadays. It helps businesses engage customers and keep the brand on top of mind. The problem is: many businesses don’t know what to look for to know if their emails are working.

That’s why in this article, we’ll list the most important email marketing KPIs you need to watch out for and how you can improve them.

1. Open Rate

The email open rate refers to how many people opened your email out of the total number of recipients. This metric is important in determining whether your subject line is catchy enough to capture the attention of your target audience or whether your brand is trusted by your target audience to open your email.

According to a study, the average email open rate for all industries is 21.33%, so if you score a better rate, that means your campaign performance is above average.

To improve your email open rates, we suggest A/B testing your subject lines, determining the best time to send emails according to your target audience, or conducting email segmentation for your customers.

2. Click Rate

Click rates refer to how many of your delivered emails resulted in a click. This metric is important in determining the number of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your email.

The average click rate globally is 1.27%, so if your result is lower than that, then you might want to try the following:

• Optimize your email content by making them more timely, relevant, and responsive to your target audience’s needs and interests. 
• Testing a more catchy and responsive headline.
• Segmenting your audience
• Changing your lead generation strategy to attract more qualified leads— those interested in engaging with your brand.
  

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the number of recipients who have completed the desired action in your email— clicking on a call-to-action (CTA) button, making a purchase, etc.

There are a number of ways to improve your conversion rate, which include improving your mailing list, making your email content more targeted, or designing a more appealing landing page, as mentioned above.

4. Email Open Time

Email open times refer to how long your audience is taking to open your emails. The shorter the time, the better. This metric allows you to understand if your audience is eager to interact with your email.

To improve your email open times, try determining the best times for a particular segment (ex: customers segmented based on location or job positions).

5. Email Read Time

Email read times refer to how much time your recipients are spending reading your email content. This is important in determining the relevance of your content to your target audience. The longer the time, the better. 

Improving this may require some time and effort (trial and error). But you can start by experimenting with email structures and content types, and by integrating personalization.

6. Email Marketing ROI

Email marketing ROI refers to how much your business is getting from the resources it spent on email marketing like ad spending, manpower, etc. This metric is important to determine whether you should continue with email marketing as a marketing strategy in general.

To improve your email marketing ROI, you need to improve your other email marketing metrics as well. You can also use tools that allow you to implement smart automation. 

This means that the tools will handle the email marketing for you such as sending emails based on schedule or when certain conditions are triggered (e.g. a new subscriber).

This reduces the resources necessary to run email campaigns (i.e. you don’t need to hire additional manpower to perform email marketing tasks), which leads to better email marketing ROI.

Better email marketing with Saphyte

Want to learn more about tools to improve your email marketing performance? Talk to our experts now. Book a FREE demo here.