Your Sure-Fire Guide to Retaining Website Leads in 2019

Two of the biggest problems that small businesses face is generating new leads and retaining website leads — this guide will help you keep customers.

Guide to Retain Website Leads

Lead generation is surely one of the most difficult challenges for marketers. Playing the field to find promising prospects for your business is a tough job, but what is even more challenging is retaining the website leads that you get.

48% of businesses agreed, in a survey, that most of their leads require long cycle nurturing with many influencers.

So yes, generating leads is important but retaining them requires equal attention.

Fact is that 96% of the visitors on your website do not come with the intention of doing business right away or at all.

So you have to use the right strategy to influence them as fast as you can and keep them engaged. You just can’t afford to let them switch to one of your competitors.

But before you go into the details of lead generation ideas, let’s have a little insight into what lead generation is and how it works for a business.

What is a lead and lead generation?

As a marketer, you would already know that a lead is a prospective customer who shows some inclination towards your business. The visitors may not be your customer yet, but from the online behavior and search patterns, you can tell that they can be a promising prospect for conversion in the future.

Lead generation is the business practice of identifying such prospective customers and drawing their attention to your website or other platforms and gradually influencing them into doing business with you.

For small businesses, a lead generation strategy is imperative for growth and expansion. To help you with this, we are sharing a guide with some of the best ways to generate leads for your website and retain website leads as well. These include:

Now let’s dig deep to understand how you can leverage these to your benefit.

Customer referral programs

No matter how advanced digital marketing becomes, or how many new strategies are developed by top marketers, word-of-mouth marketing can never go out of relevance.In fact, in today’s world of digital marketing, customer referral programs is a lead generation strategy that is easier to track and gauge. Such programs generate high quality leads as the brand is referred by people who already believe in it. One of the best ways to ensure that your customers do refer your business to their contacts is by offering them incentives.

Don’t believe us? Look at the stats that point to this:

Statistics show that referral leads tend to convert 30% better than the leads generated from other marketing channels.

A study published by Journal of Marketing states that referred customers usually have a 16% higher lifetime value.

Many businesses, even big names such as Airbnb, give out referral codes to customers where it creates a win-win situation for both the existing customers and prospects. That’s one excellent lead retention and lead generation example to learn from.

Using live chat for website

Live chat is another great way of keeping your leads engaged on your website. People usually find live chat very helpful as they are able to receive quick and accurate answers to their queries. Other ways used for handling customer queries and issues, such as email or social media, generally take 10 to 12 hours for the executives to respond.

live chat

Using live chat for lead generation can be more efficient than email communication or other modes of reaching out to the prospects and customers.

In fact, in a survey, 63% of people said that they are more likely to return to a website that offers quality live chat. 38% said that they had purchased because of their experience during the chat session itself.

To add to this, live chat for website that is integrated with AI or machine learning can give much faster response times and efficient solutions to your leads. The best option is to have your sales team handle the live chat, assisted by AI.

Reconsidering your deals and discounts

Offering offers and discounts as incentives to your existing and prospective customers is a great idea. But none of this will be fruitful if you don’t use the right media for publicity. There are various platforms on which you can advertise your offers with the intention of lead generation.

There are several websites today that are entirely dedicated to deals and discounts. Some examples of these are, the highly popular Groupon, CouponX, or Woot. You can easily partner with such websites and make your offers and discount coupons available there to generate more leads and retain existing ones.

Personalizing your email marketing strategy

54% of email marketers say that their primary aim with email marketing is to increase the engagement rate. That’s why email marketing is still one of the primary marketing tools for many businesses.

A study by Pew Research revealed that almost 92% of online adults use email and 61% of them use it every day.

 

email marketing study

Email marketing is found to be more fruitful when it is personalized for individual customers or leads. Automated emails sent to a long list of contacts with a generic looking content fails to connect with your prospective customers. Try sending out more personalized emails. Giving little personal touches, like sending a birthday message and an offer or a message from the CEO can make your leads feel important, which may eventually lead to conversions.

Creating quality content for different platforms

Another way that many of the leads land on your website and keep coming back is through your blog or other online platforms. Creating content that shares valuable information for prospective and existing customers is a great lead generation idea.

According to a report by HubSpot, 47% of buyers viewed at least 3 to 5 pieces of blog content before engaging with a sales representative on a website.

Blogging is a good way of addressing consumer pain points too. Most people discover new products or services while looking for a solution to their problem. If your blog can offer an answer to their queries, you are likely to generate more traffic for your website and hence more leads.

Content creation for your blog or other related blogs is one of the best ways to generate leads. For instance, if you are a retailer selling handmade paper, you could write a blog on, say:

  • What are the different grades of handmade paper and what are they used for
  • 5 things to check while buying handmade paper
  • Different types of handmade paper compared
  • Updates on the paper industry

Creating eBooks for downloading

One marketing trend that is currently very popular is the creation of eBooks. Similar to how blogs generate leads for your website, eBooks can also be a useful tool. People looking for useful information somehow related to your product or service can find these eBooks online and download them. This will, in turn, direct them to your website if they find the information helpful.

A good quality ebook with valuable and reliable information shows off your company’s authority in its field and can be great for building trust among your leads. These can even be shared among peers and generate more leads for you, as long as the content is useful.

Posting online reviews to influence people

We may tend to think that customer reviews online go unnoticed, but that’s so not true.

According to statistics, 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 89% of consumers even read the business’ response to the reviews.

So, it is important to get some good reviews on your website from some loyal and satisfied customers. This could be a great driving factor for lead generation and retention for your website.

Now that you know almost everything about how to get leads online in 2019, it’s time to get into action.