Some companies believe that they only need to track paying customers because after all, they’re the ones bringing in the money. But, if you’re not tracking leads too, you’re not creating a sustainable pipeline of future customers to increase your revenues and keep your business growing. By tracking sales leads, you can also pinpoint which marketing strategies are working and which ones need to be tweaked or completely scrapped. These best practices for tracking leads will help you get started.
Prepare an Entire Email Sequence at Once
One email is never enough to nurture leads once you capture them. You will usually need to send several emails to increase interest over time and build enough curiosity that your leads will move further along the sales pipeline. But, you don’t want to compose one email, send it, then compose another one a couple of weeks later. You should develop an entire email sequence at once and schedule the subsequent emails to arrive in inboxes at just the right times.
Tracking leads through email campaigns is one of the easiest ways to monitor your campaigns’ success. There are various metrics to measure including open rate, click-throughs, bounce rates, and replies, all of which can help you fine-tune your subsequent emails to get better results. For example, you can decide which leads get which subsequent email depending on their initial interest level. Those that have immediate interest are the hottest leads and your focus can go there right away.
Follow Up
You already know that not all leads will be ready to buy your product or service immediately, but with a little persistence, many of your leads could turn from warm to hot. But without tracking which leads require a follow up, you won’t know which ones to pursue. Of course, trying to remember to follow up with your leads is challenging, if not impossible, depending on how many you have and the other roles you play in your business.
For this reason, you need a tool that will allow you to follow up on leads that show promise after your first (or second, or third contact). Tracking which leads have received which information is critical so that you don’t continue to approach a lead in the same way each time. You’ll want to vary your contacts so that they get a 360-degree view of what you can do for them with each follow up.
Score Your Leads
At first, all your leads might be important to your business, but when you start getting hundreds of leads, you may find that you don’t have the resources to target all of them equally. Scoring your leads from the highest priority down to the lowest priority will help you shift your focus to the leads that are going to have a more immediate impact on your business. You can score your leads based on project size, urgency, or another metric that is easy to identify so that you can place your resources where they’ll matter the most.
Conclusion
These three best practices for tracking leads will give you insight into your complete sales process. You might discover you have changes to make, but until you’re tracking, you’ll never know.
