Our last webinar on “Increase Your Conversions with Marketing Driven Sales” taken by LeadSquared founder and CEO, Nilesh Patel, emphasized on having an perfectly aligned marketing and sales strategy to drive conversions. Those of you who missed it, here’s a summary of some of the questions asked during the session.
Question 1
What are negative keywords?
Google AdWords allows you to mark certain keywords that you wouldn’t want to rank for as “negative”, so that you can save some money on clicks. So, you can look at Adwords reports daily and see if there are certain unrelated keywords that you are getting clicks for, and then mark them as negative.
Question 2
What are drip campaigns and how do they help in lead generation?
Drip campaigns are automated sequence of emails/autoresponders that are sent to leads to move them through the sales cycle. They allow you to consistently nurture leads with relevant information based on time intervals, lead behaviour, or other parameters, freeing up valuable marketing and sales resources without neglecting your prospects. This would help you nurture your leads, and thereby, drive conversions.
Question 3
How has your experience been post an actual sales? How easy or difficult is it to get the entire sales and marketing staff ready for these kinds of online marketing makeovers for business in India?
You need to start from the top. There needs to be a change in the thinking process. If the business owners and managers do not think it is important, then it wouldn’t be important for anybody below them.
Let me give you an example. We were selling our product to a certain company. The CEO of that company liked our product but we got tremendous resistance from the ground sales force, saying they couldn’t use it. Those kinds of situations will come in.
But what I feel is the younger folk who are actually looking at solutions like LeadSquared and several others, are going to want to work smarter. By saying this I mean, they would want to call leads who would actually drive sales for them and work on a tool that would surely generate results for them, rather than excel sheets.
Question 4
Should we customize calling pitch according to the CTA on the lead generation landing page?
Yes, your sales pitch should be customized and focused on the offer, because those who visit your page have do so, because they are interested or want to know more about the offer.
Question 5
For a B-B software product on the cloud, is pricing information a good idea? Is this a standard?
If the product is new, people start by saying – sign up for a free trial and the pricing is coming soon. I think that entices people to sign up because beta is free so people do sign up. In the later stages, if you are selling to enterprises, your pricing would be high in that case, then you could probably avoid sharing pricing information. But if you are selling to SMBs, it makes sense to show the price because you would expect someone who fills a form, to pay for the product as well.
Question 6
What drives traffic to the website for B-B markets?
We personally get a lot of organic traffic, which you can get by writing relevant blog posts and engaging content. Paid ads (both Google and Facebook), depending on whether your target audience is on Facebook or elsewhere, will drive traffic. Forum posting on social channels like Quora will also get you traffic. Here’s an E-Book on “11 Lead Generation Offers & their Best Practices” that you might find useful.
Question 7
In my email marketing campaigns, should I direct traffic to a contact form or provide links to my website?
What you should rather ask is, what are you trying to do/achieve in the marketing campaign. If you are asking somebody to sign up for something, then you should take them to a sign up page. If you are saying – look at my website for a product or service offering, then it makes sense to take them to the website. What is the intent of the campaign is what you should try to embed in the form.
To improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns, try to make a singular focus of that. Try to have one call to action in the campaign. You’ll be able to do that if you know to whom you are sending to.
For example, if you are sending a mail to a bunch of companies in the education sector, then write stuff that is relevant to the education sector and bring them to a page that is relevant to them. That would make a good campaign and the redirected page could be a landing page or a website page. If it’s a landing page, they would probably go to a website as well – but that you would need to find out by doing experiments.
If it’s a single offer, use landing pages. If you don’t know what they are specifically looking for, then website could be a better option, but that wouldn’t give you too many conversions (form-fills).
Question 8
Which day and time is best for running email campaigns for USA and Canada?
This varies from business to business. You would have to try it to figure it out. LeadSquared has reports which can tell you which days and times got most opens and clicks versus the volume you are sending an email. Here’s a glimpse of some of the email campaign reports available in LeadSquared:
Question 9
Can you suggest a webinar software which is effective and cheap and you are thinking of integrating it with LeadSquared in the future?
We use GoToWebinar as you know and it integrates with LeadSquared as well.
Question 10
The responsive landing page feature on LeadSquared is good but has limitations. Is it being improved?
We have released an improved version of it. In our next webinar, we will be introducing and doing a demo of our new Responsive Landing Page Editor. You can register for it here.
Question 11
We are an education business. A lot of people search for the price of the product that we are selling. What is your take on disclosing the prices upfront on the landing page?
I think it is alright to place the price of the product on the landing page, especially if you are selling to consumers – so they can quickly understand whether that product fits their budget. Also, from a business standpoint, if you are selling a low ticket item, it will take a lot of effort and sales tactics on your part, to actually convince that person to buy the product at probably the same price which you were intending to sell it at, in comparison to the competition.
What you could try is – you could put some sort of a timeline and create urgency. For instance, you could say that the first 10 people who buy the product within ‘n’ number of days will get 10% off. This is just an example of course. Creating urgency has worked in the commodity scenario. I’m not an expert in this field, but you could try that and see how it works.
Question 12
In today’s scenario what should be the ratio of your marketing spend between traditional and web modes?
It of course depends on the kind of business. There are multiple modes, in offline and online. Offline is not dead. Here’s what you could try. Run a campaign and have different phone numbers (virtual numbers) for your online and offline campaigns, and a third for your website. Over a period of time, you would be able to figure out how many calls you got across these 3 numbers and make an assessment. By using this tactic, you would be able to get a closer estimate of whether you should spend on traditional or not.
Question 13
What are various ways to increase webinar registration?
- Use LeadSquared landing pages. That will help you increase your registrations by roughly 100%.
- There are tactics that you can use when you send emails like auto-filling your forms on landing pages. That will further increase conversions by another 20-30%.
For more tips on to increase webinar registrations, take a look at this post on 7 Ways to Increase Webinar Registration and Attendance.
Question 14
Does telecalling help in SaaS business?
Yes, it helps. What is important is whom you are calling. Sometimes what happens is the phone may be picked up by someone from another department or may not be the person with whom you are trying to connect. So it’s important to call the right person.
Question 15
Does excess telecalling feed negative branding of company?
Yes and no. If the telemarketer who is calling is not able to put their pitch forward, then that may leave a negative imapact. Calling every day is not a good idea. Also, excessive calling is bad use of your bandwidth because if somebody is not picking up the phone, he’s probably not interested in talking to you so you should move on to the next guy.
What you can actually do in this scenario is use SMS as a tactic to connect with the person whom you are trying to reach. We have found that it is being effectively used by our customers.
What we do is, if the concerned person does not receive the call, we send a personalized SMS from LeadSquared to the concerned party. That way, at least the intent from your side is shown. And since your number is mentioned in the SMS, if they really want to talk to you, they can call you back.
Question 16
How many times should you call a lead/prospect before moving to the next person in the sales funnel?
I remember reading a research report which said, the telemarketers used to make calls up to eight times, before giving up on a prospect. However, given the scenario, calling up to eight times is going to be an expensive exercise. Unless you are selling a higher ticket item, it may not make sense.
In the Indian scenario, if you have someone calling US clients at night, eight may be too much. In a two year duration, eight calls is probably okay but not in a short duration. Six to eight calls are enough to figure out if there is any interest from the prospect.
After those six to eight calls, use a system like LeadSquared, assuming they are willing to receive emails from you, to connect with them through your low cost marketing exercises. After nurturing them for a while through webinars and other activities, they may be a little more warm towards receiving calls from you.
For more webinar content, visit our blog to access all our previous webinar recordings.
