5 Steps That Guarantee Better Quality Leads

For most performance marketers, lead generation is a vital part of the marketing mix but many don’t realise the amount of spend being wasted on poor quality leads.

Many marketers are buying leads on CPL metrics giving them comfort that they’re budgets are delivering guaranteed results. They know that their marketing investment will deliver a set number of leads and can plan accordingly. However, at Convertr we know that perception is very different to reality. In a recent analysis of our platform data, up to 50% of leads from CPL driven campaigns were invalid leads, the overall average was over 23%. So your £50 CPL is more likely to be £62 or even as high as £100! Either way, it’s a significant proportion.

So what’s the cause of these invalid leads and how can you fix them?

At Convertr we frequently work with companies that have consistent issues around declining lead quality, time spent managing lead campaigns and the inability to track and monitor the ROI from lead generation activity. We’ve identified the 5 key areas that have the greatest impact on improving lead quality and will save thousands in marketing spend.

Verify and validate EVERY lead

It’s amazing how many leads enter marketing or CRM platforms with whole or partial bad data. Sirius Decisions has estimated that on average B2B marketers have databases which are 25% inaccurate and that the cost of cleaning or repairing contact databases is 10-100x more than validating data at the point of entry. Experian also estimates that this bad contact data is costing business 14% in lost revenue. Our own data analysis suggests that on average 35% of leads received have incorrect details.

Verify critical contact data such as email, phone and address before it enters your CRM or marketing automation and if possible, validate the lead against your business requirements. Ensuring that lead profiles have correct contact information and will save you thousands in marketing dollars and give your sales teams more accurate leads to work on as well as ensuring a much higher percentage of leads move from MQL to SQL.

Enrich your lead data

No matter how you capture your leads, there are opportunities available to add additional layers of insight on your prospects and all before it enters your CRM. The API economy gives marketers a great opportunity to enrich your prospect data in realtime from a wide source of publicly available and 3rd party sources. So instead of taking standard contact data and lead details, you can now enrich this information with more valuable data.

Collect a Linkedin profile, view company level information such as financial data or company size, discover someone’s property value or see what they’re tweeting about. There are countless opportunities.

Enriching your lead data can give you valuable information that ‘contact forms’ can’t collect and provide your sales teams with additional information to highlight leads that are more likely to have higher purchase intent.

Score your lead data (not just your lead engagement)

Not all leads are the same and not all have the same value, but for most marketers this is an unknown quantity. Marketing automation and CRM play an important role in the nurturing of leads from opportunity to sale and scoring leads based on their interaction with your brand. However, what happens to leads that display a range of information that might indicate higher purchase intent? How do you detect that? And what processes do you put in place to deal with it?

Start by scoring the fields of data you’re collecting and weight them according to the ones matter to you most and the least. Then create scoring rules. The data profiles with the highest possible score will most likely be better opportunities and should go directly to your sales or call centre to follow up. The leads with lower or minimum scores get sent to your marketing automation to nurture. Even creating a simple 2 point scoring system, should mean you get your better quality leads into the hands of people that can potentially close them quickly, rather than treating them all the same and waiting for engagement over weeks to surface.

Speed up your lead delivery

The vast majority of marketers don’t actually get the leads they’re buying until well past their sell by date. Most marketers wait from 1 day to 1 week to receive the leads from their sources and then many still have to go through the arduous (and quite often manual) process of checking the lead details are correct and uploading them into lead systems, databases, marketing automation or CRM platforms and then there’s the sales follow up process to go through. For most leads, its days and sometime weeks later before they receive contact from a sales person. This delay is costing business thousands in lost opportunities, customers who bought from someone else or who lost the ‘impulse’ moment to purchase or some who simply forgot and lost interest. Every hour or day delayed in getting leads into the hands of your sales or contact centre, sees the number of opportunities fall.

For marketers today, the standard of delivery has to be realtime. Customers research and evaluate products quickly, but also move between sources quickly and marketers need to keep up with this pace in the digital ecosystem we all work in.

So, cut out the manual processes that increase data inaccuracies and cause delay and automate your lead management. Get your leads delivered in realtime and ensure that your sales teams can be following up and closing the opportunity in seconds and minutes, rather than days and weeks.

Track real ROI on ALL lead sources

It’s not just your CPL activity driving leads, yet many marketers don’t fully measure all of their lead generation activity. Paid search, social and email activity as well as standard advertising are frequently used by marketers to drive leads and can all be tracked, but how often are they genuinely compared alongside each other? And what ROI measurement is being used?

To really understand what lead activity is giving the best return and how best to allocate you lead generation budget, you need to track the effective CPL and sale value from all your sources. You could be wasting thousands on a marketing channel like CPL activity that drives a high volume of leads, but very little in actual sales conversion. Whereas your email and paid social could be driving a higher quality of leads than you realised. Get the full picture and compare all your lead inputs.

Convertr is a realtime Customer Acquisition Platform that captures, validates, enriches, scores and routes leads, as well as tracking the ROI of your performance marketing activity all the way to sale.