You must focus on the whole funnel — for example, attracting new leads, or only worrying about closing leads into customers — your marketing strategy will suffer.
From Easy Automated Sales
Objective 1 is to attract new leads
The focus here is to generate traffic and create awareness for your product and services. Your metric is to get the right people into your funnel.
“Increase organic traffic by _%.”
Targeting three segments only because I need to automatically qualified the leads and clean my database (in order of importance)
- Restaurants
- Nail salons
- Accountants
“Generate and improve call-to-action click rate to _%.”
Need to track:
- Number of clicks and views of your call-to-action (CTA)
- Percentage of views that lead to clicks
- Percentage of clicks that lead to landing page form submissions
Set a goal for your CTA click rate (between 5-30%), and continually test and optimize.
- Month 1 – 3 (5% – MQL)
- Month 3 – 6 (7% MQLàSQL) [1]
- Month 6 – 9 (10%)
- Month 9 – 12 (20%)
Objective 2 is to convert Leads to MQL to SQL
“Improve lead > MQL conversion rates by _%”
You have leads in your system now, are they getting more info and are they buying? These leads have to be converted to sales because that is what your business needs. MQLs are customers raising their hands to say, “I’m interested and I am considering a purchase”
Leads to > MQL conversion rate tells you how much quality traffic you’re pulling in. If website traffic is booming, but sales are stagnant, then there is something wrong with your strategy. You need to revisit your traffic strategy, retarget with new keywords, review the lead generation channels, and influencer or, start creating more direct MQL to SQL workflows into your mix.
Once you’ve classified leads, MQLs, and SQLs, you’ll easily track conversions between the stages.
Objective 3 communicate with them directly and close
“Increase lead-to-customer conversion by _%.”
We all want to close leads into customers, but we are not good at it – this is a learned skill. Now, it’s time to analyze your close or conversion rate and determine if you need to hire salespeople.
Objective 4 optimize the process so you can automate
“Lower cost per SQL by $_.”
The bottom of the funnel is a useful metric to see the cost — how much it cost to attract, convert, and close leads through the funnel. This percentage tells you the real success of your inbound marketing strategy. By increasing this percentage, you work on tying your funnel together entirely.
To improve this rate, you must effectively nurture leads with email marketing and set up content throughout your entire funnel. You must also encourage website revisits and re-conversions. You also need to automate the hand-off between marketing and sales — not too early, not too late. The automation cost-per-SQL objective is a new metric.
- How did you initially attract these prospects?
- Which content offers did they open and read?
- Which special promotions did you offer them, if any?
[1] MQL refers to a lead that is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads. This is tracked using metrics such as website visits and content offer downloads. Ideally, only certain forms should trigger a lead to the MQL stage, such as direct business offers and other sales-ready CTAs. Objective first 3 months is MQL.
SQL is the next stage. This means that the sales team has qualified this lead as a potential customer. The SQL is in the buying cycle. Once you know what differentiates the two (you understand your business more than anyone else), you can practice lead scoring, for instance giving higher lead scores to those who visited high-value pages (sales guides), filled out high-value forms (direct sales demo requests) or viewed your site multiple times.