It’s the age-old question that keeps business owners up at night: How do I attract and convert more leads? The answer lies in your current lead generation activity. Every business is different so you need to work out what marketing campaigns and sales processes are most effective at attracting qualified leads and turning them into paying customers. You can do that by tracking leads. This shows you every step of their journey to becoming a new customer, allowing you to refine your sales funnel and ultimately make more money.
So, let’s explore the what, why, and how of lead tracking.
What is lead tracking?
To clarify, lead tracking is the process of monitoring potential customers as they progress through the stages of your marketing and sales funnel, revealing data on exactly how new leads become new customers. It provides a lot of useful information including your best lead sources, the highest converting touchpoints in the customer journey, and areas for improvement to speed up the sales cycle. Essentially, lead management helps marketing teams attract more qualified leads and helps sales teams convert more potential customers.
Why is lead tracking important?
Proper lead management gives businesses the data they need to succeed. Lead tracking shows the effectiveness of each of your lead sources. The sources that are generating the most high-quality leads are the sources to focus marketing efforts on to increase your volume of leads.
While attracting a higher volume of leads, you want to make sure you’re converting as many of them as possible. Lead tracking shows you what helps to convert leads and where potential customers are dropping off so you can increase your conversion and retention rates.
A business should never rely on one lead source, one marketing strategy, or one sales technique. They should be attracting, nurturing, and converting leads using a variety of methods. Lead tracking can determine which methods are getting the best results and therefore are worth investing in, ensuring an effective customer journey for every lead.
Lead tracking gives busy businesses real-time insights into their customer acquisition, tracking exactly how new customers are won and how potential customers are lost. This will highlight opportunities for optimization whether reworking an email marketing campaign or eliminating a delay in the workflow of sales reps.
Ready to get started with lead tracking?
How to Track Leads: 7 Tips and Best Practices
Before jumping into lead tracking, plot out your plan for effectively implementing a lead management strategy so you can start getting results ASAP.
1. Use Google Analytics and UTMs.
At the core of lead tracking is lead data. You need to collect data on customer behavior to see what marketing campaigns they’ve been interacting with and at what touchpoints they’ve reached out to your salespeople. Google Analytics is a great lead-tracking software to help you do that. Once installed on your website, it will plot where leads have come from and their activity on your website.
Even using Google Tag Manager to highlight key actions like visiting a landing page might not add as much detail as you need. Trying using UTM too. This is a piece of code you can add to the end of URLs to give Google Analytics more information about the webpage.
2. Implement marketing automation tools.
The more automation you can implement into your sales funnel, the smoother it will flow and the easier it will be to track. You don’t want to have to worry about getting sales reps to input lead information into a spreadsheet. You want data collection to be instant and accessible. Plus, by automating your marketing messages, you can improve your response time and make sure you are interacting with leads when they are hot.
3. Consider CRM software.
As your sales team works on converting leads, keep things as organized as possible so leads don’t slip through the net. A good CRM software allows you to store lead information in an easy-to-navigate platform so anyone in the team can get up to date on any previous interactions. This ensures leads are followed up within a timely manner, through their preferred communication channel, and with personalization when possible. The Podium CRM is perfect for managing customer communication.
4. Improve lead nurturing and communication.
Some customers will buy straight away. Others will need time to make the purchase decision. Therefore, a customer journey that nurtures leads gets more conversions. You don’t want to leave it too long between interactions, increasing the chance they’ll forget about the business and fail to make a purchase. But you don’t want to overwhelm potential customers with sales messages either. Experiment with marketing campaigns that keep leads engaged and progressing at their own pace along the sales funnel.
5. Follow-up via text.
The communication channel you use to follow up with leads is as important as the message you send to them. It has to be a communication channel they actively use to engage with people. Text messaging has great open and response rates. So if you don’t already use text marketing in your business, you should consider adding it to your roster of communication options. Check out Podium’s text marketing management tool for more details.
6. Assign lead statuses or stages.
We know that people don’t jump from new leads to new customers instantly. It takes some work. Breaking your sales funnel into stages will allow you to assign each lead a status indicating where they are in the process of becoming a paying customer. This will give greater detail to your lead tracking insights and help you to come up with suitable interventions at each stage. For example, a lead that has just joined your email list from social media will need to receive a different marketing message compared to a lead that has abandoned their cart.
7. Collect lead data.
Collect as much information about each lead as possible. The more detailed data you have, the easier it will be to come to accurate conclusions about your sales pipeline. You might find that different customer profiles respond to different marketing campaigns so by segmenting your list of leads you can get better results. By collecting lead data you can also implement lead scoring, ranking leads on their likelihood to convert based on the signs of conversion you have identified in your customer journey. This enables you to focus on high-quality leads.
Lead Tracking Tools and Software
Don’t rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage your lead tracking! Some tools streamline the process, presenting key insights in a snapshot on the software dashboard for easy monitoring and management.
Podium is a platform that you can use for sales lead tracking as well as multiple other activities in the marketing and communication pipeline. It creates a truly interconnected workflow and seamless customer experience. Alongside managing the customer contact list and history, sales reps can reach out through the omnichannel inbox (including text, webchat, and phone calls), send payment links, request reviews, and more within the Podium platform.
Pipedrive is a customer relationship management software where you can store and organize leads to clearly see how they are progressing through the sales pipeline through color-coding and tagging. While it can be customized, phone support is only available on the highest payment plan so it helps to be technically confident.
Capsule is another lead management system that helps you to nurture leads to the point of conversion. All your qualified leads are in one place and you can easily access lead information including their communication history. The relatively low pricing does reflect the lack of advanced features.
Surpass Your Lead Goals and Drive Conversions
If you are going to attract and convert more customers through lead tracking, you need the right tools to support your efforts. Podium meets the needs of marketing and sales teams working on refining lead acquisition and conversion. Businesses can capture new leads through their website with Podium Webchat. Whatever communication channel leads use, it can be monitored and managed through the omnichannel Inbox.
Get started by seeing the Webchat in action on your site and utilizing our 500 text messaging templates—for free!
Lead Tracking FAQs
1. How to capture leads?
To capture new leads for your business, you need to create marketing campaigns that reach and resonate with potential customers. Often a combination of SEO, social media content and paid advertising works well. Make sure leads have an easy way to interact with the business so you can follow up with them.
2. How to collect lead data and information?
Lead data can be collected through tracking software such as Google Analytics. It can also be helpful to ask them to fill out a web form with their contact information or data can be collected through conversations with team members.
3. How to qualify leads?
Lead scoring allows you to rate leads on how likely they are to make a purchase. Qualified leads score highly because they have indicated they are likely to buy. As you track leads, you’ll be able to more accurately predict the attributes of a qualified lead.
4. Why is tracking leads important?
It’s important to know what marketing campaigns and sales processes are working in your business so you know where to invest money and resources to win new customers and grow the business. By tracking leads, you can see the effectiveness of your customer journey and areas for optimization.
