3 Steps to Turn Leads Into Customers

You work hard to get every single lead for your business — but those precious leads are no use if you don’t act on them. For busy small business owners, however, it's all too easy to let leads fall through the cracks. How can you ensure that as many leads as possible convert to customers? Follow these three simple steps.

Step 1: Attract the right kinds of leads. The key to making the sale is not just attracting leads, but attracting the right type of leads — those who are most likely to buy what you sell. To do that, you need to identify your most valuable keywords and use them on your business website and in your paid search ads. 

Are you a local business seeking local customers? You don't want to waste time advertising to people 100 miles away.  Save money and get better advertising results by focusing your efforts on people in your target market. 

Step 2: Reach out to leads. Once you've landed those leads, the next step is nurturing them until they become customers. You can save time by using a lead management platform such as Lead Stream. It uses automated email campaigns to ensure that your warm leads don't get neglected. You can choose from a library of lead nurturing emails professionally written by experts to send to prospects, or create special offers on your social media pages and website (Lead Stream helps with that, too). You'll also be notified about new leads so you can respond right away to any inquiries from prospects.

Step 3: Follow up as many times as it takes. It's rare that you'll convert a lead to a customer with one contact. However, staying on top of the leads you've contacted (or haven't contacted) can be a full-time job in itself. It's a lot easier to handle if you have a dashboard that you can use to view all the information. With Lead Stream, you’ll be able to see the details of your monthly ad spending, so you can stay on budget. You can also keep track of calls and emails you've received from leads, so no one is forgotten. Last, but not least, you can track important metrics, such as lead conversion and ad ranking, to make sure you’re always getting the results you want from your marketing campaigns.

Photo by Thomas Drouault on Unsplash