Lead Generation: A Complete Guide with Strategies and Examples

“You are out of business if you don’t have a prospect.” – Zig Zigler.

We’re just going to say it; the above quote is every business’s worst nightmare. 

Prospects or leads, as they are called, are indispensable to the health of every company. As long as you get those prospects pumped up into your business, you can run towards success all you want. 

Now, you must ask – 

“How do you maintain a healthy flow of leads, or in better words, boost lead generation?”, 

“How do you know which leads you should go for?”, 

“What strategies can you employ in the process?”

Woah, well, let’s hold the horses on these questions and go through them one by one in his guide that’ll cover everything from defining the basics to training you on the lead generation strategies.

Without any further ado, let’s get the ball rolling.

Lead Generation: What It Is & How It Works? 

To understand the process of lead generation, let’s understand the basics involved first.

What is a Lead?

Simply put, a lead is a person who has somehow indicated to a brand that they are slightly interested in the services offered and have made direct and/or indirect contact. 

Let’s paint a little picture here.

Say you were browsing through your social media, for example, Instagram. There, you randomly came across a sponsored ad from an e-Learning platform offering online courses. 

Curious, you clicked on the ad and watched their post, say a video (the interaction could end just here as well), went to their site and answered a simple pop-up survey of ‘What brought you here?’ You answered, entered your email, and submitted the response. 

To that brand, you are a lead (Whether you qualify as a good or bad lead will come later in our discussion). 

Even the definition of lead quality differs for marketers and sales. For the former, the number of leads generated is considered quality, but sales might not consider all of them ‘leads’ entirely. 

It’s what’s known as a marketer’s myopia. 

5 Types of Leads

Looking at the types of leads will help paint a clearer picture of the characteristics leads possess at various touchpoints in the conversion funnel: 

1. New Lead: A prospect who interacts for the first time with a company. 
2. Working Lead: Someone who keeps interacting and conversing. 
3. Nurturing Lead: Someone who can be convinced to buy in the future.
4. Unqualified Lead: Someone who isn’t interested anymore.

Qualified Lead: One who is a ripe prospect, ready to be converted into a customer.

How to Know a Lead Is Qualified

Marketing leads are likely to become customers since they show interest in the brand and respond to lead nurturing. They may not become customers right away, but they definitely enter the sales funnel.

As for the sales, a lead is considered qualified when they are close to becoming a customer. So, a good rapport between the two departments can increase lead generation greatly. 

Sales leads have a higher chance of conversion since those leads are already past the screening point and they are qualified to become your customers. With the right strategy and support, sales-qualified leads are easy to turn into customers.

What Is Lead Generation & How It Works

Lead generation is a process with stages to capture and stimulate interest in a company’s services and products among the targeted audience and attract prospects. The process focuses on developing a sales pipeline and nurturing leads until they become customers. 

From small to mid-sized and large enterprises, all adhere to lead generation to expand their business. Even 60% of marketers believe lead generation to be a key strategy.

Although we discussed what qualifies a lead, it’s not that straightforward in day-to-day operations. 

Sometimes capturing a lead can be as easy as someone downloading resources from your websites, such as ebooks and guides, or it can be as sophisticated and complex as targeting a prospect with different marketing campaigns.

Overview of Lead Generation in the Digital Era

Long gone are the days when salespeople had to knock on the doors trying to convince customers to buy products or services based on the decorated and carefully recited marketing speech. 

“Customers are now smarter, more connected, more informed, more influenced and influential socially, and less likely to respond to campaign bait. Marketing has to create content people actually want.” — Tim Barker, Chief Product Officer, DataSift.

The message from the above quote is obvious — cold calling is no longer the major lead generation strategy. Instead of throwing arrows blindly, practices such as spreading brand awareness, creating relatable and useful content, and developing customer relationships are more effective.

Such practices come under what’s known as Inbound Marketing, a solid lead generation strategy (which we will cover later in the article).

Now, with ever-changing customer behavior, and consequently, lead generation tactics, there’s one more thing that’s been completely revamped by the onset of digitization- the relationship between marketing and sales.

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Watch: Building a Brand Using Feedback and User Research

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Collaboration Between Marketing & Sales

Unlike before, when marketing teams were only required to collect and curate a list of leads and sales would turn them into customers, now marketing’s KRAs have evolved. 

Marketing can consider the demographics to target and decide which leads qualify to be sent to sales, and then both the teams can decide further which leads to nurture.

How It Works

The audience discovers your brand on a marketing channel (like a social media post, website, blog, etc.) 

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Prospects click on a CTA (an image, link in bio, button) 

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 Navigate to a landing page exchanging some resources for customer information. 

Importance of Lead Generation

Now that you know what lead generation is and how it works, let’s understand why companies invest a huge chunk of their capital in lead acquisition and generation strategies.

1. Boosts Brand Awareness

Lead generation campaigns, including social media promotion, email campaigns and marketing, and many more are great ways to put your brand on the map and get your target audience to notice you. 

Once you have a solid lead generation strategy in place, it’ll be easier to explore new avenues to boost brand awareness and educate customers about your offerings.

2. Helps Identify and Target Quality Leads

Nothing screams waste of resources and time than targeting low-quality leads that you may find from purchased email lists or cold calling customers. 

If you want genuinely interested prospects with high chances of becoming your clients, then invest your time and energy in reading a robust lead generation strategy. With the right content marketing and other marketing campaigns, you will be able to identify high-quality leads that will convert sometime at some point down in the sales funnel. 

3. Doesn’t Cost Your Whole Capital

With online digital marketing, it’s easier for you to target specific customer demographics you know will ring in more leads. This way, you will be able to get more high-quality leads that have high conversion rates. So, all in all, it would cost you fairly less to acquire each high-quality lead through inbound marketing than any other way.

4. Time Efficient

Online lead generation and management can easily be automated with different tools available in the market, such as BIGContacts, which automate your email marketing and sales CRM.

This way, salespeople don’t have to devote a huge chunk of their time hunting for leads but focus more on qualified leads and closing deals. 

5. Helps Track Results and Measure Performance

With everything automated, it becomes easier for marketing and sales departments to analyze results and create reports to see recurring trends, and strategize for the future based on the insights. You can optimize your marketing campaigns and ensure you have a high conversion rate. 

CASE STUDY: How GoodBlogs was able to segment visitors into different customer journeys

GoodBlogs provides crowd-sourced content to its clients coming from different industries. The platform required a tool to help them redirect the website visitors to the topics of interest and generate quality leads. 

By implementing Qualaroo’s Nudge™ surveys, GoodBlogs was able to segregate leads as per appropriate customer journeys.

You can read about how GoodBlogs was able to send the traffic into the correct topic funnels to drive lead generation here.

6 Different Marketing Channels to Multiply Your Lead Generation

Inbound Marketing Channels	Outbound Marketing Channels
PPC (Pay-per-Click)	Influencer Marketing
Email Marketing	Live Events and Seminars
Content Marketing
Social Media

The table above displays the lead generation channels at your disposal and which kind they are. It’ll allow you to leverage inbound and outbound marketing strategies for lead generation.

1. PPC (Pay-per-Click)

With everything going online, it’s easier to collect customer information, but it should be in exchange for personalized and ethical marketing. PPC lead generation technique is about showing ads on Google searches (SERPs). 

Given that Google gets about 3.5 billion daily searches, it’s a good platform to have people see your brand using ad campaigns. So, prepare your PPC strategy with a good budget, seamless user flow, target keywords, and more.

2. Email Marketing

Email marketing has been a go-to tool for companies to reach out to their customers. To this day, companies are big on email marketing and keep coming up with new ideas to optimize it. 

You can send in event invites such as webinars, personalize your emails while sending promotional content, and just keep in touch while updating them on new things. It’s an excellent way to send content to prospects who may not be looking for you and turn them into quality leads.

Let’s take Neil Patel as an example. He uses email marketing to introduce customers to new events, such as webinars, and encourages them to sign up. 

3. Content Marketing

As per the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is “the marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Like any lead generation channel, you need a clear strategy to benefit from content marketing. 

So, what elements can make this channel your top lead generator? 

1. Topics your target audience will eat up immediately.
2. Type of content your audience prefers, i.e., short-form and long-form content.
3. Channels you will use to target your audience such as organic Google searches, social media platforms, partnership with third-party websites, influencer marketing, etc.

It’s best to use a mix of short and long-form, visual, and written content to capture different audience demographics.

Short-form content will be your holy grail if you target an audience on social media. You can create small videos like reels, digestible infographics, illustrated slides, and stories. 

As for the long-form content, you can create guides, eBooks, detailed articles, educational videos, courses, etc., and publish them on your website and mobile app or partner with third-party websites to widen the audience pool.

To take your game up a notch, you can follow some content marketing best practices like content re-packaging, tracking content performance across all platforms, and, most importantly, gathering customer feedback on content quality.

For example, you can launch pop-up surveys on your article pages, guides, and even eBooks to ask customers if that’s the kind of content they need. 

This way, you’ll know if you are covering the right content topics and what else you can take up. If done correctly, this channel can:

• Get inbound links 
• Social media shares and exposure
• Shape brand preference
• Help you create customer-centric content
• Put you on the map of search engine
• Increase brand awareness

Doesn’t sound that bad, right?

CASE STUDY: How Udemy improved content through feedback

An online learning platform, Udemy, wanted to understand the success of the newly updated auto-captioning feature for their videos. The team at Udemy launched Qualaroo’s Nudge^TM  surveys on their platform, asking students about the accuracy of the feature.

As a result, the team improved the feature to offer accurate captions each time. You can read more about Udemy and how it leveraged feedback here.

4. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has become a marketing juggernaut, thanks to the increasingly critical role of social media in people’s lives. 

Leading brands like Gucci, Pepsi, Motorola, and countless others hopped on this bandwagon to reap one of the most significant benefits: Lead generation.

The question is, why is it so effective and popular?

It’s because people (61%, to be precise) still believe in the power of customer reviews and recommendations.

You can partner with influencers that are popular among your target audience to spread brand awareness and attract more leads.

💡FUN FACT!

Dior, a high-end consumer brand, bagged a whopping $1.1 million in MIV (media impact value) from a single Instagram post by a singer and influencer, Oh Se-Hun.

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5. Live Events and Seminars

Just like Neil Patel, many companies opt for this outbound marketing strategy. One of the best ways to actively engage prospects with your brand is by encouraging them to participate in events like webinars that they may be interested in. 

You can host offline events such as seminars, conferences, meetups, etc., with guest speakers, but in the post-pandemic era, online events work great too. Also, online events have the potential to reach more people globally.

Hosting events not only improves your brand presence and customer engagement but provides companies a chance to know their customers’ interests. 

6. Social Media

Since social media is huge, it makes sense to incorporate it into your online lead generation strategy. 

• Facebook Leads

Facebook’s Lead Ads are a great tool to find TOFU leads and redirect them toward your website. You can add a CTA to your Facebook page that directly takes visitors to your website. 

• Twitter Leads

Twitter is another social media platform that helps businesses get and manage leads. It has a Twitter Lead Gen Card feature that generates leads from tweets and pulls out information such as tweeters’ IDs, names, and Twitter usernames; all they have to do is submit and become a lead.

• Twitter Leads

Twitter is another social media platform that helps businesses get and manage leads. It has a Twitter Lead Gen Card feature that generates leads from tweets and pulls out information such as tweeters’ IDs, names, and Twitter usernames; all they have to do is submit and become a lead.

• LinkedIn Leads

Out of all the social media platforms, LinkedIn has become popular in the professional world with big brands and is now a solid part of their social media campaigns. It offers a feature called Lead Gen Forms to facilitate B2B lead generation on the platform. 

The form auto-populates with the visitors’ profile information when they click on a CTA; all they have to do is submit. This makes it easy for users to share their information with minimal effort.  Additionally, you can export contacts from LinkedIn directly into your CRM systems or marketing platforms. This export streamlines the process of managing and nurturing leads, allowing for more targeted and personalized multi-channel strategies. LinkedIn lead generation has proven to be effective for businesses targeting professionals and seeking quality leads.

7 Critical Goal-Lead Generation Metrics to Track in 2023

Tracking the performance of your lead generation strategy is crucial for improving it. But how do you do that? – with lead generation metrics.

So, here are a few metrics that help with the lead generation process:

1. Number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

Leads that are considered qualified leads by the marketing team using lead scoring. Also, measure the cost per MQL to track how much money you spend on acquiring each lead.

How to improve: Create compelling content, incentivize prospects, improve your CTAs, and highlight customer reviews. 

2. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

It is the percentage of the total number of clicks on the CTA divided by the total number of page views. A higher rate signifies that the CTA used is effective and working to bring in leads.

How to improve: Create irresistible CTAs, use interactive visuals, and optimize ad copy headlines.

3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is a lead generation metric that businesses use to gauge the possible revenue possibilities from each acquisition throughout their life cycle.

Everything from your marketing strategy, campaigns, customer service, upselling, etc., contributes to your CLTV.

Here are some elements you need to consider to calculate customer lifetime value:

• Number of purchases by each customer
• Average purchase size per customer
• Determine yearly profit margins based on average profit margins per customer

If you have a high CLTV, it means that you are getting high-value customers and not just leads.

Here’s how you can calculate your CLTV:

How to improve: You can improve customer lifetime value by offering an excellent referral program, creating personalized marketing campaigns, optimizing cross-selling and up-selling, and gathering customer feedback.

4. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

CPA is the cost of acquiring each customer. Tracking this lead generation metric is important because it helps identify profitable channels and how much marketing you require. The enterprise-level CPA (B2B) is generally much higher than B2C.

The formula to calculate CPA is: 

The more efficient your marketing, the lower the CPA will be. You can even combine this metric with CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) to get detailed insights into your campaigns’ performance.

How to improve: Work on your ad quality score, optimize ad creatives, create dedicated campaign landing pages, update keywords, etc.

5. Capture vs. Conversion Rate

As the name suggests, the capture vs. conversion rate focuses on measuring the difference between prospects that provide some form of personal data and the final converted leads.

You can calculate the capture vs. conversion rate like this:

How to improve: Create targeted marketing campaigns, optimize website pages, and make clear and distinct CTAs.

6. Social Media Engagement

Since a significant chunk of your lead generation channels comes under inbound marketing, there are so many crucial metrics you need to track to gauge the performance of your marketing efforts. For example:

• Customer engagement and lead gen KPIs through post shares, likes, tweets, retweets, views, impressions, etc., on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
• Metrics that associate with lead conversions and web traffic coming from social media. For example, Udemy launched a survey asking website visitors how they found out about the company. With the feedback data, Udemy could identify its most effective marketing channel and reallocate marketing resources.

How to improve: Use appropriate hashtags, schedule content releases when your audience is most active, and collaborate with influencers to drive engagement.

7. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after a few seconds. There could be many reasons why this happens. 

It can be that your website is not optimized, visitors don’t find the content they are looking for, your offerings are not clear from the get-go, and so on. 

You will have a low conversion rate if visitors leave your website without providing any information or engaging with your website.

Here’s how to calculate it:

Single page sessions/Total Sessions = Bounce Rate

How to improve:

You can deploy exit-intent surveys on your website to gather feedback from leaving visitors. The surveys work using triggers and activate when visitors are about to leave. Optimizing the website, product pages, and checkout process also helps reduce the bounce rate.

[Also Read: 11 Best Exit-Intent Popup Tools to Increase conversion]

5 Essential Stages of Lead Generation: The Process to Follow

After discussing so much about lead generation already, it’s time to answer some important questions like what is the sales lead generation process. The process can differ a little depending on each company and industry.

After discussing so much about lead generation already, it’s time to answer some important questions like what is the sales lead generation process. The process can differ a little depending on each company and industry.

Stage 1:

The process starts with companies defining what a perfect lead looks like. Start by segmenting your leads into demographics and use BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Time) for further segregation.

Stage 2:

You need to figure out what you would consider a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and sales qualified lead (SQL). It is the start of the roadmap you will create in the next stage based on the lead generation funnel.

Stage 3:

Build your road map based on the lead generation funnel with your inbound and outbound marketing strategies. 

Plan and strategize the content you will push out on your website and social media and configure the placement of CTAs and pop-ups to attract customers. Then, design the steps to push a lead from the top to the bottom of the funnel until they make a purchase. 

This is also where you will have to strategize your lead magnets and how you can optimize them to bring in more quality leads.

Stage 4:

At this stage, you need to bring in your lead scoring skills and strategies to nurture the leads so they convert as soon as possible. The above steps will help you acquire the TOFU (top-of-funnel) leads, but you need to nurture the ones in the MOFU (middle-of-funnel).

Stage 5:

Testing is always the last but one of the most important stages in any process. No matter how robust your strategies are and how much you invest in lead generation, it’ll be all for nothing if you don’t test and iterate. 

So, perform A/B testing, multivariate testing, and ensure to keep the feedback loop between marketing and sales alive. This way, you will see which actions bring in better results and how customer behavior changes so you can optimize your lead generation process and strategy. 

12 Strategies to Bootstrap Your Lead Generation Campaign

A rock-solid lead generation strategy does the heavy lifting in boosting your audience reach and convincing them to convert. So, let’s discuss what strategies you can use to drive your lead generation effectively.

1. Invest in Content – Gated and Otherwise

Think of the internet as a superpower for companies, and with power comes responsibility. 

Instead of reciting an overly promotional marketing pitch, offer useful resources such as insightful posts, articles, and blogs educating visitors on useful topics related to your niche. 

Creating content that matters to your targeted audience, marketing it the right way, and placing it at the right place in your lead generation process will yield astonishing results.

For example, Salesforce has a section called ‘Analyst reports.’ When you land on the page, you can download any report you want. 

When you click on the ‘Get The Report’ CTA, you will land on the lead generation form page, where you will have to fill in your information to download the report. 

So, invest in creating gated content like guides, ebooks, and public content like blogs, articles, and other such resources. These will educate customers about your company and its value offerings and allow you an intelligent way to ask for customers’ information. 

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It may feel daunting at first to develop or improve your content strategy but asking your target audience what type of content they would like to consume is one of the best ways to go about it. To uncover, you can ask questions like:

• Was this help section useful?
• What topics would you like to see us write about next?
• What other products would you like to see us offer?
• Did this article answer your question?
• Were you able to find the information you were looking for?
• What other information would you like to see on this page?

Besides asking these content-related questions, you can also add surveys to your website to engage visitors and turn them into leads. For example, Qualaroo helps you collect leads with its lead generation form.

Here are a few questions you can ask in a lead gen form your leads to get their information and then target them to turn them into customers.

Example 1:

Example 2:

You can also use exit-intent pop-ups to engage your website visitors and stop them from leaving and eventually get their information to target them with different marketing campaigns. Tools such as Picreel specialize in this feature. 

2. Freemium

Freemium and free trial are often used interchangeably but are two different things. For example, the free trial has a time limit for which the subscribers can try the product/services for free, and then they can pay for a plan to continue using it. 

HubSpot is one example. They offer a 14-day free trial. 

On the other hand, Freemium is a free service or product with basic features. Customers have to pay for a plan to get access to premium features. YouTube is an excellent example of freemium. 

There’s no limit to how many videos you can watch or publish (the basic features), but you can enjoy ad-free streaming with many other functionalities with a paid subscription.

3. Focus on Top-of-Funnel Keywords

If you want to bring in new leads, you need to start from the top, literally. It will help to focus more on TOFU keywords that your target audience generally associates with your product and service. 

Once you know what keywords your audience usually uses, you can start targeting them in different ways and create a roadmap that directs your leads towards the lead magnets (there’s no such thing as too many ‘leads,’ not even here).

To target the keywords, you can create keyword-optimized content, create landing pages around those keywords, use the keywords for PPC, push guest blogs, and follow SEO best practices. 

[Also check out: The Ultimate Guide to SEO for UX Designers]

4. Marketing-Sales Feedback Loop 

As discussed above, a rapport between marketing and sales is crucial for effective lead generation. Creating and maintaining a feedback loop between the two teams is a great way to improve your lead generation campaigns.

For example, if marketing sends leads to sales and, in turn, the sales provide feedback on the lead quality on time, marketing can analyze what works and when they need to tweak their strategy.

If the feedback loop is missing, then marketing will think that all leads they send are converting, so they’ll continue with their existing practices without knowing what’s actually happening between the sales and the leads.

So, what’s to be done?

You can use a CRM like BIGContacts to create a solid feedback loop between sales and marketing. This integrated system can help reduce the communication barrier with its rich features.

For instance, a sales team can follow marketing campaigns to see how the marketing team targets specific leads. 

Once they know how the lead was warmed up, sales can personalize their strategies to convert them. Teams can also add notes to specific leads and interactions to maintain the feedback loop.

[Here’s something useful: Top 45+ Lead Generation Tools For Your Business]

5. Listen to Your Customers/Prospects

More often than not, businesses can significantly improve their lead generation strategy if they simply listen to their customers and prospects.

How you approach your prospects for feedback will differ from how you do it with customers.

With customers, you can gather information about your brand experience and use the data as customer reviews and testimonials. You can find loopholes in your customer journey and the overall experience to ensure your leads don’t churn away.

As for the prospects or leads, you can collect their feedback on how they come across your brand to strengthen your core marketing sources.

CASE STUDY: How Udemy discovered the most profitable marketing channels

Udemy wanted to explore how website visitors and users find out about the platform to reshape its marketing strategy and allocate resources to effective channels. 

The team at Udemy launched surveys asking customers how they find out about them. Based on the feedback, they started to target the marketing channels that worked the best rigorously.

It also helped to funnel the marketing budget to the appropriate channels and lower the overall acquisition costs while improving lead quality.

6. A Dedicated Landing Page for Your CTAs

You may think this one is obvious, but it’s not. Unfortunately, many marketers do not create separate and dedicated landing pages for CTAs when they clearly should. 

One of the primary purposes of CTAs is to direct customers to a landing page they represent. As a customer, you wouldn’t like clicking on a CTA for registering for a webinar and just landing on the website’s home page.

For example, here’s Mailchimp with its ad campaign for the “Great Landing Page Examples”-

As soon as you click on the ad, you’ll be redirected to a dedicated landing page for the same. 

💁‍♀️Pro Tip:

Try not to include multiple CTAs on a single page as it can distract the visitors and create a choice paradox as well. 

You can also A/B test your CTAs and launch surveys to ask customers what they think of them. This way, you’ll be able to design CTAs that actually work.

7. Keep Your Messaging Consistent and Deliver on Your Promise

Messaging is crucial for every company, and it is essential to keep it consistent throughout your campaigns and different platforms. 

From your ad copy to website design, to other media you create, to your offerings, it should all be a seamless experience. It ensures a smooth transition of leads to the next stage in the lead generation funnel.

For example, let’s continue the Mailchimp example from above. The landing page for the ad campaign gives the information it had promised with clear CTAs and the messaging is also consistent.

8. Coupons & Discounts

As we briefly mentioned above, you can use discounts, coupons, and deals as lead magnets for your lead generation campaign to attract both long and short-term leads.

For the long-term, you can motivate someone more to purchase from you, and for the short-term, you can convert bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) prospects. 

9. Live Chat Software to Always Be There for Customers

Using live chat software allows you, as a company, to always be there for your customers when they land on your website. They can directly ask their queries in the live chat popup and get instant support.

For example, Qualaroo also has a live chat window that pops up every time a visitor lands and needs assistance.

Besides, you can also:

• Shoot pre-chat forms to collect visitors’ information. 
• Resolve customer queries related to pricing, checkout, and other early-stage touchpoints in the customer journey with a live chat tool to transform visitors into leads and push them further into the sales funnel.
• Redirect customers to relevant pages to help them reach the end goal – purchase.

10. Lead Scoring

Each company has its own custom parameters for judging lead quality, but a common method used to judge leads on those parameters is lead scoring. 

Lead scoring is assigning points and ranking leads based on:

• How far along they are in the sales funnel
• How close they are to purchasing and their interests

You can conduct user research surveys to create buyer personas of your ideal customers and then create a lead scoring system with parameters based on your needs. 

Here are some lead generation survey sample questions to create buyer persona:

• What is your role?
• What is your biggest pain point?
• What does your typical day look like?
• What did you come here to do today?
• What problem does our product solve for you?
• What types of content do you read?
• What tools are you using currently?
• How has this feature impacted your work?

Access this survey question library for more information on this.

A few basic parameters you can consider for your lead scoring system are when the leads:

• Open your email
• Visit your website
• Download resources from your website like ebooks, guides, etc.
• Click on your promotional ad
• Register for a webinar you are conducting
• Subscribe from a free trial

You can assign scores to your leads this way, and the higher the score of a lead, the higher their quality and the chances of conversion. 

A high-quality lead is generally referred to as a ‘Hot’ lead, while a lead with the average score is called a ‘warm’ lead which you can make hotter by targeting more marketing campaigns their way.

11. Boost Engagement Across Channels

Generating leads is all about engaging the target audience and motivate them to interact more with your business. 

Your social media marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing strategies will take care of bringing the leads to your website, but what happens after that?

Once a visitor lands on your website or mobile app, you need to assist them in your customer journey to convert them.

Here are some ways in which you can engage with your leads on the website:

• You can add a live chat tool to assist in resolving queries and helping them navigate. For this, you can use a tool like ProProfs Chat.

• A self-help tool like Knowledge Base takes care of small queries from leads as they can look for any queries without relying on customer support.

• Once visitors arrive on your website, you can engage them using quizzes and collect their information. ProProfs Quiz Maker is a good choice for the same.

12. Streamline Your Sales Pipeline

There is much to be done when you get a lead, either through a sign-up CTA, Demo CTA, live chat, or survey feedback. 

You need to manage and streamline your sales pipeline to be on top of every lead and ensure they don’t drop out. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools such as BIGContact help you track each lead so you can customize your sales strategy and ensure they convert.

What Can Lead Generation Surveys Do For You?

We’ve talked about customer feedback and how it greatly affects lead generation. When it comes to feedback collection, surveys are a great way to communicate with the leads and improve the customer experience. 

Here are a few ways to help you understand how YOUR business can benefit from lead generation surveys.

Helps You Segment Leads

Surveys not only help you collect customer feedback but segregate leads based on where they come from, the product they are interested in, etc.

You can frame questions for lead generation surveys based on the segmentation you want. For example, if you have multiple product lines, you can ask visitors which product they are looking for and guide them in the sales funnel for that particular product.

You can even pair the survey tool with your other workspace tools to make the process smoother.

For example:

You can integrate Qualaroo with Slack and push the responses into your desired Slack channel in real time. Then, the relevant team can pick this information and lead data, assign them to the proper funnel, design a personalized campaign, and target the prospects to push them into the pipeline.

Easy to Identify High-Quality Leads

Once a lead interacts with a lead magnet, such as a sign-up CTA or access to gated content, they offer some information about them. You can leverage that information and follow up with them using surveys for lead generation.

You can send emails with surveys enquiring about their requirements to offer solutions tailored to their needs.

But what if you have tons of survey responses on your website? It becomes a huge task to segregate high-quality leads manually.

The answer is automation.

You can pair the survey tool with a robust CRM like Salesforce to automate workflows across the two apps.

For example, 

• You can push the lead data and survey feedback into Salesforce as soon as the visitor submits the survey. A new record is created, or an existing record gets updated into Salesforce.
• Then, use Salesforce’s automated lead scoring workflows to automatically shift high-quality leads into the right funnel. No need to lift a finger.
• You can also trigger an automated survey via Qualaroo whenever you add a record to Salesforce. Collect the relevant information and add that record to the list of high-value prospects.

Differentiate Users From Customers

Sometimes, your users are not the customers and vice versa. For example, if you own an eLearning platform targeting elementary education, your users (children) are not your customers (Parents/guardians).

So, how do lead generation surveys help?

You can launch a pop-up survey for lead generation with a few questions gauging leads’ demographics, decision-making power, preferences, etc. You can also use branching and skip logic to show the right questions in the correct order to get precise data.

Align Marketing With Content

As we briefly discussed in the article, surveys can guide your content strategy. For example, once leads tell you their preference through a customer survey for lead generation, you can show them content they will like and find helpful. 

You can follow up on your content and ask leads if they find it valuable and interesting. Based on the feedback, you can make changes in your strategy and offer personalized recommendations.

Best Lead Generation Survey Questions to Ask

You can ask appropriate questions to your prospects based on where they are in the funnel. We’ve divided the questions for the lead generation survey into two categories so that you can target prospects accordingly.

Marketing Questions to Ask to Get Qualified Leads:

• “Which industry do you deal in?”

• “Which of our competitors did you consider before choosing [Product name]?”

• “How much revenue do you earn annually?”

• “Are you the decision-maker?”

• Which of the following topics are you most interested in learning about?

• What problems are you looking to solve with [Product Name]?

Sales Questions to Ask to Get Qualified Leads:

• “What are your top priorities in a solution?”

• “What is your budget?”

• “What can prevent us from working together?”

• “How quickly are you hoping to see results?”

• “When do you plan to make a decision?”

• What strategies/plans/tools do you use to deal with your problem?

• If we can do A, B, C for you, will you buy the [product/service]?

Tips to Instantly Boost Lead Survey Response Rate

By now, you know why to ask and what to ask in your lead generation surveys. 

But what if leads don’t take them?

In that case, you can implement these smart tips to convince your leads to respond instantly.

Multi-Channel Surveys

Why restrict your lead surveys to just one channel when you can leverage a multi-channel strategy for surveying leads?

You can target website visitors through lead generation surveys not just on the website but also on mobile apps, emails, and SMS.

You can deploy surveys in-app and on-site and share survey links on emails and SMS. Doing so ensures you target leads at different touchpoints and channels to convert them.

Ask Relevant Questions

Nothing puts a prospect off like a survey with many irrelevant questions. Leads are highly sensitive at the beginning of their customer journey, and even the slightest inconvenience is enough for them to churn away. 

So, when you deploy your lead generation survey campaign, start with small surveys like one-question pop-ups asking only appropriate and relevant questions.

For example, instead of asking demographic questions straight away to your visitors, it’s best to ask them what they are looking for and then target them with an appropriate lead generation strategy.

Incentivize the Feedback Collection

Taking surveys is no fun for many website visitors, and they may resist responding at first. 

So, what can you do?

Simple – give them something in return.

You can incentivize your lead generation surveys with access to gated content, free trial, premium features, gift cards, vouchers, time-sensitive deals, etc. In that case, they are more likely to take your surveys.

Employ Conditional Branching

Conditional branching and skip logic are great strategies to ensure your leads don’t drop the survey midway. If the leads keep seeing irrelevant questions, they will abandon the survey in a heartbeat.

You can prevent this by branching your questions. For example, the next question a lead will see will depend on their previous answer, and skip logic will let them skip answering the question.

This is how conditional branching works:

CASE STUDY: How Marketade helped its client improve user experience with branching logic

Marketade is a user research company that wanted to help one of its clients improve website usability. They specifically wanted to improve the usability in these scenarios:

• Primary care appointment booking system
• Primary care doctor selection
• Scheduling Mammogram
• Family member visit patients in the hospital
• Child food allergies research

The team used Qualaroo’s Nudge surveys and exit-intent surveys to gather feedback on the current UX and also get valuable insights from leaving customers.

The feedback enabled the team to improve the overall UX and also validate qualitative findings, among other things.

You can read about this case study here in detail.

Kickstart Your Lead Generation Efforts!

With all that we have covered so far, we hope you are equipped with tips and strategies to create a robust lead generation strategy for your business. 

And not only the one that increases lead but brand awareness as well. It’s certainly possible with the right tools in your stack.

So, choose the tools that allow you to capture leads using different ways like pop-up surveys, pop-up deals, and discounts, among many other things, and you’ll see growth in the lead generation in no time.