How To Make Web Lead Buys Work

For B2C marketers, web leads can be a scalable and lucrative marketing channel with the right selection and follow-up strategy. The problem is lead quality varies considerably across lead vendors. Some leads are recycled from the past, have incorrect contact info, or can be fake altogether. Validated leads may still be outside your target audience, resulting in low sales rates. With predictive modeling and a lead validation strategy, qualified leads can be scored real-time at the point of purchase. Why use a third-party “quality” score, or a model based on another company’s experience? We can develop models custom tailored to your business and your actual experience converting leads.

Here’s the performance of an actual lead program in the insurance industry. The bars represent lead volume and the line represents actual sales rates (the percent of leads that converted).

Decile 1 represents the top 10% of leads based on the model score (leads with the best expected performance). And indeed the best performance came from decile 1 and the worst from decile 10. For this company, sales rates were high enough in deciles 1-7 to meet their cost per acquisition goals. They purchased leads in deciles 8-10 for testing purposes to keep the models trained effectively.

If you buy a lot of leads, you know that testing new lead sources can be risky. How good are the leads? Use lead modeling trained on your experience with your other lead providers to score new lead sources, then turn on new lead vendors in the best deciles only. This will bias your early results and mitigate the risk of buying a lot of poor quality leads.

It’s important to combine lead buying with an effective outbound telemarketing and email follow-up strategy. Being first to contact the lead is critical to maximizing sales rates. Scoring leads with a dialer model is an effective way of prioritize leads in an outbound dialer so the best leads are dialed first and often. To do it right you train a model on lift in sales of dialing vs not dialing, so you need to setup a dial strategy including random hold outs. The best marketers didn’t get there by accident. There are proven tactics that consistently work for lead management and predictive modeling is a proven approach to lead optimization.