This article was written by Hubspots very own, Pamela Vaughan
Say hello to Johnny the prospect. He's to your right. Now imagine this scenario: Johnny has just arrived on your blog through a link to an article of yours he found in search. He enjoys the content, and decides to click on your lovely call-to-action promoting an ebook for more in-depth information on the subject. Johnny heads on over to that beautifully optimized landing page, fills out the form, clicks "Download Ebook Now," and ... BAM! Johnny the prospect is now Johnny the lead. Brush off your shoulders, marketer, your work here is done.
Hmmm ... not so fast. Chances are, if this is Johnny's first interaction with your company, he's probably not quite yet ready for a sales call. At this point, he may not even have a clue what you sell. So while Johnny is now technically a "lead," he's probably not the warmest one in your database (even though his smile may be). So what do you do with Johnny now? You have two choices: let Johnny read your ebook and then go about his life (which may or may not involve a visit back to your website), or try to reconvert him. The choice is yours, but we recommend the latter, considering that 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy, according to Gleanster Research.
Why Reconversions Matter
If you haven't already guessed, a reconversion is when a prospect converts on your website again. And the more times a prospect reconverts on your website, the better. Here's why:
- More Engagement With Your Content & Your Brand: Every time a lead reconverts on one of your offers, they're taking yet another opportunity to engage with you. And the more they engage with you, the more top-of-mind your brand is when they're ready to make a purchasing decision, especially if they've found your content valuable.
- Better Educated Prospects: A side effect of more engagement, the more times a prospect reconverts on your website and consumes more of your content, the better educated they become about your expertise, products, and/or services.
- Better Lead Intelligence: Finally, the more reconversions you can generate, the richer your lead intelligence will be. The more you know about leads' activity on your website and with your content, the more effectively you'll be able to segment and personalize your email marketing messages, lead nurturing campaigns, and sales follow-up. Just consider the data from the Lyris Annual Email Optimizer Report. When asked to indicate their top three results, 39% of marketers who segmented their email lists experienced higher open rates, 28% experienced lower unsubscribe rates, and 24% experienced better deliverability and greater revenue.
Essentially, getting more prospects to reconvert time and time again until they're ready to buy is one of the goals of lead nurturing. But just as there's more than one way to skin a cat, there's more than one way to generate reconversions, so if you're looking to reconvert more of your prospects, here are 11 great tips to help you do just that.
11 Tips for Generating More Reconversions
1) Display Relevant CTAs All Over Your Website
Give your prospects the opportunity to convert on a relevant offer, no matter what page on your website they're visiting. This means creating and displaying calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your website -- on your homepage, on every blog post, within your product pages, the list goes on. The more simple opportunities someone has to convert, the more likely they'll do so.
Furthermore, be sure to align your CTA choices with the pages the prospect is visiting. For example, if they're checking out your product pages, they're likely to be further down the sales funnel, and more likely to be interested in a product-focused offer such as a free trial or a demo. If they're on your blog, on the other hand, (which you know through your analytics generates a lot of first-time site visitors) a more top-of-the-funnel offer such as an educational ebook is probably a better fit. For more on this, check out our full post on how to select the right CTA for every page on your website.
2) Use Thank-You Pages & Emails Strategically
Sometimes, you can get a prospect who has only just converted on an offer to convert again right away. This is where thank-you pages and thank-you emails become your best weapons. A thank-you page is the web page you redirect your leads to after they've completed a form for an offer. It's where you thank them for converting on your offer, and usually where you provide next steps, whether it be a link to the offer itself, or an indication that they'll receive the offer via email or through some other method shortly. Similarly, a thank-you email can be triggered to provide the content or with further instructions on redeeming it.
Use these tools strategically to generate more reconversions by placing CTAs for additional offers on thank-you pages or in thank-you emails. You could even test a conversion form itself on the thank-you page. As we stressed before, for the best bang for your buck, make sure the secondary offer you're promoting is complementary to the first offer the lead converted on -- in both subject matter and stage in the sales cycle.
3) Include CTAs Within Other Offers
Encourage leads to reconvert while they're most engaged with your content by including calls-to-action within your offer content such as ebooks, webinars, and other downloads. If your leads are finding the content they're already consuming to be valuable, they'll be much more receptive to converting on other valuable offers. Thus, you'll be able to reconvert them during the peak of their interest.
Include a mix of top-of-the-funnel and middle-of-the-funnel CTAs to reconvert different types of leads depending on their stage in the sales cycle. A CTA for a top-of-the-funnel offer will continue to nurture new leads, and a middle-of-the-funnel one will propel leads who are more sales-ready further down the funnel.
4) Leverage Content Recommendation Widgets
Sometimes just keeping visitors on your website can indirectly lead to more reconversions, especially after you've taken the time to implement our first tip. To keep visitors hanging around, try implementing a content recommendation widget on your blog, like Outbrain or Facebook's Recommendations Plugin, as seen on the right-hand sidebar of this very blog. These widgets will suggest popular content to your readers and entice them to stick around. And if you've effectively optimized your website with CTAs, the more chances you'll have to reconvert your leads.
You can also manually recommend content and offers if you prefer not to install a recommendation widget. For example, you could manually add links to other relevant blog posts or offers at the bottoms of your blog posts, or even recommend related content on your products pages to help educate prospects about why that particular product or service you offer should be important to them.
5) Make Offers Easy to Find
Calls-to-action aren't the only way to get visibility for your marketing offers on your website. Aggregate and organize your marketing offers into a resource center on your website so your leads can easily find self-select the offers they're interested in. You can choose to organize this resource library by the offer subject or offer type -- or both! For a sense of how you can organize your resource center, check out HubSpot's own Marketing Resources section here.
But it's not just enough to have a resource center. It should also be easy for your site visitors to find. Link to your resource center on prominent pages on your website, like your homepage, 'About Us' page, and in your website navigation. Your goal should be to make it very intuitive for your visitors to navigate there.
6) Use Top Content in Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Considering that reconversions are one of the main goals of lead nurturing, this is an obvious one. As you're planning the workflows for your individual lead nurturing campaigns, incorporate your most relevant, top-performing offers.
To determine which of your offers are your 'top' ones, analyze your offers' lead-to-customer conversion rates as well as the top landing pages leads viewed before converting into customers, as these are the offers and landing pages with the most powerful influence. (For HubSpot customers, the Conversion Assists tool and the Landing Page Analytics tool can both help you conduct this analysis.)
7) Include Secondary CTAs in Email Marketing
As we hinted at in number 3, sometimes your leads are ready to move themselves further down the sales funnel. So say you're sending an email to promote your brand new ebook to a large segment of your list in which Johnny the prospect (remember him?) is included. At this point (because you've already implemented some of the tips we've already covered), Johnny has reconverted on a couple of your top-of-the-funnel offers, and he's really starting to understand that he might just need your product/service to help him solve his problems.
Now, you could just leave the email at that -- a CTA for your new ebook, which Johnny might not really care about anymore. Or, you could also include a secondary call-to-action for one of your middle-of-the-funnel offers like a demo or a free product trial, which Johnny just might decide he's ready for. Including that secondary CTA enables you to reconvert prospects who are ready to take that next step while also converting people who are still interested in that new ebook you're promoting. Talk about a win-win!
8) Leverage Real Estate in Welcome Emails
Similar to the thank-you email, welcome emails provide reconversion opportunities as well, especially when you consider that according to Skyline Technologies, welcome emails have an average open rate of 50-60%. Wowza! So if you send out an automated welcome email triggered when a prospect opts into your email database, for example, make sure that email is optimized with a CTA for reconversion. Check out this post to learn about 15 different ways you can reconvert leads via welcome emails. Talk about low-hanging fruit!
9) Get Personal and Segmented
We've stressed the importance of segmentation and personalization before on this blog (and even earlier in this post), and it's worth mentioning again. In order to have better success reconverting leads, offering targeted content and offers is a must. Be sure you're carefully slicing and dicing your email list so you can provide more targeted content and offers to your contacts that they're more likely to reconvert on. To get started with segmentation, check out this blog post for various ways you can segment your email database.
10) Share Middle-of-the-Funnel Offers in Social Media
Social media is a great channel for promoting offers, and the benefits don't stop at generating just new leads. Your current leads are also hanging out (and probably following you) in social media, and chances are many of them would convert on later stage, middle-of-the-funnel offers they find there. In that case, don't limit the offers you share in social media to ones that appeal just to people near the top of the funnel. Giving your followers options in terms of the offers you promote enables them to self-select the ones that appeal to their particular needs.
11) Nurture Leads With Content Similar to Their Interests in Social Media
What do you get when you combine number 9 (segmentation and personalization) and number 10 (social media promotion)? Social media lead nurturing! By leveraging the lead intelligence you have about your leads' activities (what they've downloaded, pages they've visited, etc.), you can effectively nurture those leads in social media by sharing with them specific content and offers relevant to their interests. If your marketing database automatically checks for leads' social media account information like HubSpot's software does, you can easily identify your leads in social media and share appropriate content with them.
For customers of HubSpot and HootSuite, our new integration makes this process even easier, enabling users to monitor their leads' tweets in HootSuite to identify opportunities to follow up with a tweet.
