By Jeremy Durant
Lost marketing leads are expensive. Marketers are under pressure to produce as many leads as possible. A ton of marketing energy and dollars are spent on attracting the right prospects and getting them to fill out website forms, sign up for newsletters, download guides, email the sales team, or call in. When a lead goes missing, that work goes to waste—and hurts the brand.
While driving more leads is always at the center of a marketing strategy, what steps can you take to make sure none fall through the cracks? All it takes is a missing email here or there, and a potential client thinks your company doesn’t care about them. That can hurt your firm’s reputation.
Our agency is obsessed with leads; both lead generation and lead conversion. I’ve seen how frustrating it can be when a client misses the leads that come in. Here are a few tips on how to “discover” lost marketing leads.
Put Multiple People on the Distribution List
I am on the distribution list for all our website leads, along with a few members of my team. It is a good practice for every organization to have multiple people on the distribution list to provide an extra layer of security to prevent lost marketing leads. Ideally, you will have a marketing person, a sales person, and another invested party on the distribution list (appointment setter or inside sales person).
Check Your Spam/Junk Folder
Check your junk/spam email folder several times a day, not just weekly. This sounds like a common sense approach, but you’d be surprised the number of people who don’t check their spam/junk folder regularly.
“Regularly” means a couple times a day. Why? Immediacy is important. Because being hours late might make it impossible talk to the prospect that day. A week late? You could lose that lead’s interest, or worse, lose it to a competitor who responds within an hour.
Log into Your Website to View Form Submissions
When everything runs smoothly, marketing leads are delivered via email immediately. However, technology doesn’t always run smoothly. Hosting service interruptions, slow email exchanges, and servers going down can lead to lost marketing leads.
That is why it’s important for the marketing or sales team to know how to log into the website backend to view form submissions. We walk all our clients through the process and urge them to check the logs every day to see if the forms are functioning and troubleshoot any email delivery issues.
Use a Lead Discovery Tool
Even with a tight budget for lead generation, a paid lead discovery tool is often worth the investment. Knowing who is visiting a website and what company they are with is a great opportunity to reach out to a prospect who has shown interest in your company’s products or services.
Link Web Forms to a CRM
The last tip requires help from your technical team. Link your web forms to feed directly into your customer relationship management software (CRM). Then all you need to do is log into your CRM (which you should be logged into all day), and check the leads coming in in real time.
Put an End to Lost Marketing Leads
You spend time, money, and effort into attracting visitors and getting them to complete website forms. A few minutes each day following these tips, ensures no leads slip through the cracks or get lost.
