The window of opportunity

For many organisations, their website is not only the 'shop window' for their products and services, but also a primary lead generation tool, opening up the first point of contact with a prospect from which they can express interest in a topic, make enquiries or gain access to material.

Yet, whilst significant budget is invested in building, designing and optimising the website itself, all too often organisations could be falling short in their follow-up efforts once an enquiry has been made online. Many simply don't know what visitors to their site are looking at, and aren't able to pursue leads quickly enough.

In fact, more than a quarter (29%) of respondents from our own survey with 1800 SMEs, revealed that their organisation is not tracking visitor's activity at all. This means they have no insight into what visitors are interested in, or indeed, if they make a return visit to the website.

Time is also of the essence when it comes to follow up from an enquiry - and the clock starts ticking from the moment that the enquiry is made. However not all organisations have a firm grasp on how swiftly they can follow up on a lead. From our own survey, more than half of respondents, 53%, do not know how long it takes to respond and just a small minority, 7% of respondents, report that they are able to respond within an hour of the enquiry. This means they could be losing out, unnecessarily, on golden opportunities to generate new business.

When it comes to responding, it's no exaggeration to say that every second counts; the success rate of lead conversion falls dramatically after the first 'golden hour' of an enquiry. In fact, based on data from the Harvard Business Review, firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving an enquiry were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer an hour later. And they're 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer. The cold hard truth is that warm leads will soon lose interest the longer they are left waiting for a response.

Managing the Workflow

With enquiries from the web an increasingly important part of the Marcoms strategy, it's no longer enough to simply tally up the number of hits on a page. We need to get more granular than this and pinpoint the interests of specific visitors.

So how can organisations improve the follow up process?

It comes down to two key areas: having the right intelligence on what your web visitors are interested in then implementing more efficient workflows so that follow up is as timely as possible.

The good news is that new approaches in CRM are emerging which can provide more advanced insight into users' activity on your website - and then link this back to a central system so that sales people have all this information at their fingertips when they pick up the phone to make their call. These advancements mean that follow-up isn't left to chance; it can be a structured process, so that sales people can respond in a timely way, with the most relevant material.

For example, an Account Manager can see what a visitor to their site has been looking at, see when they visited your website, what pages they entered, exited on and how long they spent there. In this way, sales people are armed with the best possible intelligence and can have conversations tailored to their interests. It can also automatically alert you when a visitor makes a return visit - a sure sign that there's a warm lead waiting to be converted.

Incoming enquiries are a great source of leads but efforts made to generate them could be wasted without the right follow-up activity. With more advanced data organisations can take a more tailored approach to follow up and make sure that investments in their web marketing activity is fully maximised.

 

By Peter Connell, UK MD of CallPro CRM. 

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