Photo Credit: Eddie Welker
To make the perfect lead generation campaign, you need to mix the following ingredients:- Generous helping of know-how - there is no substitute to direct experience, specialist skills and appetite for lead gen. knowledge
- Layer of lead management software (in-house or outsourced) - in-house tech may be more customisable at first but can be a struggle to get internal resource without a service level agreement (SLA). Outsourcing may limit your options but you can often dictate terms much easier via an SLA.
- Huge dollops of performance media publishers across multiple channels - the more options you have , the less reliant you are on any particular source. As a rule of thumb, it's a good idea to never allow any publisher to represent more than 30% of the overall lead supply
- Lastly, add secret sauce - YOU - Love, care and attention will get you everywhere in lead generation. All campaigns depend on tonnes of micro-decisions which continually influence potentially large campaign outcomes. This could range from updating email creative, follow-up call script, call to action, toggling validation filters to many more...
Even with all these magic ingredients added, blending the perfect lead generation campaign still requires battling with many external elements during the cooking process, including:
- Daily changes in quality and volumes across multiple sources
- Irregular patterns of data which could indicate fraudulent activity
- Non-compliant formats of advertising copy being used
- Hard-coding of variables meaning qualifying questions are not being submitted by consumer
So, to save your lead generation campaign from getting spoiled, employ the following tactics:
- Source volume capping according to quality and tiered based pricing to reward publishers who provide the best quality
- Regular monitoring of data. Automated processes can check foreign or repeat IP address submissions and invalid email address domains whilst manual eye-balling of leads from low quality data sources can reveal recurring name variations or gobbledegook which spam filters fail to pick up.
- Policing of sources by secret shopping sites and reviewing the adverts being used, is the only true way to enforce compliance
- Comparing average response of lead generation answer values against individual source stats can reveal patterns that are unlikely to be genuine volunteered responses. For example, if age of person is is a received variable and your average age split is 20-40 years old, a single source providing 100% 20-30's could be suspect and worth further investigation
Happy lead generation cooking for 2013!