How to Effectively Capture Quality Leads

The lead capture process is fundamental to every eCommerce marketing mix. What does your lead capture strategy look like?

For many businesses, the lead capture process often focuses on the volume of leads rather than the quality. A business might use tactics to bribe for leads, such as sweepstakes entries, discounts, or another tactic to create urgency and encourage anyone to enter their email address for the reward.

The pro to this approach is you may very well increase the volume of leads captured, but the con is many of these leads may not necessarily be of the highest quality.

Additionally, many of these approaches simply ask for an email address in exchange for the deal. The customer will definitely get the deal, but your business gains little to no insight in return on what that customer cares about or what types of products are most relevant to them.

So, how can your business increase the volume of leads and better understand your customer wants and needs without compromising quality?

Keep reading for some tips and tricks to help you get started.

What is a quality lead?

A quality lead is determined by the key characteristics that help identify customers that are more likely to boost your conversion rate and make a purchase from your business. Keep in mind the metrics associated with a “quality lead” will vary depending on your business goals.

Maybe you’re a beauty brand that specializes in clean beauty products. Your benchmark of “quality leads” will look drastically different from someone working in the financial services industry.

So how can you start figuring out what a quality lead looks like to your business?

Begin by asking yourself a few key questions:

• Who am I trying to target with my products/services?
• What characteristics am I looking for in these quality leads?
• How likely is this potential customer to convert and actually make a purchase?

Once you’ve established the metrics your business is using to identify quality leads, it’s time to take a step back and learn a little bit more about the current consumer mindset.

Understanding the Consumer Mindset

In a world where digital dominates, the average person sees between 4,000-10,000 advertisements each day.

This makes it not only difficult for businesses to capture quality leads, but often garnering any attention can feel overwhelming. The best way to find higher quality leads is to simply learn more about the people coming to your website.

Now, we’re not talking about third-party data or making assumptions based on a few vague data points. We’re talking about actually getting to know your customers and asking them questions that will provide more context on their intentions.

Believe it or not, outright asking any and all customers to hand over their email address and personal information won’t generate the highest possible engagement you could achieve. Why? Because customers today have higher expectations than ever before.

Trust isn’t immediate, it has to be built over time and in a way that is conversational and natural. Plus, if the customer can’t explicitly see the value they’ll receive in turn, then why would they offer their personal information?

In order to learn more about buying intents in order to identify quality leads, your business simply has to ask your customers a few simple questions to automate the quality lead generation process.

What many people often forget is that capturing a potential lead’s attention is only the first step!

Once you have their attention, you must gain their trust, and ideally, capture first-party data to maintain personalized communications in the future.

Here are 6 types of genuine value that will not only provide a higher experience but will also increase your conversion rate and the volume of leads you’re able to collect. Consumers often ask if the business will:

1. Unlock a benefit for me
2. Give me a recommendation
3. Save me time
4. Teach me
5. Entertain me
6. Test me

By providing at least 1 of these genuine forms of value, your business can expect an increase in conversion, sales, and happy customers.

The next step is to implement an effective solution to effectively capture quality leads and increase your conversion rate!

How to target higher quality leads

Now that your team has a solid foundation, you can begin to implement a solution that will target the best people for your products/services.

By implementing an interactive experience, in the form of a quiz, a survey, a lookbook, etc., your business can not only learn more about your customers, but you can build enough trust to capture quality leads in a matter of seconds!

The power of experience-driven lead capture is that the consumer receives the value upfront before being prompted to submit first-party data, such as a name, phone number, or email address if they choose.

CBD brand, beam, created a holiday gift guide in order to help customers shop for loved ones and also capture leads to continue personalized communications in the future.

The customer is led through a fun experience where they answer a few questions about the person they are shopping for and are then redirected to product pages showing the best gift results.

Before customers see the results, they are simply prompted to provide an email address, and voila! The customer sees a gift recommendation and beam receives a declared data point to continue personalized communications in the future.

U.K.-based fashion retailer, Boden, has created product finders, lookbooks, and more in order to help their customers feel inspired and find the best products based on their preferences.

In this interactive lookbook the customer simply answers a few key questions and are then prompted to enter their email in exchange for a first-purchase discount:

Get Started Today

Lead capture can be one of the trickiest parts of your team’s marketing efforts, but it doesn’t have to be!

Start building your own interactive experience today and start capturing quality leads in no time.

As your business continues to evolve its lead capture strategy, keep in mind these 3 takeaways:

1. Understand your most important data points and make them your focus.
2. Deliver genuine value in every customer interaction.
3. Don’t infer customer preferences. Have an ongoing conversation instead!

There you have it! Now, your team is better prepared to engage your consumers and provide genuine value.

Looking for some more inspiration?  Learn how Boden maintained an average lead capture rate of over 25% by implementing interactive experiences.