The lead-to-customer conversion rate is a ratio that shows on average how many leads become paying customers. This is a metric that reflects the quality of your sales and marketing programs. For example, if you generate 20 inbound leads through content marketing and 2 of them become clients, the lead-to-customer conversion rate is 10%. If your lead-to-customer conversion rate is relatively low however, (i.e. 1%), it could suggest a number of problems:

 

Perhaps the sales team isn’t doing a good job converting leads into customers because they’re not following good sales techniques.  For example, they don’t ask enough questions to unravel dire needs and spend too much time pushing product benefits, causing prospects to resist and become irrirated. 

 

Or, perhaps your marketing tactics are attracting too many unqualified prospects, and this is why it’s hard for the sales team to convert sales. You may need to examine your web content, content marketing, or AdWords campaigns.

 

Lead-to-customer rate lets you know it’s time to evaluate your marketing programs, sales effectiveness, or both. 

Cost-per-lead refers to the total cost of generating one lead either in accumulation or from a specific marketing campaign. For example, a campaign might cost you:

 

• $200 to create an email campaign, 

• $500 to write an article,

• $3 for each pay-per-click, 

 

If you get 10 prospects to submit an online contact form, the cost-per-lead is $73. 

 

You can track cost-per-lead by building attribution models; attribution models allow you to identify different touch-points you’ve had with your audience in order to convert them into customers. For example, they let you see that your display ads enticed visitors to your website, then a Facebook post prompted them to take a look at your on-sale products, and then email campaigns converted the final sale. 

 

Cost-per-lead is essential for estimating the total cost of attracting clients and calculating return on investment.

Lead volume simply refers to the total number of leads generated from campaigns. For example, if your campaign uses both social media and search engine marketing, the lead volume is the number of prospective clients these initiatives generate. Lead volume indicates the quality of your marketing initiatives; for instance, if you only generate 10 inbounds leads from AdWords in 5 months while the industry benchmark is 25, it suggests that your campaign isn’t segmented correctly, or your keywords aren’t optimized, or you’re not targeting the right geographic locations tightly enough. You need to analyze, adjust, and test to understand why your lead volume is so low. 

 

The three metrics above help you unravel the cost of attracting potential clients, the quality of your campaigns, and most importantly, areas for improvement. 

 

If you want help assessing your current digital marketing campaign or have questions about digital marketing or in general, please contact us to speak with one of our digital marketing experts.