There is a common misconception that business success lies in product quality or price. 73% of consumers consider customer experience a major factor when purchasing. The happier your customers are, the better the conversion rates of visitors into leads.
Intrigued?
Find out five strategies on how to boost the lead generation process with superior customer experience 👇
1. Understanding Your Customer’s Journey
The key secret to building B2B lead generation strategies is knowledge of your customers. You may already know their age, location, and preferences. All these are different pieces of a buyer portrait. But it is not enough to understand why prospective customers ignore your “50% discount on (company name) chatbot” lead magnet.
You’ll never be sure until you walk in customers’ shoes.
Marketers call this process “building a customer journey map.” It is a process of visualizing each step of customer experience, from the first hear about your brand, like a click on ads or an article in the list of Google results, etc., to interacting with live agents, and sales reps, and making buying decisions. Customer journey map or CJM provides insight into user experience: needs, pain points, emotions, intents, and actions they do at every touchpoint.
These elements may vary depending on the industry. Here is an example of a B2C business eCommerce Customer Journey map to help a business owner make business decisions.
Thus, you can discover the reason for the low number of contacts in your customer base. For example, placing a “50% discount on iguana treats” offer in the “Top 10 dog-friendly beaches” article won’t work.
Why?
- Wrong place. At this step of the journey, visitors aren’t ready to convert into a purchase. They know nothing about your brand.
- Wrong CTA. There is no word about readers’ pain points like healthy dog food.
Knowledge of customers’ journey with all processes, needs, and perceptions will help you meet customer expectations. Understanding the factors influencing their purchase decision is necessary for the following strategy.
2. Implementing Personalization Tactics
Remember the last time you shop online? Suppose you spent 20 minutes choosing a summer vacation outfit. Sure thing, you added too many items to your cart, so it took some time to clean it.
Ok, much time.
You’re almost ready to close the tab and postpone this decision for the next day. But at the last moment, such a message pops up.
That is the perfect example of personalization for potential leads:
- CTA reflects customers’ interests: save the effort spent on the item choice and get a discount.
- Time – a customer with items in a cart was almost ready to leave the website.
So, if your goal isn’t just cold emails but hot leads that will quickly turn into a potential buyer, it is better to personalize B2B lead generation efforts.
That’s no problem when in addition to personal and demographic data, you know what products and communication channels your customers prefer, pain points, how they behave on your website, how they found you on the web, etc.
80% of consumers want to buy from a brand that provides a positive customer experience.
Thus, you let them feel special.
How?
Here are several tactics for lead generation personalization that your marketing and sales team can use for different buyer personas:
- For first-time visitors, offer a discount for signing up (creating an account at your store/service).
- For repeated visitors, offer early access to new products.
- For email subscribers, send follow-up emails with complementary items based on previous purchases.
Personalization may be based on the source of leads, like organic traffic from search engines, YouTube, or an email campaign.
Here are tactics for specific page visitors:
- Launch a popup offering discounts on a specific item category on product pages under this category. If there are several categories you want to boost sales, launch different popups with relevant marketing copy or video content.
- Empower your content marketing with a chatbot on blog articles of a specific category with a relevant content lead magnet like white papers on search engine optimization in 2024 or free content marketing strategy templates.
- Implement product recommendations at the checkout page based on the items in the cart.
- Announce a giveaway of a top-selling product (define it by info in your CRM). Ask potential participants to share their contacts.
- Launch a live chat message offering consultation on the product on a relevant product page.
The last example is a part of the proactive customer service tactics we’ll discuss below.
3. Investing in Proactive Customer Support
There are reactive customer services like knowledge base and support via phone or email when customers initiate a conversation on complex issues.
70% of consumers globally prefer brands that offer or contact them with proactive customer service notifications.
For instance, returning visitors of a pricing page with many plans to compare would love to see a live chat message offering them help.
So, instead of waiting until sales leads click on a live chat icon and trigger it, launch a proactive welcome message to engage them in a conversation. Then, a live chat support agent specializing in pricing will save them time by telling them precisely what customers want.
The same situation is with website chatbots. This digital self-service tool is perfect for improving the response rate and resolution time by resolving frequently asked questions, guiding visitors on product choice, sharing personalized, valuable content, etc.
There is a list of tools that offer these solutions and outsourced teams to provide their best performance. Moreover, usually, there is an opportunity to add a lead capturing form to a live chat, chatbot, or popup.
But lead generation is only one of the benefits your company gets. Here are more:
- By taking the initiative in the support, you can catch niggling problems before they grow into big and increase customer retention rates by 3-5%.
- Proactive customer service makes customers happy. And as we know, there are at least three happy customers who tell others about their consistent brand experience.
- Save your support team time.
4. Utilizing the Power of Omnichannel Communication
Each customer is unique. Some prefer self-service, and others – communication with managers. Here is the main issue for business leaders: provide an equally high level of customer experience and communication for those who like messengers, email, text messages, website live chat, socials, and phone.
Statista research on channels consumers used to contact brands as of June 2022.
With a clear understanding of your customer preferences, you’ll know where to engage them, launch marketing department initiatives, and provide effective resolutions for easy and technical issues.
Where to start? Here is a short guide for your marketing team:
- Define what communication channels your inbound leads prefer. Will it be email marketing or social media marketing? For instance, this defines lead generation campaign channels: search ads or social media ads.
- Prioritize a list. In addition to the direct messages, consider comments and mentions on social media and review websites like Capterra, G2, etc.
- Set up chatbots where possible (Facebook, Instagram, website, etc.) to faster resolution of customer queries and save contact center agents time. To ensure the best service, it’s important to offer the ability to communicate with live human employees.
- Consider contact center platforms that have relevant integrations and a shared inbox for all channels (not to lose a dialog or its context.) Some of the best examples are REVE Chat, HelpCrunch, Drift, etc.
5. Leveraging Social Proof
93% of consumers look for customer feedback about a brand or a product before purchasing it. Usually, there are comments on a product page or websites like Trustradius or Capterra.
The same logic works with downloading lead magnets, subscribing to an email newsletter, etc. Social proof is about consumer loyalty and trust.
So, here are five types of educational marketing content businesses use to gain it:
- Case studies are ideal for B2B businesses. It can be individual blog posts as well as quotes from it published on a main or a product page.
- Testimonials on the product page and socials. Here is an ideal example of customer reviews from the Sephora cosmetics store website. In addition to the text, they include photos and info about customers’ hair, skin, and eyes.
- Logos of the most famous clients. For example, the way Zoom SaaS platform does it on the main and product pages.
- Icons with ratings from the most popular review websites. All of them should be linked to a product page on the relevant resource.
- Data/numbers. Look how Buffer highlights numbers from clients’ testimonials on its main page:
What’s important is that they add photos and customers’ social media to let visitors check this information. Trust is a key to growing your email list.
To sum up
Lead generation is about sharing personal data first. Not all people are ready to share this valuable information, so you have to gain their interest, loyalty, and trust. In the article, we explained the best digital marketing and support strategies of getting qualified leads to boost your sales process:
- Creating buyer profiles and journey maps to understand potential customers and satisfy their needs.
- Using that info to personalize the offer, message copy, time, and place of communication with a brand.
- Implementing interactive content and proactive customer service tools like chat platform, live or video chat, welcome messages, or lead generation tool like popup to improve customer satisfaction.
- Providing communication on the channels your customers prefer: email, social media platforms, website live chat, phone, etc., to satisfy the needs of each segment.
- Gaining their trust with case studies, testimonials, and consumer reviews.
This is a proven strategy digital marketers use to fuel the sales funnel with business leads that match ideal customer profile. So start with the first one, then implement the rest of the list step by step, with a critical focus on customer communications.
