There isn’t one guaranteed way to win your next customer. But no matter which path works best for your team, you can’t prospect effectively without a deep understanding of your product, a firm grasp of your ideal customer, and the specific steps needed to connect the two.
Let’s break down the various channels for finding prospects and look at how effective each is at converting leads to opportunities, and ultimately, to customers.
Channels for Converting Leads
Websites
For most businesses, websites are a key lead-generation platform, especially when they’re set up with the right tools to attract, inform, and persuade visitors.
Optimum website conversion rates vary depending on the type of website, the desired action, and the industry. An analysis of 44,000 landing pages by Unbounce found a median conversion rate of 4.6% — with results ranging from 3% for SaaS businesses to nearly 8% for media and entertainment.
Website conversion rates can be affected by a number of factors including:
- the quality of traffic to the site
- the relevance of the site’s content
- the industry
- how complex the products or services are
- how niche the audience is
- the user experience of the site
- design and layout
- the overall trust and credibility of the site
- the effectiveness of the call-to-action
Consistently tracking your website’s conversion rate will help quantify how any changes to your site are affecting conversion rates. To improve your website conversion rate, make sure your business is optimizing its web forms.
Email outreach typically requires a series of targeted emails, delivered on a predetermined cadence, that relate to the prospect and their pain points. The average email open rate across industries is about 21%.
There are many ways to make your emails more effective, from catchy headlines that are impossible to ignore to personalization that shows a prospect you understand their specific needs and problems.
These cold email templates can help you use the customer data at your fingertips to convert prospects faster.
Cold Calling
Cold calling gets a bad rap. But when done correctly, it’s one of the most cost-effective ways of making a real connection with prospects. In fact, 41% of salespeople consider cold calling their most powerful tool for making a sale.
To prove it, ZoomInfo’s data team researched how often individuals picked up their mobile and direct phone lines. After a month-long analysis, we found that over 24% of individuals answered their mobile phone, while 12% answered their direct lines.
The importance of calling mobile numbers skyrocketed during the early days of the pandemic, when many people were working from home. However, this tactic remains effective, even as more folks return to the office. The bottom line? With a mix of in-office, hybrid, and remote work options now in place, having both mobile and direct-dial office numbers as part of your sales toolkit is essential.
Conversion rates on traditional cold-calling campaigns can be very low — a widely cited Baylor University study, done in conjunction with Keller Williams Realty International, found agents earned an appointment or referral only 0.5% of the time.
The good news: With more accurate targeting, better prospecting data, and solid pre-call research, your sales team can beat those dismal numbers.
Chatbots
Conversational marketing tools, typically known as chatbots, allow marketers to craft automated, interactive conversation models personalized to their prospects. In a recent study, more than half of marketers said chatbots increased their conversion rates by at least 10%.
The best chat products integrate with your existing tech stack to send real-time notifications when prospects that match your ideal customer profile visit your site. Data-backed chatbots can also use company metrics, news, and buyer intent signals to direct conversations and effectively route leads to the right salespeople when buyer interest is high.
Use our chatbot buyer’s guide to find the chatbot that’ll work best for your company.
Social Media Campaigns
A good rule of thumb for social media campaign conversion rates is between 2-5%. Specific rates vary based on your industry, which channel you’re using, and whether you’re running a paid or organic campaign.
Social media campaigns work best when they deliver messages that make people scrolling through their feed do a double take. Designed images can perform much better than simple text, so create some templates to save time. And never underestimate the power of emojis to make a message feel approachable.
Display and Search Ads
Display ads target prospects who may or may not know about your product or service. These ads show up before or after a video, on commercial and media websites, and in emails. Internet-wide, click-through rates for display ads can average about 0.1%.
Search ads only show up when a prospect is actively searching for a specific product or service, so it’s no surprise that search ads see a higher average conversion rate, around 5% according to WordStream research.
To make display ads more impactful, include a clear CTA, employ retargeting, and use well-written, on-point copy. And avoid these display ad pitfalls.
Converting leads into closed deals is a long, complicated process — more tools and more channels can sometimes mean too many KPIs to track and increased worries about wasted spending.
If you want to connect with the right prospects at the right time, ZoomInfo can help — in a recent survey, 88% of our revenue operations customers said they used ZoomInfo to expand their total addressable market. Get a demo today to learn more.