More often than not, businesses tend to over plan their funnels. But the most effective ones are those that are kept simple and to the point, especially when your clients seem to be taking longer to make a buying decision.
In this article, we will be discussing the possible reasons why you may be struggling to convert leads into clients and how marketing automation can help smoothen your customer journey and accelerate the conversion process.
5 reasons why your prospective clients aren’t buying from you
You aren’t addressing their pain points
Most businesses think that the best way to get noticed is to put up a great-looking website. Agreed but there’s an awful lot more to it than that.
You need to know what your prospective clients are looking for when they are looking for products and services similar to yours. You need to be able to identify the specific problems your prospective clients are facing and how you can solve them. This means getting inside their heads and understanding what they want and why it matters.
You also need to be able to demonstrate how you can help them solve their problems and deliver on their expectations.
Simply put, if you can’t narrow down the exact pain points of your ideal buyer, you won’t get their attention.
You aren’t credible enough
People don’t buy from people they don’t trust. If your prospective client doesn’t believe that you will do what you say, then they won’t be willing to take the risk of buying from you.
There’s a reason why thought leadership content is the king of all content. It helps build authority by allowing you to demonstrate your expertise in your industry.
If people can’t come to you to get their queries resolved or clear their doubts, they won’t buy from you. But once you have established credibility, you will be able to sell even the most mediocre offering from your product/service catalog.
Whether you agree or disagree, this is exactly why influencer marketing is so effective. Influencers spend years building credibility among their audienceby providing them with valuable information, which brands then leverage to promote their offerings.
Similarly, if your business can become a credible source of information for your clients, they will buy from you.
The value you are offering isn’t valuable to them
Every offering, whether product or service, has two benefits: tangible and intangible.
Tangible is the direct benefit that the client will get from using your offering, whereas intangible benefit is the perceived value that they derive after using the offering. Unarguably, they are both extremely important for overall customer satisfaction.
Let’s say, your customers don’t feel like they are getting any direct value from the products or services that you provide because they aren’t solving a problem for them, then it is time to rethink your approach because there’s no reason why they should buy from you.
Likewise, if you are offering them something that does solve a problem for them, but it doesn’t make them feel good about using it, then they aren’t likely to buy from you again because you aren’t satisfying all their expectations.
For instance, if you are selling SaaS-based software to small businesses, which is functional and powerful but extremely technical in nature, your clients will be on the lookout for a replacement because they won’t be fully happy interacting with it. And that’s when you would lose a customer.
You are talking to everyone
If you are talking to everyone, then you aren’t talking to anyone. This means you need to personalize your communication so well that your prospect ought to feel that you are speaking to them on anindividual level.
You need to identify what your ideal client looks like, and then focus on talking to them directly. You can do this by creating a persona –a description of the ideal customer to whom you want to speak. This will help you find out who is buying from you, and what they want from your company.
The more specific your persona, the easier it will be for you to find out how different types of people use your products or services.
Your sales funnel is broken
Do you have a clear path from awareness to purchase? If not, this could be the reason why your clients aren’t buying from you.
You need to ensure that there are high-quality engagement points for every stage of your customer’s buying journey. If you don’t set up your sales funnel properly, your clients will have a hard time finding the information they need and making a purchase decision.
The goal of a customer journey
A customer journey is a series of steps that a customer takes to interact with your business. It is not just about how you get people to buy things; it is also about how they come back and tell others about their experience.
A customer journey is a strategic approach to customer satisfaction. It is a map that shows how customers interact with your business and the flow of information. This map provides you with the ability to understand how your customers engage with your brand so that you can create touch points that appeal to them, from awareness to purchase and everything in between.
Your customer journey should help you identify what your ideal buyer is looking for, why they are looking for it, and how they find it. It should also help you understand where your customers come from, what motivates them, how they interact with you, and how much value they think you provide them.
The idea of a customer journey is to help marketers and salespeople understand how a potential customer moves through the purchase decision, so they can better tailor their marketing efforts and develop new products and services for them.
For example, if you are selling software and a customer signs up for a free trial, their journey will look something like this
Awareness:The first step in the customer journey is awareness where the prospect has become aware of the fact that they need software like yours.
Interest:Once someone becomes aware of your product, they become interested in it and want more information about it. This is where most companies mess up by not organizing their content. You need to have different sets of information for customers in different stages of their buying journey. This is where content marketing comes in!
Desire:This is the stage wherein the prospect has decided that they want to make a purchase. If they find your content and offering convincing enough, they will begin to do brand-specific research on your business.
Action: In the final stage, the prospect will turn into a customer if they choose to buy your software. If not, they will go back to the interest stage and find your alternatives. So, it is up to you to create effective touch points that will prevent them from falling through the customer journey process.
As you can see, a customer journey is an extremely systematic approach. So, you need to nail down your buyer persona to create an effective customer journey that actually helps you get more clients.
What does marketing automation do?
The world of business is changing rapidly. With the introduction of new technologies, there has been a revolution in how businesses operate.
The digital age has made it easier than ever to connect with customers and build relationships with them. This is great news for customer relations teams who are trying to keep up with demand while also supporting their customers’ need for a better experience.
Automation is the practice of automating processes to increase efficiency and make them more reliable so that you can focus on things that actually require human expertise. It can help improve your customer experience by reducing the time spent on tasks that don’t have a high impact on the customer experience, such as routine tasks like creating email marketing campaigns and updating social media profiles.
In addition, it can also help you reduce the amount of effort required for repetitive tasks that don’t add value for your company or its customers, like manual data entry and customer support (ex. chatbot).
Today, automation is a key element in improving customer satisfaction and meeting customer expectations as it helps companies improve their efficiency by increasing productivity, reducing costs, and improving the quality of interactions. It also helps companies to gain insight into their customers and allows them to react faster in order to meet the expectations of customers.
Why automate your customer journey
Countless businesses, especially small businesses with limited resources, are operating with the help of automation. Automating your customer journey can help you:
- Save time by reducing the number of operations and steps involved in closing a sale as well as reducing errors, as you can automate complex processes with software using a simple configuration.
- Improve quality by helping make getting feedback easier, which you can use to make higher quality products. By automating processes, you can ensure consistency in your offerings across a wide range of products and services, which can improve customer experience and loyalty.
- Increase efficiency by driving down costs by simplifying tasks and making them more efficient both in terms of time and effort required for their completion.
Additionally, you can also get more accurate data on who is contacting you and how, so you can better personalize the experience for each customer.
Automating your customer journey will also allow you to have a single operations dashboard that will show all of your customers’ interactions with your company in one place. And because you will be able to identify patterns in customer behavior, you will be able to improve the quality of your interactions with those customers and make more informed decisions about how best to serve them.
The importance of having a marketing funnel
A marketing funnel is instrumental in helping you understand your consumer’s buying process and how to reach them at different points in their journey. It is used by organizations of all sizes to track how their products and services are performing, and what’s causing customers to buy.
It is similar to the customer journey but instead of simply analyzing people in different stages, marketing funnels use specific approaches to convert them. For instance, using social media posts to increase brand awareness among people who are in the awareness stage.
The purpose of the marketing funnel is to segment consumers into stages of their shopping journey, so they can be targeted with specific marketing efforts that resonate with them at each stage.
Having a marketing funnel is an essential part of any business. It is the first step in creating a plan for how you want to market your product or service. There are three stages in every marketing funnel: Top of the funnel (ToFu), Middle of the funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of the funnel (BoFu).
The bottom of the funnel is where you will find your target audience and they are the people who need what you have to offer.
Once you have some idea of who those customers are, it is time to think about how they can get it. That’s where marketing comes in, which is why having an effective marketing plan and the software to implement your plan are so important.
The benefits of using a marketing funnel are numerous. Aside from helping you manage customer data, improve customer experience, and increase conversions, you can use a marketing funnel to:
- Segment your customers into target groups based on their behaviour.
- Create customized offers for each group
- Optimize your website’s content for each group (more site visitors).
- Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and adjust them based on the results.
- Grow your email list.
- Increase traffic to your website.
- Find out how much money people spend on your product or service (CLTV or customer lifetime value).
- Measure the effectiveness of different marketing strategies.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Depending on your needs, software, and your team’s ability, you can streamline all your operations based on a single, well-defined marketing funnel.
How to combine your marketing funnel with marketing automation to convert prospects into buyers
Marketing automation is a great way to capture leads, but if you don’t know how to convert those prospects into buyers, it is not of much use. That’s why we have put together this list of tips for using marketing automation to help your business grow.
Use content marketing to nurture leads
Content marketing is the best way to attract new customers and drive sales. It helps you build trust by showing how your company cares about your customers. By sharing valuable resources and getting data in exchange for it, you can educate potential customers about your products and services to help them make informed purchasing decisions in the future and build your own database.
You can use marketing automation tools to repurpose content to suit the needs of your customers across different platforms and still manage all data in one place.
Besides, content marketing will also give your prospects interesting information that they can share with other people, who might be interested in what you have to offer too. This is exactly what automated lead nurturing aims to achieve —keeping track of leads throughout the buying process by providing relevant content on a regular basis.
Personalize email sequences to address each prospect’s needs
Marketing automation tools automate repetitive tasks, freeing up your time to focus on more strategic activities. With marketing automation, you can set up email campaigns in minutes rather than days or weeks, create dynamic landing pages for lead generation, automate social media engagement, and measure the ROI of each campaign.
You can use the templates available in your marketing automation software or create them by segmenting your customer data. This is where personalization comes in. I
f you have enough data, you can create unique email sequences for each prospect based on their behaviour and past interactions with your brand. They will show up with individualized subject lines and content that matches each segment’s needs and interests.
With marketing automation, you can send emails and other communications to your prospects based on their specific needs at that moment in time.
For example, if they are in the buying cycle but haven’t purchased yet —even if they haven’t expressed interest in your product or service —you can send them a personalized email sequence that addresses their specific needs at present. Not only will this help you get your brand in front of them but also increase your chance of getting a sale because you have tailored your communication as per their requirements.
Personalization is key to increasing sales conversions. Marketing automation can help you personalize your emails by:
- Segmenting your list of contacts into different groups based on their behaviors, demographics, or other criteria you define.
- Using automated segmentation to deliver personalized content based on each contact’s unique preferences and history.
- Using predictive algorithms to determine what types of content will be most relevant to the recipient, based on previous interaction with your brand or products.
Incorporate a loyalty program
Loyalty programs are a great way to increase the chances of a new customer becoming a repeat customer. By offering discounts, perks, or other incentives to customers who maintain a certain level of loyalty, you can make your brand more attractive to them and increase the likelihood that they will continue to purchase from you in the future.
You can use marketing automation to streamline your loyalty program. Let’s say you want to leverage your loyalty program to expand your email list. You could create an email list of current customers and encourage them to invite others interested in purchasing your product or service.
Once a new referral signs up for your newsletter, you could reward them with special offers or discounts on their next purchases. You can also incentivize existing customers by providing them with more service-related benefits if they refer another person who becomes a new customer.
Loyalty programs give you the opportunity to reward your customers for their loyalty while also helping you increase your sales and improve the customer experience.
With marketing automation, you can:
- Track what kind of customers come back often
- Create a database of customers who have purchased particular items or services in the past
- Allow customers to redeem rewards based on past purchases
… among more.
Identify gaps in the sales funnel to reduce churn
Everyone knows that you need to make sure your marketing is converting visitors into buyers. After all, if no one buys your product or service, then you can’t make money.
But how do you measure conversion? You might look at the number of leads generated, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. It is also important to understand how those leads are converted into sales and how much revenue they generate for your business. As a result, it is essential to know where in the sales funnel people are dropping off before they close a deal.
When done well, marketing automation will help you increase conversion rates by lowering the cost of acquiring customers, increasing lead generation, and increasing engagement with existing customers. All this simply by allowing you to visualize the gaps in your funnel so that you can fix them before they affect your bottom line.
Automate the feedback loop
One of the key ingredients for growing a business is getting feedback from your customers. If you have no idea what they think of your product or service, then how can you improve?
The only problem is that people are willing likely to tell you if something isn’t working for them or if there’s an issue with your product brands often don’t know how to collect that information for better utilization.
Start by making it easy for people to provide feedback. A simple questionnaire is all it takes in most cases. In this case, a quick survey question like: “What did you like about the product?” can really help you identify trends and patterns so that you can make improvements over time.
And you can set up this feedback form in a way that it shows up right after every purchase using marketing automation. You can collect the responses in one place and arrange them into meaningful segments, which you can use for informing decisions.
Marketing automation is a powerful tool that helps marketers reach the right person at the right time. It is also a great way to improve conversion rates, increase revenue, and optimize your operations to help you scale faster.
That said, marketing automation shouldn’t be viewed as an end in itself; it should be seen as one piece of a larger digital marketing strategy that includes website optimization and email campaigns. So, make sure you don’t use it as a replacement for digital marketing but as an extension of your marketing efforts.