Capturing a lead is referred to as collecting the basic information about an interested customer including their name, number, email address, and organization’s stature. Lead capturing is a common term used when pitching marketing strategies. As information is the most valuable asset for a company, a lot of processes go behind designing a successful lead capture strategy. Some of which are mentioned in this article.
Determining Individual Responsibility
When implementing a successful lead capture strategy, it’s critical to define the roles and responsibilities of your marketing team. Without clearly defined responsibilities, the leads might get tangled in the complications of operations and you might lose a potential customer.
A well-defined strategy is necessary because it’s confusing or even spammy to customers if multiple salespersons reach out to them for the same purpose despite them being interested in the product.
Defining Sales Funnel Stages
Most startups don’t have a well-defined sales funnel in place. If you are one of them, initially consider developing a sales funnel that starts from capturing the leads and ends in the sales. Without a delineated sales funnel, you won’t even know when a lead falls off your radar.
There are four stages of a sales funnel. The lead, market qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), and sales.
Lead is the top layer that’s determined by the lead capture strategy.
Leads transfer to MQLs when your salespersons have contacted them and they’ve shown interest.
SQL leads have been nurtured by your team and are close to completing a deal.
And the last part is sales, which is the closure.
Utilizing a Lead Capture App
It’s tough for most organizations to follow every lead through their journey without having a dedicated team for that. Dedicated lead capture apps are CRM software that tracks leads from the moment they leave their contact info with you, until the completion of sales. With lead capture apps, you get to have real-time data about the leads that promote the implementation of a successful lead-capturing strategy.
Lead capture apps also make sure that your team has the latest data on the leads and multiple salespersons don’t engage a single lead, saving you resources.
Data Collection
You need to collect and organize clean data from your leads at every stage of the lead generation process. Without ample data, your team won’t be able to decode which demographic the customer is in and what is the best strategy to engage them. Some customers prefer calls, and some are more comfortable with emails. If you keep pushing emails to the leads that don’t even understand your language, it’d be futile.
Data collection is also important when nurturing leads.
Nurture Your Leads
Gathering information from a lead and engaging them once is not the best approach to secure sales. You need to keep nurturing them by providing relevant information about your product, and the service you are offering, and helping them in any way they need. Throughout the buyer’s journey, your team must keep in touch with them.
Keep Track of Lead Capture Strategies
Employ multiple strategies for different segments of leads. If your funnel is new and doesn’t have an optimized strategy, keeping track of different approaches might be the best alternative to implement a better lead-capturing strategy.
Design multiple strategies and keep applying them to different leads. Ensure that you’re keeping track of the conversion rate of each one.
For example, one lead capture strategy might involve engaging the leads in an aggressive manner that directs them to purchase within a set amount of time to avail of a discount. The other might involve a more general tone that offers them a bundle pack.
Creating Gated Content
As lead capturing is the process of gathering information, gated content–that asks your leads to fill out a form to get a certain download–helps a lot. Produce content that’s valuable to your audience and offer them for free in return for their information. If they find your content valuable, they might be more inclined to buy your product at a premium.
Use a Chatbot
Chatbots are effective in gathering information from your audience in real time. Whenever someone shows interest in your website, the automated chatbot is triggered and offers them help to navigate through the website. That way, you can gather their info in real time, and if your executives are present, they can initiate talks from within the website itself.
Offer Free Trials on Your Website
Offering your audience a free trial in return for their contact and personal info is often an effective strategy to implement in capturing leads.
Once your leads are hung with your product, it’s challenging to move out of them. Google offering a free one-month trial of YouTube Premium is a great example. Once you’ve taken the offer, you can’t ever go back to watching ads.
Use Gamification Strategies in Forms
Gamification is introducing gaming-like mechanics into your lead capture forms. Gamification increases interaction and encourages your audience to leave their personal info more than traditional longer forms.
Create quizzes in your forms that allow your customers to entertain themselves by scoring points. Ask for their details when it’s time to show the scores.
Use Multi-Level Forms
Just as the name suggests, multi-level forms are tweaked traditional forms. They consist of the same fields but are broken into parts. The user fills up their name and email in the first form and then proceeds to fill in other details in the next parts.
Multi-level forms don’t let the users trigger the flea reaction that is presented by longer forms.
Offer Discounts and Coupons
Offer your leads discounts and coupons when they put their info in your lead capture form.
It’s not necessary to customize coupons for each of your leads. Even a limited-time discount that doesn’t end ever, works quite well too. Shuffle between different types of discounts to analyze which one works the best so that you can implement them better in your lead capture strategies.
The Bottom Line
A successful lead-capturing strategy requires the determination of individual roles, defining a sales funnel, utilizing a lead-capture app, and creating gated content. Apart from that, PPC ads, discounts, free trials, and social media can also help achieve your sales goals.
