Unlock Leads with Stellar Customer Service

Lead generation has become the primary concern of establishments of all sizes. In a market that is becoming increasingly saturated and competitive, attracting consumer interest to your business's products or/and services is not as easy as it used to be. Branding, consistency in communication with prospects, and digital marketing are some of the most powerful lead generation strategies.

Today, brands are heavily relying on the Internet to convert prospects and push them to enter the sales funnel. Marketing strategists are using landing pages, blogs, forums, and paid ads on social media. But no matter how many leads are generated by marketing, only approximately 20% of those leads actually convert into customers.

Is there something more that can be done? The answer lies in forming a deeper relationship with prospects. In order to achieve this, you will have to excel in your customer service. But first, let's focus on improving lead generation.

The Four Pillars of Lead Generation Strategies

There are a lot more strategies than we can fit in any article, but all of them have four factors in common:

• Lead capture

If you want people to stay on your website long enough to drop down the funnel, you need to capture their attention with information that's relevant to them and their search. Only then will you have a better chance at capturing a lead.

CTAs like "Sign up here" don't work anymore — people don't want to get spammed with unnecessary mail. The rule of thumb here is to give something before you ask your lead to give back.

• Lead magnet

The new marketing motto is to "add more value" to a potential customer's search. The thing is, you might see a good gap between generating traffic and leads. A way to close this partition is to offer potential clients some sort of value — a lead magnet.

This can be a free tutorial, webinar, e-book, or trial of your product or service.

• Landing page conversion techniques

Landing pages are websites that usually exist outside your main website, and they're where your ads should lead to.

You can track the success of your advertising campaign with a tool like Voluum.

On the one hand, a good landing page can capture leads. On the other, it can warm up those in the process of commercial research.

• Lead scoring

This is basically the use of marketing automation software. It will help you organize leads by priority — the level of their engagement with your inbound marketing.

5 Ways to Improve Lead Generation

1. Lead Generation via Comments on Blogs

You may already know that a blog is an important aspect of any website. Useful and up-to-date content attracts more visitors. In the end, it increases website traffic, time spent on a page, and the website's rank in search results.

However, there is also one more thing you can use your blog for - invite readers to ask or recommend something in the comment section after each article. It might seem like an "out of your comfort zone" task for customer support agents to be active on a blog, but it really isn't any different than chatting with a customer using live chat.

Highly informative articles written in a friendly and professional tone that encourage readers to participate do result in higher lead generation. The readers' comments also provide ideas for the next article.

After the support agent answers the thread in the comments section, that topic can be used to write the next in-depth article that will generate more leads. Don't forget to pay attention to SEO when you write these. By doing so, you will get even higher ranks in search inquiries.

2. Leveraging Email Marketing to Generate Leads

Email marketing has become a trend in generating leads. Almost every online business relies heavily on lead generation as one of its core marketing ethics. There are numerous tools on the market to generate leads for businesses. From Mailchimp to send out drip campaigns to Mailbird to manage emails, prospect addresses, and much more, it can easily be said that email marketing has become a breeze with the help of such tools.

What is a drip email campaign?

A drip email campaign is a set of emails that are automated to be sent within a certain timeline. Basically, you are sending the right pieces of information at the right time, providing relevant content. An example of a drip campaign in relation to newsletters would be a welcoming email with links to browse right away (to help a reader get acquainted with your website) and a catchup email a couple days later with your most popular or most recent content.

Now, businesses can capture leads by sending out newsletters and drips with the help of email automation tools. Listing those precious prospect leads, managing all the emails, and maintaining a smooth flow is being offered by email management apps such as Mailbird. In a nutshell, businesses don't need to worry much, as these tools take care of the technical side while they focus on leads.

3. Lead Generation via Social Media Engagement

"Knowing every detail of your business will determine its success or failure. You must know every metric that makes your business successful and cut the metrics that aren't delivering success," says Greg Hayment, founder of SEO.it.

The social media aspect is similar to the blog comments. When addressed properly, both of these work as the perfect synergy of lead generation and lead nurturing. While the influx of questions posted through a blog can be limited, the number of social media profiles is significantly bigger. This is why social media can be leveraged for lead nurturing.

There should be at least one person from the customer service department appointed by the service lead to track the social media page(s). By responding in detail to each question posted there, you will send a powerful message to consumers. The foundation of a firmer bond with your consumers is laid by making them feel they are respected and that they can always talk about whatever concerns them.

For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is a gold mine of opportunities. LinkedIn feed is search engine oriented which means the articles and textpost uploaded can help you drive organic traffic to you company pages. LinkedIn filters and InMail allows you to prospect and connect with a niche set of audience. Automation tools like Linked Helper can help streamline LinkedIn lead generation to much extend.

In order to get the full grasp of social media's potential, you will have to use tools to track social media metrics.

4. Passive Lead Generation via Knowledge Base

Using an external knowledge base to empower your target audience is an incredible means of passive lead generation. When you have well-written knowledge base articles in terms of SEO, titles, concise and actionable content, and clear categories, you dramatically increase the chances of your articles showing up in search results when someone looks for help online.

Your knowledge base will not only be at your customers' disposal, helping them solve issues efficiently, but it will also attract valuable prospects to your website. If you want to further increase lead generation through the knowledge base, make sure to provide users with help center information easily accessible on every page so they can call for further assistance if they need it.

5. Improving Lead Generation and User Experience on Landing Pages

The landing page is the part of your website with the most lead-capturing potential. This is why its design and optimization are of utmost importance. A landing page is usually used for the promotion of a single product or service. Therefore, its minimalistic design doesn't surprise us. The elements found on a landing page should provide any information that might interest a visitor before clicking on a call to action.

If you want to cover all the ground and make sure visitors don't leave because they feel unclear about something, put a "Need More Information?" or "Get in Touch" element on the page together with call center contact info. Thus, your contact center can give your visitors immediate help.

In recent years, video content saw a steady rise in popularity, so it's no wonder that more and more landing pages now have some form of video in them. However, keep in mind that page loading speed remains a critical factor, so you might want to consider using a content delivery network (CDN) software.

In order to increase lead generation even further, you can implement live chat software or services on the landing page. One Forrester study claims that 44% of online consumers are of the opinion that having questions answered by a real person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the key features a website can offer.

What Is the Main Role of Customer Service in All This?

Customer service is your secret weapon in lead generation.

Whether you offer something, forecasting that people will like it enough to try your services, or you're hunting down leads via a knowledge base, what you will require one way or the other is communication. Communication is the crutch of not only scoring leads but also nurturing them.

A lot of lead generation strategies fail because no matter how many leads you get, it's the ones you can win over that you value the most. There's no point in having 100 leads if only one person ends up buying from you.

Brands are starting to use AI contact center platforms that not only generate and collect leads from various channels but also provide insights from collected data. These insights can be recommendations, predictions, or data-driven decisions that the sales and marketing team can use to convert a prospect into a customer.

So that is why good customer service matters. It helps build relationships and nurture leads into loyal clients.

Wrap Up

As you can see, customer service is a valuable ally to your other marketing strategies aiming to increase lead generation. It plays a huge role in lead nurturing, which in turn feeds the transition of leads from the marketing funnel to a sale.

Since we are at the start of a customer-centric era, we can safely assume that in the future customer service will have an even more important role to play. Feel free to expand your knowledge by reading other relevant resources on how to make your customer service more effective in order to generate and nurture more leads.

What are the top lead generation strategies?

To sum up, here are the strategies mentioned in the article:

• Engage with readers in your blog's comments section.
• Ask blog readers for recommendations and use them as ideas for future articles.
• Use Mailchimp or Mailchimp alternatives for email marketing campaigns .
• Use Mailbird to manage correspondence with prospects.
• Send useful and relevant newsletters and drips.
• Appoint someone from the support team or hire an SMM specialist to engage with potential leads on social media.
• Use a knowledge base to create handy articles about your product that will be especially helpful for potential leads.
• Improve your landing pages to include all the essential info a potential lead might need.

About Robin: Robin is a Technical Support Executive with a combined experience of six years. He is well acquainted with various Knowledge Base tools and is currently associated with ProProfs. In his free time, Robin enjoys reading and traveling.