.avif)
Any omnichannel strategy has many moving parts and stages. If your goal is to attract and convert more prospects into paying customers, you'll need to address your approach concerning high-quality leads.
The lead generation process isn't easy, yet 91% of marketers say it's their most important goal. If you're part of this majority, you'll need to focus on the conversion points that help you drive leads. And if you're not one of the 91%, it's time to reprioritize.
Do you feel that lead generation is overwhelming within your current omnichannel approach? A simple checklist can give you the clarity and direction you need to succeed. Here's what to consider when building your next omnichannel lead generation campaign.
Any successful lead generation campaign aims to create interest in your product or service to develop strong leads. The key is knowing how to generate such campaigns, focusing on the importance of personalization, testing, and performance measurement.
The following list will help you rethink your next campaign as you adjust stale strategies that aren't converting leads.
One of the most important items on this list is making sure your lead capture forms are properly set up, capturing the leads' information, and attributing it to the right marketing program. You should also have triggers set after the lead fills out the form, such as sending them a thank you email or piece of direct mail, or adding them to a nurture series, to keep them moving on their customer journey.
You'll also want to think through the placement of your lead capture form, whether it's above the fold on your landing page, maybe it's in a chatbot, or a popup, or it's embedded within your webpage's content.
Finally, you'll need to decide on the length of your lead capture form. Short forms generally mean you'll get more leads but the longer your forms are, the more likely those leads will be of better quality. Depending on the goal of your lead generation campaign, you'll need to decide if it's better to get more leads that can move through nurture tracks to hit lead scoring thresholds or if you want to qualify your leads up front.
In Google Analytics or in your marketing CRM tool, do you have your goals or programs built so you can effectively measure online conversions? If a lead is registering for an event or downloading a gated asset, do you have a thank you page built to signal your analytics that a goal was met?
Recommended reading: The Modern Marketer's Guide to Direct Mail Analytics & Testing
You'll want to set up Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) links to know whether your latest investment is worth it. For example, are you getting enough traffic from a recent promotional campaign? Gaining access to this intel will help you better understand each campaign's or channel's ROI. Some UTM parameters include:
Read more: How To Track Direct Mail Using Tracking Links
There are several reasons to shorten links across digital and printed material, including better aesthetics and greater functionality.
Whether the goal is to increase traffic to a landing page or a product page, QR codes help you track campaigns to ensure the highest ROI. These codes bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds, allowing you to measure the performance of flyers, print ads, and digital signage.
For example, if your evolving omnichannel strategy currently includes direct mail, QR codes can help you schedule consultations, send targeted offers, or guide recipients to a specific webpage. For example, you could create hype around gated content. Once a code is scanned, the user may need to fill out a brief form or pop-up to access the desired content. In the meantime, you could build your email subscriber list. Email capture configuration is something you'll want to prioritize.
Ensure you have all conversion tracking set up to optimize your QR codes and landing pages.
Visuals matter — regardless of the channel. The right images can make or break a campaign, whether it's email, a landing page, or direct mail.
For example, when a photo accompanies a social media post, it is ten times more likely to get engagement. People are highly visual, so use this to your advantage. You can create functional, attention-grabbing print mail from digital assets, leveraging tools like Canva.
Generating leads is tough if you don't know your audience, which is why segmentation matters. This process lets you create messaging based on your customers' needs and wants. Identifiers can be broad or highly specific, based on geographic and demographic variables, behaviors, interests, etc. For example, you might adjust your messaging based on factors like industry, gender, age, or geographic location.
Marketers in certain industries may even want additional fields on their lead capture forms to put leads on the right nurture track or set them up with appropriate retargeting ads, such as a pet supply company asking if the lead has a dog, cat, rabbit, fish, etc. so they send highly-relevant offers to those leads. Marketers in retail may want to know if the lead identifies as male, female, non-binary, or prefers not to self-identify. The result will be more personalized marketing material, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Recommended reading: The Modern Marketer's Guide to Customer Acquisition with Direct Mail
In marketing, we know that not every tactic drives immediate results, especially tactics like influencer marketing on social media, print advertising, retargeting ads, or even direct mail. Sometimes these tactics need a bit more time to drive conversions so it's important to set up your attribution window to accurately capture results from your long-term marketing efforts, especially if you have a multi-touch attribution model.
To stretch your budget further, you must test your campaigns. A/B testing is a valuable option to determine the most effective campaigns and is essentially the same for direct mail as it is for digital marketing. For example, if you sent out 1000 postcards, these pieces would be identical except for one element. You could send 500 with a "buy now" call-to-action (CTA) and 500 with a "free trial" CTA. Which performs better?
We hope that this checklist will help set you up for success with your next omnichannel campaign.
Thinking about what other tactics or trends to include in your omnichannel marketing strategy? Listen to our podcast episode on 2023 marketing trends and resolutions to jump start your brainstorming session.
Want to dive deeper into the topic of omnichannel marketing? Get your copy of The Modern Marketer's Guide to Omnichannel Marketing!
