Lost leads are a source of significant frustration for any business. You spend endless time and money to carefully nurture a prospect into a lead, guiding your contact through a host of touchpoints and meaningful experiences. In fact, the average journey from prospect to sales-ready lead takes more than 13 touches, and up to 84 days of work.
There are few things more disheartening than going through all that work, just for your hard-earned lead to slip through your fingers.
So, how do you win back a lost lead?
Start with Conduct a Root Cause Analysis
Giving up on lost leads simply isn’t an option for many businesses – particularly when the investment in converting each prospect into a customer is so significant. However, you can’t begin to reconnect with and transform a lost opportunity without first understanding what went wrong.
Start by finding out wheat kind of lead you lost (hot, warm, or cold). If you lost a cold lead, you could probably avoid doing any further investigation. If it’s a hot or warm lead, a follow-up call to the customer can help you to determine what made them lose interest.
Some of the most common reasons for lost leads include:
Failure to follow up: Failure to call or contact a lead when you said you would creates distrust in your business and harms your credibility.
Competitor action: Did your customer get a better deal from a competitor, or did the competition offer something you can’t provide? Finding this out will help you to determine how you need to update your product or service.
Slow response times: Research shows responding to leads too slowly can cause them to lose interest. Making sure you have automated responses or reminders to connect with leads quickly is crucial.
Lack of understanding: Did your customer fail to grasp the benefits of your product? If so, this could be a sign your sales pitch and strategy isn’t informative enough.
Tips for Winning Back Lost Leads
Once you know the reason for your lost leads, you can begin to implement strategies to improve your chances of regaining a conversion. Some of the most effective options to use include:
1. Try Retargeting
Retargeting is an excellent opportunity to re-capture a cold lost lead, who visited your website, or browsed through your products, only to forget to take the connection any further. Retargeting campaigns with social media platforms like Facebook, or Google ads can help you to regain these leads, by placing a pixel on their browser which allows you to deliver specific content to that customer when they’re elsewhere on the internet.
2. Provide Limited-time offers
Limited time offers are an excellent opportunity for regaining a warm or hot lead. If your customer failed to continue with a conversion because they were concerned about the value-to-risk ratio of your offer, a good deal can help to get them back on your side.
The key to limited time offers is making sure your customer only has so long to take advantage. The fear of missing out (FOMO), and urgency connected to your deal should push your customer to act fast, which reduces your chances of losing their interest again.
3. Market across multiple channels and devices
Today’s customers are present and interacting with companies on a range of touchpoints, from social media, to email, and website chat apps. Sometimes, the best way to re-engage a lead, is to connect with them on a different platform, or continue your relationship with your customer on multiple devices and channels.
Leveraging your CRM and sales data software, create a campaign which will help to build your credibility with your audience by showcasing your product, brand, and business across every channel they visit. The more you connect with your audience, the more familiar they’ll feel with your brand, improving your chances of conversions.
4. Change your contact strategy
One of the most common reasons companies end up with lost leads, is they reach out to the customer at just the right moment, or through the wrong platform. We’ve all been frustrated when receiving a call to our work number in the evening, when we’re trying to spend time with families.
If you think you lost your lead because your contact methods are rubbing them the wrong way, consider changing things up. Connect with the lead you lost over the phone via email or send a text asking for the best time to call them. Showing you care about your customer’s time and preferences can help them to bounce back into your sales funnel.
5. Set up a nurturing campaign
Finally, one of the best ways to avoid lost leads and regain the attention of prospects you may have lost in the past is to set up drip marketing campaigns. These are campaigns designed to target both new and existing leads, to nurture relationships over time.
The great thing about nurturing campaigns is they allow you to focus on creating a deeper, more meaningful connection with your audience, rather than trying to push a quick sale. It’s these relationships that can generate more value over time.
