Is there an ideal lead conversion rate?

Converting leads becomes important as it signifies the success of your marketing and sales and also ensures you keep up with your competitor.

This article will discuss the ins and out of lead conversions and some of the most effective conversion tactics to bring more customers.

#1 What is lead conversion?

Lead conversion is a process where marketing and sales collaborate to convert more leads into customers

using nurturing tactics like retargeting, re-engagement email campaigns, automated drip sequences, etc.

While lead generation focuses entirely on acquiring leads from different channels, lead conversion converts them into paying customers to generate revenue.

#2 Why is lead conversion important?

A huge number of leads will not drive any revenue as long as they aren’t paying you money. Thus, all your lead generation effort will go in vain.

So, a good lead conversion rate will ensure that you’re getting expected returns on your investment from lead generation efforts and money.

Besides, the success of the marketing and sales team is reflected in the revenue generated, so if leads are not converting, you will be answerable to the company's stakeholders.

#3 How to calculate lead conversion rate

The lead conversion rate formula is:

Lead conversion rate = Total conversions/total leads X 100

You take the total number of conversions and divide it by the total number of leads you generate in a specific period to get the conversion rate.

For example, if you generated 500 new sales qualified leads in 6 months and 100 of them became your customer, the math would look like this:

100 divided by 500 = 0.2

0.2 x 100 = 20%

So, your lead conversion rate would be 20%.

What is a good lead conversion rate?

Lead conversion involves various touch points, so getting a single number might not give you the right metric.

Instead, focus on the average number of lead conversions by considering different channels, the type of leads (MQL/SQL), or various touch points such as emails, social media, website downloads, etc.

Giving you an exact number for a reasonable  lead conversion rate would not be the right answer. The rate at which leads convert depends upon

• Industry type: Retail, Advertising, Travel, Technology, etc.
• Type of conversion: Landing page, email conversion, etc.
• Types of leads: warm leads, cold leads, hot leads.

A study was done by Unbounce, which analyzed lead generation landing pages across 10 different industries (with a total of 74,551,421 visitors), and the average landing page conversion rate was 4.02%.

Here’s an industry-wise breakdown of the conversion rate for landing pages. Conversion rate carries, even though slightly, across different industries.

You can take the average conversion rate, i.e., 4.02% as a benchmark if you belong in the list of these 10 industries, but it’s still best to run experiments and curate your data to assess if your lead conversions are good or not.

#4 How to build an effective lead conversion process?

The lead conversion process involves various tactics that work simultaneously towards converting the right lead. In this section, we’ll cover some of the best ways to convert leads:

1. Develop a lead scoring process

One important factor upon which other lead conversion strategies are based is qualifying leads. Lead scoring helps a business do that. 

In lead scoring, you use certain criteria to qualify leads for their sales readiness and devise further conversion strategies.

The criteria can be:

• The marketing assets they interacted with the most
• Their demographic and occupation information
• Their level of social engagement

The idea behind developing a lead scoring process is to let the sales team prioritize which leads shows higher intent to buy and focus on nurturing them. As the lead score increases, so does the sales team's interest in converting that lead.

2. Focus on nurturing qualified leads

Once you have the leads, nurturing them is the next step toward converting them. You cannot expect leads to convert as soon as they sign up with you.

You need to nurture them by sending different lead nurturing emails, getting them familiar with your offerings, and building credibility with them.

Some of the tactics that can help you nurture leads include:

• Do not pitch your product services before making a good connection with them
• Personalize your emails to build a one-on-one communication
• Talk about their pain points and offer relatable resources.
• Use social proof to build trust and eliminate confusion.

3. Remove frictions in the conversion path

Ensure that your lead conversion process is as frictionless as possible so that the drop-off is reduced. The first step is to find drop-off points. It can be a long sign-up form or a lack of instant customer support.

Whatever the drop-off you find, you need to resolve them to ensure a smooth interaction for your recipients. Some of the ways to make the conversion process as seamless as possible are as follows:

• Use live chatbots to assist your website visitors 24*7
• Ensure your website pages load within seconds
• Add only the most relevant questions to the sign-up form.
• If your form needs to be long, add a save, edit, and preview option to let users return and start from where they left off.
• Build interactive funnels using MarbleFlows to engage with the website visitors.

4. Use retargeting campaigns: Organic and paid

Don’t get disheartened seeing visitors bouncing off your site; you can retarget them organically and through paid tactics such as social media ads.

Retargeting helps as the people you are reaching out to have already shown some interest in your product/services, thus possessing a higher chance of a conversion.

To retarget the right user, you need to look at your analytics and CRM data to create a list of people you’ll target with different tactics.

For example, showing a social media ad promoting a lead magnet that users interacted with will have higher chances of conversion than showing an irrelevant ad that has nothing to do with the user’s previous interaction.

You can retarget users through organic and paid tactics:

Organic tactics include:

• Win-back email
• Personalized pop-ups
• Special offers and exclusive emails
• Lice chat bots that show the previous conversation

Paid tactics include:

• Run paid ads using the right keywords and lead users to the relevant landing page.
• Social media ads on channels your audience is most active.
• Display ads on sites your audience visits the most.

5. Level up your follow-up game

Your leads might become inactive over time, which is why following up through email or call become imperative. The leads might be interested and closer to the conversion; if you don’t follow up, you can lose the chance of getting a conversion.

While following up, it’s a good practice to keep an adequate time interval and avoid sending too many emails as it can annoy the recipient. Besides, always talk about your previous email briefly to ensure that the recipient is in the loop with the conversation.

You can also build a follow-up email sequence that contains 3-4 emails to reach out to interested leads before breaking up with them. The emails should be personalized to the recipient and give them a reason to listen to what you’re pitching.

Here’s an example of a follow-up email sequence you can steal:

Email 1: First follow-up after getting no response on your feedback survey email

Email 2: Give them an offer, like a discounted price, for a limited time.

Email 3: Create FOMO (Fear of missing out), like telling them their offer is expiring.

Email 4: Tell them this is your last email and if they’re still interested, reply to this email.

6. Use social proof to enforce credibility

If a lead is confused or skeptical about making a decision, social proof can be the impetus to make their decision easier.

People tend to rely on what others say about your product/services, and if you have the right case studies, testimonials, or success stories, you have an advantage.

The marketing landscape has shifted, and there are many ways you can showcase your credibility.

Some other ways we have seen include:

• Adding a video testimonial on your landing pages
• Using social proof next to lead magnets or sign-up forms
• Share statistics of users converted and revenue generated for them
• Add customer reviews to your emails

#5 Lead conversion strategy examples: Two brands that got astonishing results

Here we discuss the case study of Intuit and Voice.com and how they boosted their conversion rate drastically.

Live chat improved Intuit's conversion rates by 211%

A global technology platform that helps you achieve financial confidence, Intuit saw an increase in conversion by implementing live chat on different pages of its website.

• Implementing live chat on a product comparison page increased sales by 211%.
• After adding chat to their checkout page, their conversions went up by 20%; even better, the average order value increased by 43%.

Live chat can generate such results as they remove the period between when a user raises a query and when they get the answer.

By customizing the chatbot responses based on the page users are in and their queries, you can create a personalized user experience that leads to more conversions.

Here we discuss the case study of Intuit and Voice.com and how they boosted their conversion rate drastically.

Conversion rate of Voices.com increased by 400%

Voice.com, one of the leading marketplaces for voice-over talent, increased its conversion rate by 400% once it started working with a CRO expert team.

The team considered the following things to achieve such an astonishing result:

1. Analyzed the company's analytics to understand the area of improvement in the sales funnel.
2. Run competitor website analysis
3. Analyzed 510 visitor surveys to understand why they weren't signing up
4. Studied the company's sales literature and interview and talked to the CEO to understand their persuasion techniques.

Once the team got an understanding, they implement the following tactics to reach a 400% conversion rate:

Adding social proof on the website: Voice.com had decided to add social proof by adding the names of relevant household clients that resonated with their website visitors.

Segmenting (by visitor type or visitor intention): Voices.com segmented its website visitors into two major categories: voice-over artists and companies looking for voice-over artists.

Once all the segments are ready, they create pages with different CTAs and copy to appeal to that segment and put the leads into different conversion funnels.

Demonstration videos: This video showed what users would get if they signed up. The video communicated the value the users will get after signing up.

Way forward

Lead conversion is a reiterative process. 

The optimization you made to get results might not work two years down the line. You need to be vigilant about how your website looks and sounds to the visitors, what might be the possible drop-off and what new avenue you can explore to bring in fresh conversions.

So, make sure you’re capturing the right audience and nurturing them by sharing information that’s relevant to them.

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