Losing the Lead: Why the Customer Journey is So Critical to Digital Marketing Results
As a digital marketing agency, we’re appropriately focused on getting new prospects into our clients’ sales pipelines. These prospects may be frequenting a business in person, placing an order online, or donating to a charitable organization. We send them to the website, e-commerce store, scheduling tool, or donation page.
And then, we look to our clients to ensure that the leads convert, which is more likely when prospects are handled in a specific and strategic way that turns them into customers, supporters, or donors. The sad thing? Often, a percentage of those leads simply get lost.
Why do leads get lost? Here are the typical reasons we’ve discovered over the years.
Lack of Focus on the Customer Journey
The customer journey encompasses every touchpoint a prospect-turned-customer experiences with your company, from their initial introduction on social media or through advertising to becoming a loyal advocate for your brand. Mapping this journey using tools like Miro can help solidify the concept with your team, ensuring that you’re all paying attention to and maximizing each touchpoint’s effectiveness.
Lack of CRM Process
Many businesses don’t understand the incredible value of a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) process. While CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot are valuable, some companies don’t have the budget, technical acumen, or person-hours on their existing team to cover this critical “last mile” of the customer journey. This means that prospect leads that flow in can disappear into the ether, with no specific team member assigned to follow up and keep in touch.
Lack of Understanding of Lead Times
Some people who aren’t professional marketers or salespeople don’t realize how many leads may turn into customers or referrals months or even years after they come in. If someone inquires about your organization, you’ve gotten their attention. Now you need to use responsible marketing to KEEP their attention through ongoing follow-up and monthly outreach.
Lack of a Sales Department
A sales team typically understands the value of each lead. They’re trained to suss out the likelihood of each prospect becoming a customer. This knowledge alone can help ensure leads are tracked properly. The folks whose income depends on sales will typically pay more attention to closing those leads. Is it time to hire a salesperson to ensure your leads don’t get lost?
How Can You Make Up for What’s Lacking?
If you see yourself or your company in the “Lack of” paragraphs above, don’t worry; there are many things you can do to keep in touch with your prospects once you’ve gotten their attention.
Here are a few suggestions you can implement right away.
Map Out the Customer Journey
Do you know all of the customer touchpoints that your prospect goes through? You may be surprised that you don’t. Every single point of contact is critical.
When they fill out a form, do they get a well-written thank you for sharing their data with you, with a link to valuable information on your website to add proof to your marketing message?
When someone calls your business, does the phone get answered by a polite and interested professional? If they leave a message, do they get a return call right away from someone who is vested in helping them with their request or problem?
When a customer makes a purchase, do they get a follow-up call or email to ensure the product or service performs as it should? There are many interaction points in a customer journey; not paying adequate attention to them will negatively affect your sales.
Designate Responsible Parties
When raising my son, I was adamant that a few attendees be “assigned” to watch the young ones whenever a family outing occurred near a pool or other body of water. “If everybody’s watching the toddler, nobody’s watching the toddler,” was my mantra. No child was going to drown on my watch. I firmly believe that when too many people are responsible for anything, it makes it super easy to think, “Somebody else has got that,” when in fact, nobody does.
Prospect lead handling is very similar. If everybody’s responsible for making sure leads get followed up, is anyone verifying that it’s getting done? Making one person responsible for ensuring that everyone involved is doing their due diligence is an excellent first step to cleaning up the last few steps of the customer journey and maximizing conversion.
Track Your Leads but Keep It Simple
Lead tracking doesn’t have to be complicated or require a considerable investment. A simple spreadsheet may be enough, depending on your organization’s size. Early in my career, I used a file box and index cards. I was selling a service with a long-lead sales cycle and was able to efficiently keep in touch with prospects that needed to get to know us before spending tens of thousands of dollars on our services.
Consistent attention to your prospect lists is more important than complex features. Just start! As you optimize your lead tracking system, you can add automation and figure out what will work best so you invest in the right support platform.
Create a Monthly Missive
For prospects with long sales lead times and customers from whom you’d like to get repeat or referral business, a monthly email newsletter will always be a great way to keep in touch and turn those names into action. Fill it with updates on your organization and links to helpful content on your website so the recipient looks forward to receiving it. You might even add a contest that rewards readers with a gift card or discount to add even more value.
There’s nothing more boring than monthly emails that are loaded up with 100% promotion. It’s disrespectful to your prospect/customer’s time and a surefire way to get readers to hit the unsubscribe button. So your monthly missive must be interesting and useful.
How Can We Help?
PopSpeed Digital Marketing LLC can help you optimize your customer journey. From attracting new leads and getting click-throughs to your website on social media to managing your website forms and writing, designing, and deploying a monthly email message, we can help you get new leads and nurture them to conversion.