Leads are the lifeblood of any business, and a good lead generation strategy is key to long-term growth. Marketers and agencies focused on ROI are great at crunching the numbers and acquiring new leads. 

Unfortunately, quality leads often get lost as the workflow continues on. Interested prospects get left on read, long-term customers fall off after a long period without communication, and yet the ROI is still going up. If companies want to see tangible growth that is accurately reflected by their ROI, then a holistic approach to lead generation is imperative. 

Acquiring new leads, following up with interested prospects, and implementing an air-tight lead generation workflow are all vital to tripling ROI. Increasing the number of customers certainly raises the numbers. However, there is much to gain from increasing the dollar amount in sales per customer over time. 

Even if a business creates an online ad campaign that gets record clicks, these leads can quickly cool off if their lead generation strategy doesn’t include retention and multiple touchpoints throughout the acquisition stage and customer journey.

Let’s take a look at nine out of the box strategies that can help marketers triple their ROI:

1. Nurture Campaigns

As browsers are increasingly doing away with third-party cookies and allowing more ad blocking capabilities, companies are in need of new means to target potential customers and increase the number of times consumers come into contact with their brand. 

Additionally, more customers are moving toward technologies, like voice search, that many marketers are uncertain about. These factors seemingly work against brand marketing strategies. However, if leveraged correctly, it is possible to nurture thriving customer relationships and increase ROI. 

One of the ways brands can leverage the “new normal” of expensive digital marketing is through customer-centric nurture campaigns. A nurture campaign meets customers where they are in their journey and gives them a friendly nudge toward the next step in the process. 

A nurture campaign is highly personalized according to where a customer is and where an organization wants them to be. In terms of increasing ROI, nurture campaigns are targeted toward customers who are engaged and likely to make multiple purchases over time.

2. Optimize Landing Pages

Landing page conversion rates aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. For example, the average landing page conversion rate sits at 2.35%, and the top-earning landing page conversion rates are still only 5-10%. These numbers are not great. But, they don’t have to be. Landing pages are not top sellers, as we can clearly tell from these statistics, but they are amazing tools for planting seeds as key touchpoints during lead generation. So it’s still critical to optimize landing pages with an SEO-centric strategy.

What’s more important than the fact that a consumer arrived at a landing page is how they got there. Optimize your landing pages so that they fit in seamlessly with your lead generation efforts as a next step in the process of converting to sales. There are many writers who are skilled in developing optimized landing page text, and you can expect to pay at least $25 an hour for a quality freelance writer. This is a worthy investment as landing pages are crucial stepping stones along the consumer path to making a purchase. 

3. Remarketing and Follow Up

When a hot lead slowly becomes cooler and cooler, it tends to fall into the category of leads that receive generic messaging over time in hopes that they will eventually change their mind and convert. 

While this does sometimes work, a proper remarketing strategy will work better. Instead of blindly making contact every once in a while with vague advertising and “we miss you” messaging, an active remarketing strategy continues to target these cooler leads. 

In terms of ROI, you’ve already got the lead data that you need to adjust your campaign according to their needs. Instead of spending time and money creating new campaigns, remarket your existing campaign with a few tweaks to hook leads that are cooling down. 

Your remarketed leads need a little extra support, so utilize automated support systems like chatbots to give them instant guidance when they need it so that you don’t lose them again. Marketing AI is also extremely cost-effective, which is why it’s especially great for warm to cool leads. 

Support AI is also useful for the follow-up stage. Company response time can make or break a sale, no matter how long it’s been since the last touchpoint. In fact, 90% of customers say that an immediate response is very important when they have a customer service-related question. In the global economy of eCommerce, 24/7 service is mandatory. And there’s just no way to accomplish that without automation. 

As an added perk, chatbots and support AI are also great at generating leads themselves. Instead of submitting an inquiry and waiting to receive a simple response or having to do extensive market research, consumers can receive instant, personalized guidance without having to leave your website. 

4. Custom Account-Based Marketing

It’s a well-known fact that personalized ad experiences can have significant effects on ROI. A personalized web experience can lead to an increased ROI of 19% and even higher percentages for personalized email campaigns. Custom account-based marketing is the personalization of B2B marketing. Instead of creating customized campaigns for individual personas, an account-based approach creates a customized ad experience for a business as a whole. 

Many times marketers get close to account-based marketing by marketing toward specific roles at a company. However, account-based marketing speaks directly to the philosophy and culture of a company. This is a marketing strategy that requires extensive research, but the payoff can be huge compared to general lead generation strategies. Focus on building a relationship with the account that you want to convert, and let that relationship dictate all other marketing moves. 

5. Consistent Workflows

Consumers like consistency. Create a lead generation workflow that accounts for several different customer journeys, points of abandonment, and remarketing opportunities. There should never be a point where you give up on a lead completely. There is something to be gained from every piece of data, even if they have been sitting in your prospect list for a year or more.  

The best way to make sure that you don’t have any leads decay early or that you miss a critical touchpoint along the way is to utilize CRM software. Not only do CRMs allow marketers to automate the entire prospecting and lead generation journey, but you can also modify your segments and targeted campaigns automatically according to customer activity and other factors, like data from your monetized ads. You can expect to get paid between $0.05 to $0.50 per click depending on the advertisement, and you can gain insights into the interests of your visitors. 

Consistency also makes it easy for customers to trust a company. Building trust through consistency gives your budding relationship a strong foundation that is backed by your company’s ongoing customer service and support. Consistency sets the tone for the entire relationship moving forward.

6. Analyze Lead Source and Production

Consider this: you have three campaigns that make ten sales a day. One at 100% ROI, another at 30% ROI, and the last coming in at 300% ROI. You might consider dropping the least profitable campaigns so that you can continue hitting ten sales per day with 300% ROI. Not bad. But if you consider volume, you’re really not acquiring that much of a customer base in this scenario. 

Let’s say that you keep all three campaigns going. Now you are making 30 sales per day with 170% ROI. Real growth can be seen when you step away from the ROI momentarily to look at the bigger picture. In this case you have tripled your volume and remained profitable. Looking to the future, you have a 60-70% probability of selling to an existing customer vs. a 5-20% probability of selling to a new customer, and you just tripled your existing customer base in one day. 

Conclusion

Integrating these tips can significantly increase your ROI and improve customer relationships, retention, and long-term gains. Recognize weak points in lead generation workflows and identify the ways that automation can strengthen your marketing strategies. Consistency is critical when it comes to creating a resilient and functional lead generation strategy, but that shouldn’t deter marketers from trying out new techniques if their current strategy is falling behind their ROI goals. 

Finding a balance between customer retention and acquisition can improve revenue overall and increase the amount of user-generated content and customer loyalty that creates leads without tedious analytics and marketing efforts. If you want to triple your ROI, think specific, think multi-channel, and look ahead to automated technologies that increase productivity and produce data-driven workflows. 

Author Bio

Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter from ShenZhen, China. She has a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan, and DouYin (now TikTok).

Author Bio:

by guestauthor