TL;DR: Lead mining is the closest thing to gold mining today. But to hit gold, you need the right tools. Develop your strategy, unleash your storytelling prowess, create high-intent lead magnets, automate your process to nurture leads and convert them to sales.
Lead generation is the eCommerce version of gold mining.
In this article, we'll arm you with pickaxes and give you a clear roadmap to help you find gold.
And like all precious metals, you'd need no one to tell you once you strike gold. One promising lead can be worth 10-100K dollars MRR.
We'll review well-known and lesser-known strategies and give you a leg up on your competition.
The goal is to habitually test different angles and strategies weekly because if you’re starting fresh, you might not know what works.
Stoked? Let’s dig in!
How To Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Machine
You can transform your eCommerce website into a powerful lead generation machine that attracts, engages, and converts potential customers into loyal fans.
With the guide and tactics below, you'll attract and convert potential customers into leads, drive more sales, and grow your business.
Here are the steps:
Develop a Strategy
Unleash Your Storytelling Prowess
Create High-Intent Lead Magnets That Convert
Use Automation To Nurture Leads & Fast-track Growth
Test, Refine, Rework
Develop A Strategy: You Can’t Hit A Target You Can’t See
Like every crucial business decision, the first step is to be clear about what success means for you. Your lead generation will only yield expected outcomes when you know precisely the type of leads you need.
Who is your target audience? Do you need to target a business with a specific revenue? Or companies that are only within one particular region?
Research and be clear about your target audience. The better your targeting, the more relevant your message will be and, ultimately, the more positive outcomes you’ll get.
Your offer could be the best thing since sliced bread for one segment but then be utterly uninteresting for another demographic.
Based on that objective, establish some roadmaps for KPIs for measuring your lead generation efforts. Some common KPIs for measuring the effectiveness of your lead generation include
conversion rate, cost per Lead (CPL),
number of leads generated,
lead quality,
Return on Investment (ROI), and
time to conversion.
Unleash Your Storytelling Prowess
Marketing does not always mean pouring your hard-earned dollars down the ads pipe. Great content brings coherence to your brand, helps you trim your marketing budget, and turns your website into a resource center for your prospects.
But to actualize that objective, your team must master the art of storytelling.
Consumers' attention span hasn't been shorter in today's digital economy, fueled by fierce competition, skyrocketing technological innovation, and social media addiction.
Plus, information overload makes the likelihood of your brand being noticed minuscule.
At HeyDay, we understand these challenges. And one of our strategies is to offer busy professionals easy-to-apply hacks and best practices for turning their onsite search from a brick to a high-converting lead magnet.
As an innovative brand in a competitive industry, we’ve spent years studying the market and analyzing mountains of data. Unleashing our storytelling prowess through valuable resources, we provide unique insights to savvy eCommerce entrepreneurs.
Our blog offers exclusive, actionable strategies that our readers love. And our landing pages speak directly to visitors in simple, easy-to-understand languages.
Guess what? You can do the same for your eCommerce.
The world is hungry for great content. A single article, video, or podcast, supported with good SEO strategies, can travel across continents, bringing customers to your store. It's basic logic. Stories are the oldest form of knowledge transfer. And they're how we learn complex concepts from infancy. The best story, not necessarily the best product, always wins.
As our world becomes increasingly fragmented, repetitive, and taxing, the demand for original content, not generative content, grows.
Moreover, relying solely on paid media to attract consumers' attention isn't sustainable. Creating a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel provides a more affordable alternative for growth hacking. Additionally, having an internal content platform gives you control over the messaging and delivery, which is crucial. That is especially true if you don't have a large budget for advertising and Google search traffic.
The returns on investing in building a coherent brand showcasing your organization's values and principles are priceless, no matter what you paid.
Create High-Intent, High-Converting Lead Magnets
You’ve defined your metrics and refined your storytelling to breathe life into your content.
The next step is to capture the leads with high-intent, high-converting lead magnets.
Remember, the goal is not to get traffic. Neither is it to educate your audience.
Even if you’re a news agency or education company, you’re in business to make money…right? So the end goal is to convert traffic to prospects and sales.
Let’s break the components down step-by-step:
Step 1: Optimize your onsite search bar.
Understanding user behavior, providing relevant results, implementing features like predictive search, autocomplete, and filters, and using synonyms helps improve your site's search functionality and lead to better conversions. All that and more you get with HeyDay.
Step 2: Show social proof.
92% of consumers trust organic, user-generated content (such as reviews and recommendations) more than traditional advertising. And 70% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product if it has reviews on the product page.
Social proof is a powerful psychological tool that’s highly effective in marketing. It builds trust, reduces uncertainty, creates a sense of belonging, increases perceived value, and Fastracks decision-making.
Step 3: Invite your leads to subscribe to your newsletter or start trial.
Email marketing gives you 4200% ROI, meaning that for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $42.
Email marketing helps you create a highly engaged audience with targeted and personalized messaging while providing valuable insights and building long-term customer relationships. 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the past year, and 59% say email is their most significant source of ROI.
Again, 60% of consumers have purchased due to a marketing email they received.
Step 4: Grab attention with conversational/personalized lead generation bots.
Whether it’s a chatbot, special product offering, quizzes, or sign-up form, pop-ups are dynamic. You can tailor them into any format that works best for lead capturing.
Estimates show that using conversational lead-capturing pop-ups helps boost your subscription rates by up to 4 times. And 80% of consumers are more inclined to buy from brands that offer personalized experiences.
Lead-capturing chatbots help you to enhance your customer experience by tailoring your messaging to the visitor's previous behavior on your website.
Step 5: Give out freebies.
Giving your product or service for free is daunting as it offsets your revenue goals. Yet, giving freebies have been proven to boost sales by as much as 2,000%.
Be thoughtful about your giveaway. You can offer discount codes or coupons, conditional free shipping, free sample, free trial, free educational content, such as ebooks, guides, and videos, or host contests to generate excitement and interest in your brand.
Step 6: Put your social media skills to work.
Social media marketing is another strong lead-capturing hook to feed into the systems you already have on your website.
Now that you’ve unlocked your storytelling prowess, you can pull readers of your content back to your website to buy your offering, test a free product, subscribe to your newsletter, join a product launch waitlist, and so on.
Social Media marketing success is not an overnight process. It often takes time before you start to reap the dividends of your investment. Take your time to build and nurture your community.
You don’t have to go through these exact steps, but they help simplify the process.
But it doesn’t end there.
Use Business Automation To Nurture Leads & Fast-track Growth
Not all website visitors will follow the customer journey you’ve established for your eCommerce. For instance, about 70% of readers will only scan this article for essential points they can use. They won’t read it word-for-word.
Marketing automation helps you ensure your eCommerce store is omnipresent and that you can nurture prospects into buyers.
Research shows that 63% of brands use marketing automation to outperform their competition, with a sales increase of about 14.5% and a marketing spend reduction of approximately 12.2%.
Where do you start?
email marketing,
customer service,
Analytics.
Automate your email marketing
Email automation is highly effective in nurturing leads and driving sales from prospects and existing customers. Unlike newsletters or campaigns, users trigger automated email workflows when they take specific actions on your store.
By setting up workflows, you can save time and increase efficiency in your email marketing strategy.
Use case examples include:
Welcoming new subscribers. Don't expect all first-time visitors to your eCommerce store to make a purchase. That's why welcome emails are like thank-you notes after a job interview. While not mandatory, marketers have noticed that welcome messages get four times more reads and five times more clicks than regular marketing emails.
Preventing cart abandonment. To avoid cart abandonment, set up abandoned cart email workflows. You can set up workflows to recapture buyers' interest and encourage them to complete the purchase.
Launching promotions or introducing new products. By personalizing your email campaigns to shoppers who have expressed interest in such information, you can achieve an average open rate of 150%.
Most email service providers seamlessly integrate with e-commerce software providers.
You can also use Alloy or Zapier to connect your email flows to service providers such as MailChimp, Lemlist, or Sendinblue.
Automate customer service
Customer service automation saves time and resources while providing your customers with efficient support. Notable examples include using AI chatbots to offer faster answers to frequently asked questions, such as order status, shipping information, and returns.
You can also provide self-service options such as an FAQ page, knowledge base, or community forum to help them quickly find answers to their questions without contacting customer support.
You can also use AI-powered tools to analyze customer data and provide personalized product recommendations or to identify potential issues with orders before they arise.
For example:
Shopify built a fraud detection algorithm that uses machine learning algorithms to analyze customer behavior and identify fraud patterns, such as high-risk orders, suspicious activity, and chargebacks.
Finally, as noted above, you can automate email responses by setting up triggers and automated workflows. For instance, you can set up an upsell email to customers after a purchase or offer a discount to customers who have abandoned their shopping carts.
Automate analytics and reporting
We understand that data-driven companies outperform their counterparts. And tracking your progression is not for when your company becomes big. That’s how your business gets to be influential.
Heyday's automated site search analytics provides valuable insights into how your prospects interact with your websites, such as the number of searches performed and the most commonly searched keywords.
By analyzing this data, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions when optimizing your website to generate more leads.
You can also use that intel to fine-tune your website's content, making it more relevant and engaging for visitors, and rework your messaging, such as the language used in your call-to-action (CTA) buttons and email campaigns. That saves your team time and resources while improving the quality and quantity of leads generated.
Another vital aspect is to develop in-built analytics and reporting tools or leverage tools like Google Analytics to track sales, orders, and customer behavior.
For example:
Shopify customized its reporting tools to provide specific insights and regularly sent automated reports to stakeholders. Other reporting tools include Bizible, Tableau, Insight squared, Piwik, and Kissmetrics.
Test, Refine, Rework
Leads do not automatically convert into customers. Businesses that nurture their leads with care see 50% more sales-qualified leads than their non-nurturing counterparts at a 33% lower cost.
Ensuring they can easily find what they need at their first contact with your website sets the tone of the relationship.
Use the various lead nurturing techniques highlighted above to progress leads through the sales funnel. After a lead fills out a form on your landing page, add them to a workflow to keep them engaged and provide valuable content that aligns with their interests.
Begin lead nurturing with relevant follow-up emails that contain high-intent content.
As you continue to nurture the leads, gather as much information as possible about your leads and use this information to personalize all future communications, segment your list, or deepen the relationship.
A/B test different options for better outcomes. All the best!
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About the Author
Tom-Chris Emewulu is HeyDay’s Digital Evangelist. With 8+ years of digital marketing and business development experience, he crafts high-intent, high-converting, data-driven SEO articles that put brands on page 1 of Google search. Forbes, DW, Business Insider, Businessss2Community, and many other publications have featured his works. You can find him on Social Media via @tomchrisemewulu.