Lead Generation Blog

Question 1: How do you generate leads in a category when your potential customers seem to be hiding under the bed? That’s essentially the question many financial marketers are asking.

Offers that worked for many years have seen much lower response. We’re talking about staples such as primers for investors new to a category or webinars for more advanced investors. Response rates have dropped as the markets have.

So what’s working? Many financial marketers are succeeding by directly confronting the worry that’s in the market today – either by showing there are alternatives or by appealing to the contrarian part of human nature. How does this work? In effect, remind consumers that avoiding the markets doesn’t solve anything. It is better to take some educated action, to try something new, to take advantage of others’ fear. For the contrarian - history has shown that the best time to buy is during the greatest despair. Stake out a position as an alternative and you’ll attract the right prospects.

To make this work well, marketers need to rethink their products as well. Sensitivity to down or turbulent markets is just a band aid if the product doesn’t offer tangible solutions to downside protection or leverage.

Question 2: Why should you care about the plight of the poor financial industry if you’re looking for leads in other categories? Because financial is often the leading indicator for what will happen across the economy. Marketers of discretionary products need to plan how they can change messaging and product attribute to continue to attract new users in a less affluent time. Timeliness – recognizing new realities of consumers’ economic life – shows you get it.

Performance advertising is the ideal laboratory to measure which alternative messages work. What attracts opt-in and makes money in CPL applies to the broader marketing plan.

I just read a very interesting article on MediaPost.com: Four Strategies For Maximizing Lead Performance. There are many important things to consider when it comes to optimizing lead performance. First, it is important to realize lead generation providers are not simply money making machines. They may have a very logical and profitable business model in place to generate leads for your business, but an effort needs to be made on both ends. “A vendor can provide the greatest, most eager leads in the world, but if they aren’t responded to quickly and persuasively, they soon begin to diminish in value.” It is important for the advertiser to recognize that publishers use different varieties of inventory which can have a significant impact on the lead quality. Companies should recognize the importance of communicating with the publisher on the lead quality so they can adjust the inventory and placements.

“Some advertisers even score performance by source ID, giving their lead provider granular insight on the performance of their traffic sources.” I believe this statement to be true. As long as vendors provide a source ID corresponding to each lead generated the advertiser should have no problem communicating the lead performance in a timely fashion.

Although this next statement is a cliché, I find it to be an essential strategy to consider in the lead generation business — Timing is everything. Vendors can send the most qualified prospects who are actively interested in a particular product, however you MUST follow up with these prospects immediately. The time sensitivity for follow up communication varies from one sector to another. For example, health offers vs. investment offers have different follow-up timing criteria to optimize conversions. There is a general rule of thumb that lead quality decreases over time exponentially. In my own experiences, I have found this to be true — I had a client whose conversion rates increased by 10% simply as a result of starting to follow up with the delivered prospects immediately instead of the following day. This goes to show how time sensitive the lead quality is to the advertiser. I believe the two most important aspects to maximizing lead performance is effective communication with the lead provider and follow up response time.

As we turn toward tighter economic times, we increasingly see the squeeze on marketing dollars.  What started out as a MarCom Mangers’ dream of a media mix is leading toward strict media buys with “guaranteed results.”

CPL/CPA media jargon oozes out of our mouths with the equivocal promise of, “The streets are paved with gold.”  Expectations are locked in a vicious circle between sales teams to marketing departments, to media agencies, onto publishers and back to sales teams.  The term lead is highly subjective and becomes a convenient foundation of a love-hate relationship.  Leads: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

Lead gen is purchased in hopes that the majority of the output is not only perfect (just short of receiving the respondents social security number and blood type), but will sign on the dotted line upon the first call or email.  I know others in the lead gen provider space can agree with me that CPL is just another branch in a media mix.  Advertising, by Wikipedia’s and my Marketing 101 professor’s definition, is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers.  Name generation is a form of communication in attempt to persuade potential customers with collateral in return for their name (real or pseudo name).

Like other forms of advertising that preceded CPL, this is not an exact science.  As we near the halfway point of 2008, it is safe to say that all those using the internet are very well versed.  The jig is up and registration pages have lost their shine.  Super savvy internet users know the catch behind providing their very sacred information in return for a “free whitepaper.”

This conundrum is plaguing CPL providers everywhere and I say the expectation needs to change from the source.  “Hey there sales and marketing teams, lead gen works.”  You need leads and we can provide that.  We can guarantee that all leads generated were interested, we can assure you that most were just researching, we can speculate that some will give false information to avoid contact, and we know that there are a select few that with the proper sales follow up, will be a valuable customer.  We, the lead gen provider, can get you several steps closer than that connectionless banner ad or that Interstate 495 billboard.

Leads: Can’t live with them — Not all leads are going to be perfect.

Leads: Can’t live without them — CPL programs take the prospecting work out.  Just like “No PR is bad PR”, I am putting my foot down and saying, “No lead gen programs are bad lead gen programs.”  With lead gen, your company name is out there, your offers are out there, and you are getting qualified respondents to follow up with.

In the age of the BlackBerry and iPhone, the sky is limit to where you can access your email (and even that will soon be possible). I came across an article on MediaPost that discusses the issue of email marketing in this new era of alternative ways to check your email. The article debates whether email marketers should want their recipients to use handheld mobile devices to read email, or if they should just accept the change in email viewing practices and adapt to it. This is a very important issue to ponder since not all emails can be correctly viewed by a handheld. Therefore, some email marketers argue that they do not want people to open their mail via BlackBerry because they may not see what they want them to see. In addition, since part of the message may be disabled, the user may not be able to sign up for the offer, open an account, or make a purchase which is ultimately the objective.

On the flip side, the counterargument is that instead of fighting the use of handhelds for email usage, email marketers should accept the change, and make all emails compatible with mobile devices. The BlackBerry and iPhone provide it’s users with quick access and convenience. For the person on the go, which many BlackBerry and iPhone users are, checking email via computer can be a hassle. The article states that according to a Marketing Sherpa study, “64% of key decision makers are viewing your carefully crafted email on their BlackBerry’s and other mobile devices”. Therefore, this argument supports the idea that email marketers need to “get with the times” and work around the convenience and lifestyle of the consumer, because in the end the consumer’s best interest is their own best interest.

This article raises a very interesting question: Should email marketers accommodate the changing consumer? Or should email marketers keep what they know works?

Personally, I agree with the argument that email marketers should change with their consumer. With the constant expanding of technology, people have become used to convenience and now expect it. The consumer is out for their interest only, and is not concerned with how difficult a job it may be for the email marketer to get emails out to them. The email marketer needs to accept that fact, and create a strategy around convenience for the consumer. Once that is put into plan, I believe the email marketer will see a positive return from the consumer.

Since we have really been expanding our efforts in building our network publishing portfolio over the last 3 months, I found this article on MediaPost to be very interesting. It discusses how many of the networks out there today are not and should not be looked as the same. There are many things that differentiate a network and how to determine what network best fits.

Also from a company standpoint as we are possibly exploring the values of moving into our own network some things should be considered… Over the past year over $1 billion in combined value have been used to buyout networks from bigger companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Media Initiatives some of the bigger players in the industry. Obviously this would be the level we would all like to achieve on a whole and moving forward could be useful to what type of representation we would like to achieve as a network and more importantly which one is valued the most.

Most agencies and advertisers have realized the benefit that networks provide for brand response campaigns. It’s through their mass reach, branded sites, and often unique out-of-the-box placements and technologies, that branding and brand response campaigns have been able to be successful using networks.

There are four main components that is determined as an ad-network:

• Site Representation Network: these types of networks fully own their publishers inventory and are recognized as mostly brand only campaigns. They deliver a high quality traffic and do not focus on remnant inventory.
• Advertising Networks: These Networks have non-exclusive publishers, and are mostly blind networks. The inventory is typically remnant space with mostly behavioral networks which allows for strategic media planning.
• Technology Based Networks: These networks fall under the category of retargeting, contextual, and other tech based optimization. This type of network is somewhat effective, with the relevance of contextual users as well as the scalability of retargeting publishers makes a significant difference when determining your best course of action in your media plan. The value of these networks are based on the combined, un-duplicated reach of their network publishers.
• Broker and Exchange Networks: These networks use an exchange model to find cheap inventory with low risk factor. They run as a blind network and use other networks and use their advertisers to run on other remnant space. Usually work on a CPA base model where placement is not so much as important as conversion.

As mentioned in the article all 4 are very effective. Its hard nowadays just to try and focus on only one category but to have a little of all 4. I believe to be completely successful in this world of online lead generation that it is important to have a little of all the types of Networks to be a player in the industry and not to completely limit yourself in any way in becoming a full service online media agency.

I read an interesting article on MediaPost the other day that discussed WebMD’s decreased revenue guidance. It served as a perfect example of how, in the U.S. economy’s current “sluggish” state, health advertisers are concerned with response rate and a positive return on their investment. They are lowering their traditional CPM spends and instead moving into new online advertising opportunities that will give them the same type of media exposure but on a cost per lead basis. It’s less risky for the advertisers and the publishers are happy to accept the new approach too because it is a positive alternative to seeing their profit margins slide.

We broke ground this week on our newest project here at Precision Prospects: The Lab, a flexible landing page delivery system that utilizes multivariate testing methods to provide us with the data needed to enhance our landing page conversion rates. When we were first brainstorming this project, we just envisioned a simple A/B Testing scenario but then we started thinking big — Instead of merely testing two different options, why not test thousands at a time? Of course this option would take a little more work, but we concluded that the resulting data would be worth the effort.

So the basic function of The Lab becomes the delivery of dynamic landing pages, each having a given number of variables (x), and each variable having a given number of possibilities (y). The result will be that we will, in effect, have x^y different landing pages. That number can get pretty big in a hurry. For example, if we test 5 variables with 5 options each, we’ll have 3,125 possible landing pages. That’s far too many to analyze as separate entities so we will instead be looking for trends that hold true across different pages. For example, if x is set to a, the page performs better than when x is set to b. We can take this even further and learn how different variables affect conversion across multiple campaigns.

Where this gets interesting is from the design standpoint. Traditionally, designers have tinkered away at our landing pages playing with this and that until the whole thing looks perfect. But when you’re talking about thousands of different pages, that becomes impossible. Some of the random combinations (maybe even many of the random combinations) might look bad. What is going to be the cost of losing that “human element” in the design of a perfect landing page? To be honest with you, we don’t know yet. That’s the scary part. We’re definitely going to keep an eye out for any particularly poor performing variable possibilities and remove them from the rotation as soon as possible. The other thing we are going to do is to start small. Instead of throwing a bunch of hugely different variables into the mix right of the bat, we’re going to start with a few minor adjustments to a standard landing page.

So, why go through all this work? Because, at the end of the day, what’s important isn’t how good our design team feels about the landing pages, but instead, how well our landing pages are converting. With The Lab’s multivariate testing methods, we are going to take the control away from the designers and give it to the potential leads because they’re the ones who really count.

Adam and I just got back from Ad Tech 2008 in San Fran. I feel like our trip was a great success. One thing to I learned about lead generation is that e-mail performance marketing has been shoved under the bus by new targeting and optimizing technology. Advertisers have been avoiding this marketing tool because they are more interested in the new lead generation technology on the market. We can’t forget to stick to the basics. At the end of the day, it’s the simple things that tend to perform better than the rest.

An observation about the Health Channel (my focus) — Exclusive health insurance and diabetic offers are hot right now. They are popping up left and right from various lead generation providers. Real time delivery is essential and standard for this consumer health based industry because it has a tremendous impact on conversion rates.

So what to make of this latest rush for bigger fish eating big fish or for that matter, Razorfish? For one thing, it means that the definitions of agency or media buying firm or media technology firm really don’t mean anything.

And conflict of interest is beginning to look quaint. Will agencies that own serving companies favor their clients? How can they not?

In the end, consolidation probably rationalizes the online ad market and brings better price/value to the advertiser. Certainly, banner ads will be more cost-effective as will search. And acquisition of Right Media and others means that some form of rationalization is coming in the Cost per Lead space as well.

The question is whether the ever-larger players can really pull off a consultative sale, bringing the customization leads programs require to boost ROI. Just as in search, vertical knowledge commands a premium. Whatever the result, the advertiser will have more choice of lead provider and program – and the numbers will tell the story.

Double Click announced a bid-driven ad marketplace a few weeks ago. Today, Yahoo said it was buying the rest of Right Media. As we all know, Google in March revealed its commitment to an auction approach to Cost Per Action. Big players clearly see some value in bringing buyers and sellers together for online display ads. Is this the future?

I’d say it is at least part of the future for CPL and CPA. A successful exchange requires transparency and measurement standards. In the equities markets, the former means quarterly reports and10K’s, and the latter means agreement to evaluate stocks on earnings or revenue.

But in the world of performance advertising, there’s a real risk of “apples and oranges”. How can an exchange equate the value of a sale versus a newsletter sign-up versus a webinar attendee? It will be fascinating to see how these exchanges approach the multitude of possible actions. In the meantime, there’s real value in standardizing programs for niche advertiser needs. I’d appreciate any thoughts on how the evolution to exchanges might happen.