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Lead Generation - What Should You Expect?
(0) Comments | Posted: Tuesday May 15, 2007 in The Pink Boa Blog - by Hannah Paramore
Lead Generation is all the rage right now in online marketing and it ought to be….As an advertiser, you have the right to know as much as possible about where your ads are running, who is delivering the most leads to you, and how much each lead costs.
Lead Generation is all the rage right now in online marketing and it ought to be. LeadGen, as we lovingly call it, also known as co-registration, can march a straight line to an attractive ROI for your company – if it’s done right. In an online lead generation campaign the advertising dollar actually purchases a lead – and the lead is whatever you define as a lead. Want first name, last name, postal address, phone number, email address, the name of the family dog and their favorite night spot from people who are interested in your specific product or service and who live in a city where you do business? Ask for it! And here’s the best part – you only pay when a real live person fills out your form and hits the submit button. The lead comes to you either on a real-time basis (meaning as soon as the person hits submit, the data is sent to you either as an email or in a CSV file) or is emailed to you every morning as a CSV file containing all the leads generated the previous day.
Sounds groovy, doesn’t it? Well, for all that groove, a lot of mystery still surrounds leadgen, especially if you work with the wrong folks.
See, the industry works like this – publishers of websites agree to carry your offer if they think it will be attractive to their regular visitors. The offer has to work for everybody because they aren’t charging you anything for the space they are giving up on their site. And you don’t get leads if nobody fills out the form. Well, it gets more complex…most websites who carry leadgen offers are always actively recruiting other websites to carry their offers. So, say you do business with CoolSavings.com – a very reputable company in this space – your offer appears not only on CoolSavings.com but also on some of their 600+ ‘partner sites.’ That’s how your offer gets exposed to the maximum number of people likely to want info from you and how the websites make money too. So if you’re working with reputable folks you want to give them the freedom to find good placements for you online.
Tired yet?
Now layer in some folks who sell leadgen who don’t want you to know which networks or websites they are using and you get a lot of confusion. See, some folks won’t tell you where your offer will be because they are afraid you’ll go directly to those websites and cut them out.
Or maybe they’re just embarrassed.
We say phooey on that. As an advertiser, you have the right to know as much as possible about where your ads are running, who is delivering the most leads to you, and how much each lead costs. When you dive into leadgen you don’t have total control, but you shouldn’t agree to be kept in the dark either.
So with all that exhausting preamble, here’s what you should ask for and expect from a company who manages your leadgen campaign:
- The list of websites or website networks who will be carrying your ad.
- The price being paid for each lead. A company acting as an agency on your behalf will mark up the cost of the lead to create a 15% margin. That’s just like paying a media commission on print.
- How many leads are delivered each day and where they are coming from.
- Creative approval of all ads – demand it! It’s your brand!
- Daily reporting on how many leads have been delivered.
- Monthly reporting of all leads who opt out of your program. (This is assuming you have an email follow-up program in place that starts immediately once you get the leads. More on that later.)
- Monthly analysis of the leadgen program. How’s it doing? Is it sustainable.
And finally, you should work with your agency to create a way to track actual results from leadgen. It’s not enough to keep getting new leads. Eventually you gotta sell ‘em something. Right?
Refuse to be kept in the dark on your campaign. It’s important.
Next installment….
What’s the best use of leadgen?
And the Next…
Now that I have leads, what do I do with ‘em?
