According to a study by InsideSales.com, 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first to an inquiry. Further, a recent HubSpot study found that response rates decline as the age of a lead increases.

When you get a lead that isn’t an immediate sale the question comes down to what happens after initial contact. Without proper care, nothing becomes of the lead. Therefore, the efforts put into generating inbound marketing are lost to some degree. It would be great if all internet marketing efforts led to direct sales, but that isn’t the case. It is important to recognize those leads that still have the potential to develop into something that hopefully, is a sale. Maybe even repeat business.

In a nutshell, lead nurturing takes the inbound marketing leads generated and helps them still develop into future sales. It is reported that as high a percentage as 70% of generated leads could still result in sales. Using proper lead nurturing techniques, you can still retain these leads. With proper nurturing, you may even be able to still cause them to develop into sales.

More about What Lead Nurturing Is

If you have invested your efforts in creating lead generation through internet marketing, those leads are crucial to your business. Yes, even the ones that are not direct and immediate sales. This is especially important for inbound marketing techniques because these potential customers have already taken the first step towards buying, which is being aware and interested. Read more

Although many claim the economy is still down, ecommerce has shown this may not be quite as true as consumers and the public believe, or as the media makes it out to seem. Of course, one key factor in how well internet marketing does for ecommerce stores is free shipping. Not only does it increase the likelihood of someone making a purchase, it also ups the amount of money they may spend.

In fact, comScore reports indicated that from the beginning of November until Christmas Day, sales for ecommerce were up 15 percent versus the same period the previous year. While the overall growth rate of the 2011 Christmas and holiday shopping spell was not as high as the prior year, the overall results were still promising.

Why This Works for Ecommerce

There are many factors that go into consumer spending online. From the merchandise offered down to the e-commerce website design, certain traits make consumers more likely to spend in certain places. One surefire way to gain sales through internet marketing is to offer free shipping. Ecommerce is no different from brick and mortar retailers who must offer promotions to lure in browsers and buyers. Read more

When it comes to conversion optimization and gaining the most return from your inbound marketing campaign, the call-to-action is extremely important. Those who create work with content marketing or inbound marketing may have quite an impressive campaign and even an equally impressive list of potential leads or future customers as the result of the work. Yet without a call-to-action, this may all be in vain.

Defining a Call-To-Action

A call to action is a method used to cause potential customers to take immediate action. In other words if you want those reading your internet marketing efforts to follow up by going to your sales page the “click here” button is the all important call-to-action that tells people to act now. If you want to gain more contacts for your email lists, then you would include a “sign up now” option somewhere. Of course, the most important one is the direct and straightforward “buy now” tab. Read more

If you feel like all of your hard content marketing work is for nothing, you could unfortunately be right. It can be challenging to try to draw in and retain a steady audience for your content because of the amount of content that is already out there on the web. However if the content is right, the followers will come and your inbound marketing campaign will flourish . The important thing to take from this, though, is the reasons why content marketing fails to build and audience. By understanding these reasons, you can avoid falling into the same pitfalls.

# 1– Poor Keyword Selection And Usage

SEO is crucial to having the right audience find your content. However, you should do your research to find out what keywords you actually need. Google Ad Words and Google Trends can help you see if your keywords are good or if there may even be something better to use. Also, make sure you use these words enough and in the right places without overusing them. Read more

While it may be easier to track conversion if you have a e-commerce site, tracking your conversion rate or sales conversion for a non-ecommerce site can be a bit trickier. However, it can still be done and is important to the success of your website. Whether you have an ecommerce site or not, tracking and understanding your conversions is a vital part to understanding your own business and improving it. So, regardless of what kind of business you have, you should begin learn how to track your sales conversion. Read more