Optimizing your lead tunnels and funnels is essentially where sales and marketing converge, with the ultimate goal of driving value to customers, and generating results for a business. In this article, we dive into some tips and tricks for optimizing lead tunnels, and funnels to go the extra mile, which many seasoned marketers swear by.
Define Your Goals
The first step towards optimization lies in clearly defining your goals, whether it is a download of a freebie, a newsletter subscription, or a recurring payment agreement, the end goal has to be explicit.
Such goals should ideally be created in Google Analytics, which effectively tracks and reports when visitors perform certain actions, or visit a particular page.
Setting this up is quite simple, and marketers can take this further by giving such actions a value, for example, if 1 in 10 people who subscribe to your mailing list result in sales worth $1,000, the value of each subscriber can be determined at $100.
Unified Lead Qualification
Marketing and sales teams often remain at loggerheads, mainly owing to the lack of standardization when it comes to measuring performance and results.
In order to ensure alignment between these two critical halves, it is necessary to agree on the criterion for what constitutes a qualified lead.
Businesses that implement such unification witness substantial improvements in revenues, as well as operational efficiencies, with teams becoming more collaborative, and communicating better with each other, based on a standardized language.
It goes without saying that not all leads are the same, just a quick glance across ActualTech Media’s website should make this all the more evident, with a number of different content formats, and avenues for B2B lead generation.
Split The Funnel
It is widely accepted in marketing-lore that the funnel can be split into four different stages, namely awareness, interest, decision, and action.
Apart from aiding with further segmentation, and tracking, these stages remain in-line with the cognitive processes that customers go through as they journey towards a sale, or any call-to-action.
Also referred to as the AIDA model, and similar to an actual funnel, it remains wide at the top, when all visitors are huddled through the initial sales process, and starts getting narrower and narrower, as prospects continue to drop out.
Perform An Audit
At early stages, and even over the course of their regular operations, funnels require regular audits throughout their depths to identify, report, and rectify points to friction. Performing a funnel audit is in itself a specialized task, and best left outsourced to third parties to ensure an unbiased take.
An effective audit ultimately boils down to the data being collected, and the figures being tracked, without which, it is nothing more than a simple UX audit, which fails to provide deeper insights.
The audit also differs in its scope at different stages of the funnel, for example, in the awareness stage the focus remains on visually appealing, and compelling content, and as it goes deeper, the focus shifts to trust, product, and pricing related issues, which emerge as the prospects get closer to a sale.
Final Words
Working with lead funnels, or tunnels can be quite laborious, but can be very fruitful in the long-run, with successfully optimized funnels capable of generating consistent ROIs on advertising spend at a regular pace.
This is an art, as well as a science, with many of these principles and practices having emerged only over the past few years. This means there are no clear answers, and perfection requires extensive testing, tracking, and experimentation.