Maria Pergolino Reminds Us: Leads are Listening, Prepare to Tell Them Something Good

You’re driving traffic to your site, and you’re converting the traffic into leads, but how do you convert those leads into customers?

On Tuesday Lee Odden, Maria Pergolino and I presented a B2B Optimization Secrets webinar. We covered pre-click marketing (driving traffic), post-click optimization (converting that traffic into leads) and post-conversion optimization (turning those leads into customers).

Lee did a fantastic job covering SEO tactics for driving traffic, I covered my top tips for converting traffic, and Maria ended the presentation with a bang by providing us with a ton of great information on how to nurture leads. Here are her top five best-practicing for converting leads:

• Establish permission - there are three ways you can legally establish permission to engage a user outside the landing page, but that doesn’t mean all three are correct.
  
  The CAN-SPAM method will grow your database quickly, but relationship quality is unlikely to improve.  The single opt-in approach increases deliverability and sender reputation scores, but assumes that just because a prospect requested info one time, they will want to hear from you again. The double opt-in approach increases deliverability and sender reputation scores, as well as ensures subscribers truly want to hear from you; however, it adds a layer of complexity. 

• Don’t include a form - ask yourself, “is a form absolutely necessary to converting a user?” If not, don’t use it! If you do need to obtain some information to finalize the transaction, keep your form fields minimal by only asking for what you need.

• Use progressive profiling- cut down on the information you need to ask the user at any one time during the conversion process by using progressive profiling. 

• Score your leads- two categories make up lead scoring: demographic scoring and activity scoring. The more complex of the two, activity scoring, involves looking at the number of users who watch a webinar, view a website, mention you on social media platforms, click-through your emails and so forth.

• Optimize using your lead scoring- once you’re done tallying up scores, you need to optimize. Start by reviewing the scores of won and lost opportunities, then look at leads that had high scores but did not turn into opportunities, check the demographic scores, and finally review online behaviors.

I hope the Marketo webinar and our three-part Tell Them Something Good blog series will help you transition more easily to a conversion focused online marketing plan. 

You can still review the first two parts in the series here: Search Engines are Listening, Tell Them Something Good (pre-click marketing), and Landing Pages are Talking and B2B Visitors are Listening, Tell Them Something Good (post-click optimization).