Story Pro

Do you need more leads or do you need better quality leads? Here are a few tips to improve your lead quality or quantity:

If you need more leads:
- Experiment with fresh ad media.
- Try sending traffic to a different page on your website or a fresh landing page concept.
- Make it easier for prospects to become a lead (reduce the number of fields in your form).

If you need higher quality leads:
- Make your site visitors scroll through more information before they can take an action.
- Create additional steps or pre-qualification items before a lead can successfully submit a form.
- Send visitors an intermediate item like a brochure or a catalog and require them to contact you after they have received it.
- For Google Ads, narrow the list of keywords and make them exact match only.

Your marketing guy sends you a report and one term keeps coming up: conversions.
What's a conversion? Let's put it in plain English.

A conversion is actually a pretty broad term. Basically, it's any action your customer takes that you're measuring.
In most cases, a conversion refers to a customer becoming a lead — submitting a form or making a phone call. But sometimes it's further up the funnel. Maybe the marketing agency is tracking:

Views of a specific page
Clicks on a specific button
Whether visitors take a survey or browse a particular gallery

Any of those could be conversions, so it's important to know what your marketing agency actually means when they use the term. Are they talking about leads, or some other action?

Key takeaway: Not all conversions are equally important. Make sure you know what your agency means by conversions, and you'll be better prepared to make smart business decisions.

What if you could double or triple the average value of your leads? I believe you can. The short version is this: Serve every customer so well that on average you get one or two referrals from every customer. It's not easy, but it is attainable. This list will get you started:
- Train your techs to master the first impression.
- Set clear pricing expectations and avoid surprise charges.
- Always look for a little something extra that you can do for the client, free of charge.
- Implement a simple but effective system for keeping the client in the loop from start to finish.
- Have a systematic way to ask for referrals.

I recently came across this stat: Average response time for roofing companies is around 48 hours after the lead comes in. If it's true, that's pretty appalling. The reason it's appalling is that according to studies, leads that are contacted within 5 minutes are 21x more likely to convert than those contacted after 30 minutes.

When you're busy this spring, don't forget to respond to leads! Or better yet, delegate the job to a person or machine who is always on the alert.