Lead Generation

A good lead is the life blood of a business. Any business in any market is always looking for a ‘good’ lead. Good as a word is as clichéd as can be… but ‘good lead’ as a phrase will have value till eternity.

Why?

Because each and every business wants a good lead.

What is a lead?

Lead is a bit of information about a potential customer who has stated his interest in buying a product/service. The emphasis on a good lead is because there a number of ‘purported’ prospects who say they are interested but their interest is not qualified i.e. he/she turns out to be a non-serious prospect.

What information do we need to capture for to be termed as a lead? This depends completely on the product/service being marketed. If one is looking to create a list to email information on a regular basis, Name and email id would constitute a lead. A debt management company would , on the other hand, require more information –

Name

Email id

Mobile number

Landline number

At least 3 qualifying debts

Minimum unsecured debt to be US $ 5k

Must have regular income

Must be paying at least $ 200 per month toward qualifying debt

Quite a list isn’t it?

Clearly, generating a name and email id is fairly straightforward – in terms of ability of generate ‘quantity’ of leads as well as the sources these leads come from. Unless the product/service is very ‘niche’, the wider the spread of leads the better.

Generating a lead for a debt management company is more involved. Publishers with whom the campaign is to run need to be carefully selected. Publisher demographic needs to be carefully studied before being included in the campaign.

Co-registration ( discussed in one of my earlier articles) lends itself to the former type of lead generation campaign. But the latter type of lead generation would call for a Run of site campaign that is carefully optimized and monitored on a day-to-day basis.

Pitfalls of online lead generation

Incentivized v/s non-incentivized leads – Any lead generation exercise which has a lolly of a free gift is fraught with risk, especially if it is a matter of providing minimal information like name and email id. People will freely register to get the free gift. There is something irresistible about getting something free. An up-front incentive is a recipe for a bagful of infructuous leads. An incentive payable after a user has contracted to a service could , on the other hand, work wonders.

Fake Leads – If a network is running a CPL campaign, it could very well get a host of people to enter their details and submit a lead. Such leads only shore up the statistics on the campaign, with poor end results.

Bottom line is that if a lead generation campaign has a stated and clear goals, good processes to monitor the campaign there is no reason why it should be able to generate fairly high quality leads.