How to Increase Longterm Leads & Conversion Rates – Part 1
“Many businesses are so focused on generating cashflow that they never create enough evergreen assets to free themselves from economic desperation.”
Assets or Consumables: Which is Your Focus?
I had a meeting with a long-standing client last week to review the past eighteen months’ campaigns and results and check that our marketing asset list was up-to-date. Our focus for the past twelve months has been on improving lead generation campaigns and conversion rates while the business steadily increased their capacity and continued to exceed customer expectations.
The last two years have a been a whirlwind of growth for this client and twelve months ago we set a goal of ensuring that at least 70% of their assets were evergreen and a further 15% re-usable with only slight modifications because I convinced my client that if he kept on urgently creating new campaigns at short notice we would always be on high-alert and we wouldn’t get the conversion rates we wanted to.
Slowing Down to Speed Up
Every time we ran a campaign last year we checked all the assets and collateral to ensure that it was truly evergreen and made annotations on all seasonal campaigns and other segments that needed modifications. The only exception was one ‘emergency cash surge’ campaign which performed well, but demonstrated just how much time, effort, energy, and resources go into a campaign… Too much to waste on a one-off with no real future.
Updating and refining the campaigns was hard work and it sometimes felt as though we were on the highway trying to do 100kph with our brakes on. However, these campaigns generated 10-20% more leads over previous years and over the course of the year the conversion rate steadily crept up until, through a more targeted approach to lead discovery and better nurture segmentation, we could rely on a 25% base close rate with some campaigns hitting close to 70% conversion.
What About Your Campaigns? Are You Still Running on the Hamster Wheel?
Here’s the problem with the hamster wheel approach…
You’re either creating everything from scratch every time
OR
You’re re-using emails and campaigns that may or may not be effective
What Do I Need to Change?
First, stay encouraged, like my client you probably already have elements that you can use in various campaigns. The problem is that don’t know where they are so you can’t find them.
Here’s what we did:
Preparation:
- Create a list of your assets (lead magnets of all kinds, emails, campaigns, prospecting tools, offers, etc.)
- Review and annotate each item in the list
- Segment your assets by target market and purpose (this can dramatically accelerate your response rate and if you’re building evergreen campaigns it is worth the effort)
- Identify everything that needs to be updated and make a list of different types of evergreen campaigns that you could create. (See Part 2 for more ideas)
Action:
- Design core campaigns that take your prospect from initial interest through to sale (don’t overcomplicate these)
- Your core campaigns should have very specific target audiences and goals
- Set these up and analyse:
- Who responds?
- Where do they come from?
- How long do they take?
- What do they end up buying?
- Make sure that at the end of each specific campaign your audience feeds into an ongoing contact sequence (you can refine this later)
Improvement:
- What else could you do for people? (This includes asking your team, “If someone is interested in X, what else might they want that we already have or could create?” as well as planning to expand this sequence and plug any places where people opt out.
- What else could we offer to attract our ideal clients?
- Where else do we need to appear that our ideal prospects hang out?
This improvement step is very important, but it’s not something you want to do on a campaign that you’ll only use once and then put on the shelf forever. In fact, it’s the key to dramatically increasing your lead flow and conversion rates and it’s one of the most important aspects of an evergreen campaign because it opens up so many new opportunities.
Balancing Urgency and Investment
My book, Dynamic Direct Response Copywriting provides an insight into how to research and write powerful advertising copy and create evergreen campaigns that irresistibly attract your ideal prospect and pre-disposes them to work with you.
Purchase your copy today at https://hiltoncopywriting.mykajabi.com/opt-in
