New lead follow-up strategy nets 42% boost in client’s conversion rate.

Quick Facts

Industry

Home Service

Niche

House Cleaning

Since

2009

Location

USA

About The Client

Client operates a multi-location house cleaning business with a focus on high-quality residential clients. To help with lead generation, they offer free price quotes through the estimate form on their website.

Situation Overview

After completing the estimate form, leads are automatically emailed 19 follow-up questions. Once answers are provided, the salesperson updates CRM by copy/pasting the responses into corresponding text area fields. Finally, the personalized price quote is emailed along with a list of available dates to book the service.

Campaign Goals

  • Increase lead response rate to initial email follow-up.
  • Improve client’s overall lead conversion rate.
  • Find alternative to salesperson manually updating CRM record.

Variant A (Original Template)

The initial template for lead response. It contained the 19 questions in plain-text within the email body.

Design

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Campaign Stats

To establish baseline metrics, I recorded lead engagement of the existing workflow, Variant A.

After 62 days, 153 leads received Variant A.

Observations

  • Design-wise, the follow-up email is an eyesore of plain black-and-white text.
  • Requesting answers to 19 questions through email was problematic; lead sometimes gave ambiguous answers (or forgot questions entirely), necessitating additional back-and-forth.
  • Our client’s email signature added to the convoluted and daunting design.
  • Manually inserting text answers into CRM is time consuming and inefficient.

Strategy Hypothesis

Although the follow-up questions were necessary, the implementation was far from optimal. Beyond the off-putting email template, the workflow was a chore for both my client and their leads.

After careful assessment, I felt reasonable concluding the following:

  • A more organized email template would increase user engagement.
  • Providing an easier platform to answer the follow-up questions would increase lead responses.
  • Streamlining the process of transferring lead answers to CRM would free up time for salespeople.

What Was Done

  • Overhauled the template content by slashing word count, adding clean formatting, and rewriting the pitch with a more natural tone.
  • Consolidated their salesperson’s clunky 18-line email signature into a clean, 6-line design; replaced their warranty and terms of service text with external links.
  • Relocated the follow-up questions to a survey and linked it as a questionnaire in the email body.
  • Integrated the survey with client’s CRM; instead of manual insertion, lead’s survey answers automatically pushed to their CRM record.
  • Structured survey questions to allow qualitative answers only, ensuring congruent data that can be analyzed easily later.
  • Setup email triggers and CRM alerts to immediately notify their sales team of survey completions; built custom views to segment and prioritize these leads to help improve conversions.

Variant B (Updated Template)

Designed with clean and organized formatting, the upgraded template is 37.44% shorter than it’s predecessor. The biggest difference is no longer asking the follow-up questions in the email body itself. Instead, leads answer the questions through an external questionnaire.

Design

view full-size image

Campaign Stats

To gauge whether the new template was successful, I ran Variant B for roughly the same time frame as the original and tracked the same metrics.

After 67 days, 192 leads received Variant B.

Overall Campaign Results

Emails Sent

192
Leads

Replies Received

20.65%
Response Rate Increase

Jobs Booked

41.67%
Conversion Rate Increase

These results are statistically significant with 99.9% confidence.

Additional Benefits

  • With automation freeing up so much time, salespeople were able to better focus on sales (likely a significant factor in the 41.67% spike in conversions).
  • By forcing mostly nominal and binary answers to the follow-up questions, the client began collecting an organized treasure trove of valuable customer data. Beyond the immediate benefit of reliably filtering, segmenting, and prioritizing new leads, this data also helps immensely with future marketing.

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