Lead Nurturing Boosts Conversion Rate by 400%

October 17, 2012

Are you missing sales opportunities because your direct mail or other print marketing is generating leads but your salespeople aren’t able to sift through them, qualify them, and act on the most qualified leads quickly enough? Is the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns being impacted by a limited view of the customer?

If so, you’re not alone. Fortunately, there is good news. Let’s look at one large international company that took the time to integrate its lead generation and lead nurturing programs, creating a holistic view of the customer, and by doing so, boosted its conversion rate by 400%!

Let’s see how it did it.

The company was highly successful. In fact, it was generating a very high volume of leads. Its challenge wasn’t that its marketing was ineffective—it wasn’t. The company’s challenge was that it was not qualifying those leads and distributing them appropriately to the right salespeople to follow up on a timely and effective basis.

The company began to channel all of its customer information—customer service contacts, transactional data, marketing data, Web data—into a single, comprehensive database. This gave it a 360-degree view of its customers’ behavior. Not just during the sales process, but from the lead generation all the way to conversion. Then the company de-duped its data, cleansed it, and standardized it.

With its data clean, accurate, and in one centralized location, the company was able to improve the effectiveness of its lead generation efforts. It was able to deploy multi-channel campaigns using information and knowledge about the customer gained from other channels through which that customer was interacting. Communications were also more precisely targeted based on a holistic view of that customer.

Using this information, the marketer implemented a comprehensive lead qualification and distribution process that put qualified leads into the hands of the right salespeople at the right time.

For “warm” leads (people who showed an interest in the company’s products but who were not necessarily ready to buy), the company developed a lead nurturing process that communicated with those leads in relevant and timely ways until they became sales-ready.

The results? By increasing the efficiency of its campaign execution and setting up an automated process for nurturing leads until they are ready to be distributed to a sales channel, the company has increased its lead-to- opportunity conversion rate by a whopping 400%!

Not every marketer will have the level of sophistication or the economies of scale as this one, but this example illustrates the power of centralizing your data, creating a more comprehensive view of your customers, and using that information to develop a more effective lead generation and distribution process.

Don’t have a limited view of your customer. Boost the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts by channeling all of your customer information into one database and put qualified leads into the hands of the right salespeople.

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