Lead response time – how to convert more leads

1. Educate your marketers about lead response time

Digital and traditional marketing are as different as they are similar. That’s why you need to increase the awareness of your marketing team – especially if your business is new in the digital world.

If your team has been selling face-to-face, the problem of lead response time doesn’t exist for them. The interaction is immediate and its success depends on other factors.

It’s fine if they don’t know. Make your team aware of the issue. Show them this lead response time study to emphasize the problem. But most importantly, be open to their solutions.

2. Optimise your contact channels

These days, a potential customer can reach a small business in dozens of ways:

• various social media profiles, including direct messages and public comments
• phone numbers and e-mails of your company and its employees
• contact forms on your business website
• live chats
• comments on your blog
• third-party lead generation services
• other offline channels, depending on the business type

Control all of them. Search for your old phone numbers on online listings, update contact information on your website, moderate the comments on your blog, and so on.

3. Inform the customer about your response times

Facebook implemented response time badges on business pages for a reason. Customers want to know when to expect a response. They’re one click away from your competition – every minor inconvenience matters.

They will buy in your physical store if it takes five additional minutes. Five more minutes online will probably mean they’ve already checked out from your competition’s website.

4. Automate your lead nurturing process

Customer relationship management systems offer an abundance of functionalities. From automatically updating contact information to creating follow-up chains, these tools can stop you from losing several leads.

But, especially among small businesses, these features often go unnoticed. Updating your website to take full advantage of your CRM will save you a lot of time that you can invest elsewhere.

If your small business offers services based on manual labour, your employees won’t be able to pick up the phone or answer e-mails within 5 minutes. That’s where automated chatbots or e-mails come in handy.

Letting the potential customer know that you’ll be in touch shortly drastically increases the chance to convert them into a client.

Make lead response time your priority

Everyone wants more leads, more sales, just more. So do we here at NerdCow. But more than anything, we want our clients to use their business website just how we built it – to be an efficient digital marketing hub, providing the best ROI possible.

Additional landing pages and advertisements might bring you more leads, increasing your sales. But it’s not the most cost-effective way of achieving your goals. It’s crucial to find the fine line between quantity and quality.

Optimising the lead generation and lead nurturing processes should be your priority, and that includes working on lead response time.