In episode #596, Eric and Neil explain how you can convert leads into customers. Tune in to hear what steps you can take to increase your sales revenue.
TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES:
- [00:27] Today’s Topic: How to Convert Leads into Customers
- [00:34] Eric and Neil both get leads from their website, but only convert about 5% into customers.
- [00:52] Converting comes down to nurturing, because you have to coax people into being ready to buy.
- [01:05] If 5% of your leads are qualified, you could follow up in various ways, but it could take a long time.
- [01:48] Eric’s company sends an introductory email.
- [02:02] He has also created a great channel via the Growth Everywhere podcast.
- [02:29] Nurture people with content over and over.
- [02:39] Most of your site visitors and leads will buy right away, but many will be hard to convert over time.
- [03:03] Real-person engagement helps convert people who aren’t sure.
- [03:14] This means attending conferences, hosting live events, Facebook Live Q&A’s, etc.
- [03:40] When you do polls using Zoom, you can ask people questions that will help you find new ways to approach your customers.
- [04:05] See which of the people you are trying to convert are in your area and make sure they attend a live event.
- [04:54] You should also be engaging your customers on social media, which is a great way to convert.
- [05:16] When people have questions or problems, don’t pitch your product, just be there to answer questions and prove yourself useful.
- [05:46] That’s it for today!
- [05:58] Go to Singlegrain.com/Giveway for a special marketing tool giveaway!
The post How to Convert Leads into Customers | Ep. #596 appeared first on Marketing School Podcast.
Full Transcript of The Episode
Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about how you can convert leads into customers. Neil, where do you think this all starts?
Neil Patel: Well, we both collects leads from our website. What's the thing that you notice about most of your leads?
Eric Siu: They take a long time to buy.
Neil Patel: What else do you notice from those leads? If you got 100 leads, how many of them are good?
Eric Siu: Five percent max.
Neil Patel: Most of them are junk. When you're trying to convert your leads into customers, you got to focus on the right ones, and a lot of that comes down to nurturing because most people aren't ready to buy right away, and you have to, hopefully, move them along from being a "marketing qualified lead" and turn them into a sales qualified lead.
Let's say if 5% of your leads are qualified, you could focus on those 5%, talk to them, email them, use chatbots, whatever you can to convert them, but the money is really in the people who aren't ready, and you have to nurture them and work their way up and be with them until they're ready to become a customer, and that takes a long time. Sometimes, it could be a few months. Sometimes, it could be a year.
What's the main strategy that you're using right now to keep your brand out there, create the awareness, so, that way, all the people who aren't ready to buy from you yet or can't afford you still have you as top of mind?
Eric Siu: I'll take this in the concept of a services business, the agency. Really simple to understand. We sell marketing services. What we do when they first come in is we try to ... I'm not going to go too granular here, but the first email is an introduction email, and then we try to segment people out. Your business does over 5 or 10 million dollars a year, maybe less, or you don't have a business. Then we can market to you accordingly, but a high level, because I've created so much marketing content around Growth Everywhere, for example, every single week, there dripped a piece of content in Growth Everywhere because those stories never, ever change, and it's helpful content for people, and then we have new blog posts. They will basically show up on Tuesdays, for example, so it's an automatic blog to RSS feed, and then they'll be push new blog posts, and then, at the very bottom, there's a signature that says, "By the way, if you're looking for marketing help, we have marketing services here. You can click on this." We're just nurturing them with content over and over, and that works out well for us.
Neil Patel: I was talking with Ryan from HubSpot. He gave me an interesting stat, and I believe him in this because I've seen something similar. Most the people who come to your site and become leads, they'll either buy right away or they're the right type of customer. The ones that you're nurturing over time tend not to do that well and they don't convert well over time. What I found is dripping people content, yeah, it keeps you top of mind, but it doesn't convert enough people into customers, and you're probably seeing that, as well.
Eric Siu: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Neil Patel: What I found is real person engaging is what helps convert a lot of those people who are "not ready yet" to eventually come back and buy from you. That's things like conferences. That's things like doing the Marketing School Live Event that we once did. That's things like doing Facebook Live or a Q&A or webinars. You can't just do drips in content. If you're not engaging from a human-to-human level, don't expect most these leads to convert into "customers" in the future.
Eric Siu: One hundred percent. Neil's right. Webinar's a really easy way to do it because you do a webinar, you're going to see the same people joining, and when you do polls in the webinar, like Zoom ... I use Zoom for webinars. You're going to ask them what their revenues are, what their struggles are, all that kind of stuff, and it shows up in a webinar report afterwards, and then you can sic your salespeople on it. That's one way to do it.
The other way is we actually look at everybody on our list. We enrich them with Clearbit, and then we see who's qualified. We'll use Excel just to break things up, and then we can have our salespeople reach out with additional content and also try to get them on the phone, as well. That's more of like a sales kind of tactic, but also looking and then seeing which one of these people are in your area, maybe throw in a dinner, maybe doing a live event, which we are going to do another one by the end of the year, by the way, FYI.
Neil Patel: You're doing the dinner tomorrow.
Eric Siu: No, Tuesday. Doing the dinner Tuesday.
Neil Patel: I always get the dates wrong.
Eric Siu: We're taking it a step up. You start, you seed stuff, the foundation first, with content, and you take it a step up. What Neil's saying is completely right. The kind of nurturing over time, that's just the table stakes, bare minimum. We have gotten people to buy from us, but it did take two years to get them to buy, and so these are some of our best customers, but you have to send ... I know when we do a new webinar, all of the great people, they jump on it. When we do a new lead magnet that's really good, like data that we have that we spent months on, people jump on it and that starts to generate more conversations. Neil's completely right.
Neil Patel: [inaudible 00:04:54] engaging just from webinars or in-person meetings. You should also be doing that on the social web, too. We talked about this in the previous episode. The biggest problem most companies have with their social profiles is that they don't engage. It's not a one-way channel. It's a two-way channel. Not only are you supposed to tell people about updates about your company, but when they have questions, you should be helping out. When people are complaining about your competitors, you should be helping out. You shouldn't be pitching your product. You should just be helping first, and then, eventually, you can get into pitching, but by engaging in person and through the social web, you'll be able to convert more people into customers. Maybe not tomorrow, but over time.
The leads that are the 5% that are your most "hot leads" or they look like your zebra, that's who you should focus on first. Engage with everyone else, and, over time, some of those will convert into customers.
Eric Siu: Great. That's it for today, but before we go, go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to look at the giveaway that we change from time to time. Check it out. See you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: Today, we're going to talk about how you can convert leads into customers. Neil, where do you think this all starts?
Neil Patel: Well, we both collects leads from our website. What's the thing that you notice about most of your leads?
Eric Siu: They take a long time to buy.
Neil Patel: What else do you notice from those leads? If you got 100 leads, how many of them are good?
Eric Siu: Five percent max.
Neil Patel: Most of them are junk. When you're trying to convert your leads into customers, you got to focus on the right ones, and a lot of that comes down to nurturing because most people aren't ready to buy right away, and you have to, hopefully, move them along from being a "marketing qualified lead" and turn them into a sales qualified lead.
Let's say if 5% of your leads are qualified, you could focus on those 5%, talk to them, email them, use chatbots, whatever you can to convert them, but the money is really in the people who aren't ready, and you have to nurture them and work their way up and be with them until they're ready to become a customer, and that takes a long time. Sometimes, it could be a few months. Sometimes, it could be a year.
What's the main strategy that you're using right now to keep your brand out there, create the awareness, so, that way, all the people who aren't ready to buy from you yet or can't afford you still have you as top of mind?
Eric Siu: I'll take this in the concept of a services business, the agency. Really simple to understand. We sell marketing services. What we do when they first come in is we try to ... I'm not going to go too granular here, but the first email is an introduction email, and then we try to segment people out. Your business does over 5 or 10 million dollars a year, maybe less, or you don't have a business. Then we can market to you accordingly, but a high level, because I've created so much marketing content around Growth Everywhere, for example, every single week, there dripped a piece of content in Growth Everywhere because those stories never, ever change, and it's helpful content for people, and then we have new blog posts. They will basically show up on Tuesdays, for example, so it's an automatic blog to RSS feed, and then they'll be push new blog posts, and then, at the very bottom, there's a signature that says, "By the way, if you're looking for marketing help, we have marketing services here. You can click on this." We're just nurturing them with content over and over, and that works out well for us.
Neil Patel: I was talking with Ryan from HubSpot. He gave me an interesting stat, and I believe him in this because I've seen something similar. Most the people who come to your site and become leads, they'll either buy right away or they're the right type of customer. The ones that you're nurturing over time tend not to do that well and they don't convert well over time. What I found is dripping people content, yeah, it keeps you top of mind, but it doesn't convert enough people into customers, and you're probably seeing that, as well.
Eric Siu: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Neil Patel: What I found is real person engaging is what helps convert a lot of those people who are "not ready yet" to eventually come back and buy from you. That's things like conferences. That's things like doing the Marketing School Live Event that we once did. That's things like doing Facebook Live or a Q&A or webinars. You can't just do drips in content. If you're not engaging from a human-to-human level, don't expect most these leads to convert into "customers" in the future.
Eric Siu: One hundred percent. Neil's right. Webinar's a really easy way to do it because you do a webinar, you're going to see the same people joining, and when you do polls in the webinar, like Zoom ... I use Zoom for webinars. You're going to ask them what their revenues are, what their struggles are, all that kind of stuff, and it shows up in a webinar report afterwards, and then you can sic your salespeople on it. That's one way to do it.
The other way is we actually look at everybody on our list. We enrich them with Clearbit, and then we see who's qualified. We'll use Excel just to break things up, and then we can have our salespeople reach out with additional content and also try to get them on the phone, as well. That's more of like a sales kind of tactic, but also looking and then seeing which one of these people are in your area, maybe throw in a dinner, maybe doing a live event, which we are going to do another one by the end of the year, by the way, FYI.
Neil Patel: You're doing the dinner tomorrow.
Eric Siu: No, Tuesday. Doing the dinner Tuesday.
Neil Patel: I always get the dates wrong.
Eric Siu: We're taking it a step up. You start, you seed stuff, the foundation first, with content, and you take it a step up. What Neil's saying is completely right. The kind of nurturing over time, that's just the table stakes, bare minimum. We have gotten people to buy from us, but it did take two years to get them to buy, and so these are some of our best customers, but you have to send ... I know when we do a new webinar, all of the great people, they jump on it. When we do a new lead magnet that's really good, like data that we have that we spent months on, people jump on it and that starts to generate more conversations. Neil's completely right.
Neil Patel: [inaudible 00:04:54] engaging just from webinars or in-person meetings. You should also be doing that on the social web, too. We talked about this in the previous episode. The biggest problem most companies have with their social profiles is that they don't engage. It's not a one-way channel. It's a two-way channel. Not only are you supposed to tell people about updates about your company, but when they have questions, you should be helping out. When people are complaining about your competitors, you should be helping out. You shouldn't be pitching your product. You should just be helping first, and then, eventually, you can get into pitching, but by engaging in person and through the social web, you'll be able to convert more people into customers. Maybe not tomorrow, but over time.
The leads that are the 5% that are your most "hot leads" or they look like your zebra, that's who you should focus on first. Engage with everyone else, and, over time, some of those will convert into customers.
Eric Siu: Great. That's it for today, but before we go, go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to look at the giveaway that we change from time to time. Check it out. See you tomorrow.
Announcer: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.