Personalizing your relationship with the perfect audience is the key that opens the door to success for your online business!
In the era of Permission Marketing — which is the term coined by sales expert Seth Godin to describe the current methodology of approach centered on customer consent (and participation) in the digital environment — it is essential to attract consumers’ attention to awaken in them the desire for new and exclusive information that only your company has.
All this without them feeling bothered by your messages!
This is why personalizing your business’s communication at each stage of the purchasing journey that leads go through has become an essential practice for:
- Collect data about these people;
- To understand what their purchasing intentions are;
- And offer the most relevant offers : truly capable of maximizing the chances of this audience closing a deal!
To get to know your potential customers better (and manipulate how they interact with your brand to increase your sales), you can use lead tracking!
This text’s mission is to teach you everything you need to know to practice lead tracking and convert many more buyers — so let’s start yesterday!
What is lead tracking?
“Lead” is the English word that has ” potential customer ” as the closest meaning in Portuguese!
It is used in Digital Marketing to separate curious or unknown people from those who have shown interest in the brand to the point of giving permission to be contacted later.
This arrangement usually happens as a condition of an exchange: you offer rich material as free content on your website only after a curious person fills out a form with a contact method (such as an email address) and their name!
“Tracking” can be translated as ” follow-up ” or “tracking”.
Putting one word together, “lead tracking” means “following up on potential customers” and allows you to monitor your leads from the beginning of the buying journey until the deal is completed!
This practice is useful because, if you read the Enjoy Minder blog, you already know that a huge number of followers or visitors is not always a guarantee of huge sales success!
Not every lead is the same, and to avoid making an offer to the wrong person (or to the right person, but at the wrong time in their buying journey), it is essential for a Digital Marketing strategy to categorize potential customers into:
- Qualified, who are those increasingly willing to take your offer home;
- And unqualified, which are those people who, no matter how hard your brand tries to convince them, will not buy even a single loaf of bread that you offer!
Paying attention to poorly qualified leads is expensive because your team wastes precious time (and you spend a lot of money for nothing) that should be dedicated to checkmating the most qualified people: those already “warmed up” by your nurturing and automated sales strategy!
By closely tracking people’s behavior (all within the law and ethically, always respecting users’ right to privacy), it is possible to:
Know exactly which type of personalization most impacts which type of people in the process of displaying offers and content;
Identify the best words to communicate with segmented groups of people, without making the message generalized or annoying, and deepening the relationship with each customer on an individual level;
Forecast Return on Investment (ROI) to ensure your company does not spend more than it earns;
- Know exactly which type of personalization most impacts which type of people in the process of displaying offers and content;
- Identify the best words to communicate with segmented groups of people, without making the message generalized or annoying, and deepening the relationship with each customer on an individual level;
- Forecast Return on Investment (ROI) to ensure your company does not spend more than it earns;
- And how to expand sales potential by creating original opportunities based on the type of customer (and the type of product, service or experience) that only your brand has!
Using Digital Marketing automation platforms with lead tracking functionality (such as RD Station, or even borrowing the expertise of my measurement team here at Enjoy Minder) you will have access to information such as:
- Who are the leads visiting your business website (what gender, region or age, for example);
- Which pages do these people visit most (making it clear what interests or problems they face that your brand can help solve).
In addition to features such as:
- The ability to send notifications to your visitors’ devices, guiding them directly to a page or offer that is most relevant to their purchasing profiles;
- And a history of your leads’ actions in relation to your company on the Internet (making it possible to filter profiles of people with a genuine desire for your product or service, from those who are just curious and will never become buyers).
With this critical data in place, you can direct your sales team and your sales pitch with considerable ease — allowing your team to approach “hotter” customers only when your pricing page is viewed, for example!
All of this is done precisely and “automagically” — and that’s the biggest advantage of the word “digital” in Internet Marketing!
What are the biggest advantages of lead tracking?
One of the biggest advantages of lead tracking is being able to closely monitor your customers’ life cycle — especially if your business is aimed at people who do a lot of research before swiping their card and don’t buy on impulse!
The more valuable your product, the more interactions your prospects will feel compelled to make in order to make an informed decision — and all of these interactions are recorded in your company’s lead tracking system!
The questions your audience has or the interests they carry are recorded in your database, allowing you to surgically affect not only your current leads, but also the leads who are yet to discover your business — ensuring that you gain their trust through personalized content!
The objections these leads will have will be destroyed, highlighting your brand as the market authority and the best (and possibly the only) company when faced with your competitors.
From a productivity perspective, having lead information organized into segmentable data (easy to identify and separate groups with similar tastes and behaviors within your general audience) harmonizes your team’s line of action by:
- Clearly identify potential customers who need attention;
- Which people on your team will be responsible for what;
- What is the length of your customers’ life cycle, telling you when will be the best time to bring new offers to them and produce new products or services to continue selling to those who have already purchased from you ;
- And eliminate or isolate low-quality leads (with zero or very little purchasing potential, but with high capital consumption) by cutting off the sources through which they discover your business — and investing these savings to win over real customers!
All of this eliminates wasted resources and maximizes your Return on Investment — in addition to making your brand the number one option in the eyes of those who need what it offers!
But the benefits don’t stop there: there’s more below!
Integrates the efforts of the sales and marketing teams
The automated aggregation of the most valuable information about your potential customers guarantees symbiotic effectiveness between your Marketing team (which attracts and presents your brand to strangers with the potential to become buyers) and your sales department (to which Marketing passes the ball when it’s time to score a goal)!
Optimizes the conversion of leads into customers
With such accurate information about the individual behavior of real people within your ideal audience, in just a few steps, you can create a database categorized by behaviors and interactions, intensifying the level of personalization of content and offers that are truly capable of awakening the trust (and action) that makes someone finalize the purchase!
What are the differences between lead tracking and lead scoring?
Before explaining the difference between lead tracking and lead scoring, I need to say that both practices have the same objective:
- Understand your leads;
- Rank them in the purchasing journey;
- And personalize your communication (and your offers) for them!
While lead tracking tracks how people react to your brand, lead scoring assigns points to them depending on what actions they take on your website.
The higher a potential customer’s lead scoring score, the more ready they are to receive (and accept) a personalized proposal!
By knowing what actions your leads take on your page, lead tracking feeds into lead scoring.
An example of lead scoring would be one in which a more significant action for deepening the relationship between your potential customer and your company gives them a higher score (such as accessing your product or service page, or downloading rich material in your sales funnel) in contrast to a less significant action (such as leaving the website before the minimum viewing time)!
As I said before, this tracking and points assignment process is automated: Digital Marketing platforms do all this work for you — giving your sales team space to do what only they know how to do: sell!
Lead tracking and the Marketing and sales funnel
While the purchase journey is the path a lead takes from the first contact with your brand until the moment they feel comfortable buying from you, the Marketing funnel is the route you prepare to capture and guide your potential customers towards a sale!
As the funnel involves monitoring and analyzing the behavior of leads throughout the purchasing journey (which is part of the sales cycle), lead tracking becomes an essential practice to bring success to your strategies!
Remember that not all people are the same and leads have different stages of awareness regarding your offers, which defines their qualification in lead scoring.
Therefore, personalizing what is shown to them in the Marketing funnel based on each group of individuals’ familiarity with your brand ensures the best chances of selling more — and faster!
Understanding lead behavior
Everything related to your leads’ interactions with your company’s online presence can be tracked in lead tracking to categorize their behavior patterns.
The most used virtual spaces to fish for this information are usually:
- Your business website;
- Your company’s blog;
- The emails you send in Email Marketing campaigns;
- And even the content you publish on social media!
Customizing the approach
By knowing where your best quality lead is and what they do, you can approach them without seeming desperate, out of context, or even in an irritating manner — lengthening the desire and life cycle of this potential customer in relation to your offers!
With this same power of personalization in communication based on “tracked” data (which is marketing jargon for pointing out tracked information), you can nurture undecided leads and increase the relevance that your brand will have for them — leading to practically infinite sales!
It is the personalization of the approach that defines your chances of conversion: the more contextualized and customized, the better!
Identifying engagement points
By tracking people’s interactions, it is also possible to know which are the most effective points of engagement.
Engagement points are the pages on your website or other Internet platforms where your qualified audience discovers the existence of your business and decides to interact with it!
By knowing where they arrive and what drives them to invest time consuming your brand’s content, you gain clearer insights into the type of relevant material that drives them to take action — and the triggers that make them buy!
Improving lead scoring
As I said earlier, lead tracking provides all the information that lead scoring needs to assign points that reflect the stage of awareness of a potential buyer in relation to your brand — thus knowing who is at the point of becoming a customer and who still needs nurturing!
Nurturing leads more efficiently
By knowing exactly what your qualified leads like and need most, you can nurture them in the most fantastic way possible!
By receiving content relevant to the issues they face in life, these people feel fulfilled (or “nourished”) by your brand — moving from someone who gave you a “chance” to convince them, to someone who feels cared for (and flattered) by being in contact with your company!
Accelerating the sales cycle
All these advantages culminate in an absurd acceleration in your business’s sales cycle because, by anticipating the needs of leads, you make sure that:
- Even more customers appear;
- Much better qualified;
- Easy to conquer;
- And absolutely excited to buy more (and more, and more, and more) from you!
Identifying bottlenecks in the funnel
Of course, not everything is perfect: problems exist everywhere. The difference is that with lead tracking you can identify a bottleneck before it becomes a loss!
It’s easy to identify where leads drop off, the least engaging messages, and what to do to resolve these barriers as soon as they arise — ensuring that nothing stops your business from continuing to guide customers through the sales funnel!
Analyzing Return on Investment (ROI)
Finally, you will have exact numbers of how much your company is profiting from the investment in your advertising efforts (called ROI in Digital Marketing)!
Knowing how your lead acts from the beginning of contact to the moment of conversion, you can evaluate your Return on Investment without leaving room for doubt — perfectly guiding your next actions through Marketing channels towards your profitability goals!
Setting Tracking Goals and KPIs
Valuable information like this is only useful when examined and put into action — and that’s why you need to set goals and key success indicators!
Goals are specific , time-bound results that move your business closer to its financial and business objectives.
KPIs — which is what Key Performance Indicators are called in Digital Marketing — are the metrics that indicate whether or not a goal is close to being achieved!
Some very common goals and KPIs sought by partners here at Enjoy Minder involve:
- Increase the number of paying customers, which is a goal indicated by the conversion rate (a KPI in percentage of how many people pay for a product or service after being attracted, for example);
- Reduce the sales cycle, this being a goal aimed at increasing the number of possible sales closures (illustrated by rates such as customer acquisition, which is a Key Performance Indicator in this case);
- Or increase the number of visitors to the website or online store by 30% — a goal to be monitored by the KPI that indicates the monthly number of unique visitors to the page!
Turn more leads into customers with Enjoy Minder!
I promised I would teach you what lead tracking is (and how to use it) — and I think I nailed it!
You have learned:
- Lead tracking is the tracking of your potential customers’ actions on your company’s digital channels;
- That lead tracking feeds lead scoring, which in turn assigns points that indicate whether a lead is hotter or colder to receive a sales proposal;
- That the sales funnel and lead tracking take your lead by the hand and guide them along the route that leads to closing a deal;
- And it is necessary to define goals and KPIs to ensure that this rich data is being used correctly (or that it is even being used)!
Observing the behavior of your best prospects saves resources in the long run and ensures that your sales team’s efforts are worthwhile: Marketing passes the ball and Sales kicks it into the net!
Need help scoring that winning goal with an unstoppable Digital Marketing strategy? Secure your place alongside the champions by contacting Enjoy Minder here!
I am proud to say that I am the CEO here at the agency (heading a multidisciplinary team capable of anything) and that I am waiting for you to choose whether or not you want to enter the hall of fame.
We can get you the results you need — and all you have to do now is decide if you want to win!
