Leads are the lifeblood of just about every small business. They’re the fuel that keeps the engine going. With a steady influx of targeted leads, you’ll make more sales, learn more about your customers and generate more revenue.
However, many startups face two common challenges when it comes to leads:
- Getting the leads in the first place
- Converting the leads into customers
Today, we’ll provide strategies to help you overcome both of these challenges. That way, you can get more leads and convert them into customers (instead of losing them along the way).
Related: Treehouse Internet Group [Google Case Study]
Here are five reasons why your business is losing leads:
- Poor lead magnet
Your lead magnet is more or less the “bribe” that gives your customers a reason to provide you with their email. It should be relatively simple, prominent throughout your website and built around your prospects’ biggest needs.
For example, if your business is focused around real estate, your lead magnet could be something like, “Home buying cheat sheet: five quick tips to find the perfect home.”
If you’re having trouble thinking of a good lead magnet, you can check out this post on five great lead magnet ideas.
Once you have your lead magnet built and ready to go, you should feature it on your homepage, within your posts as well as at the end and on the sidebar of your website. You can also consider adding it as an “exit pop-up” to incentivize visitors to subscribe before they leave your site.
- No email autoresponder (or a weak one)
Once visitors sign up for your email list, what happens?
You should contact them right away with an email auto responder thanking them for subscribing. Your auto responder sequence should typically consist of five to seven emails spread out over one to two weeks.
Within these emails, you should add value by giving users helpful content around their challenges, and then finish off the sequence by giving them the chance to purchase your product or service.
This gives you the best chance to quickly turn your leads into customers.
- You’re not there when they need you
When your prospects give you a call, are you always there to answer the phone and help them with their questions?
Or do they often get no answer, or simply get sent to voicemail? If so, you’re losing a lot of potential leads.
And how about when your prospects message you on Facebook? Are you there to answer, as well, or do they get no response for hours at a time?
You can solve each of these issues quite easily. The first can be solved by hiring a virtual receptionist service that is there to answer the phone 24/7. The second is to use an automated Facebook bot to immediately respond to messages through your Facebook page.
- Poor page load speed
Your website speed goes a long way in determining whether visitors (aka potential leads) stick around your website or quickly leave it.
If your website is taking nearly a full second to load its pages, that’s too slow, and it’s going to cause you to lose leads.
You can take some measures to speed up your website, though. One way is to switch to a faster hosting service. You can find a list of hosting services along with their corresponding speed here.
- Weak content strategy
Is your content structured around what your prospects need? What’s more, do you have content that caters to prospects in different parts of your funnel?
For example, there’s top of funnel content, which caters to people looking for resources, opinions and insight. There’s middle of the funnel content, where people are evaluating whether or not to buy your product. Then there’s bottom of the funnel content where people are looking to find out how to buy your product. Your blog has to have a mix of these types of content.
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A summary of why your business is losing leads
To keep your business functioning at a high level, you need to not just get enough leads, but be able to convert those leads into paying customers.
The strategies we’ve given you here will help you to do both of those things.
What other reasons do you think businesses lose leads? Let us know in the comments below!
