Daniel Burstein’s excellent article on lead management is filled with intelligent tips on how to achieve the admittedly tricky balance between lead quality and cost.
Reading through Mr. Burstein’s list, I agree with every single tip he shares. Indeed, it all starts with measuring – tracking each and every lead and understanding where they come from. Next, defining what a quality lead means – Sales should definitely be involved here – and also defining what would be considered an affordable or an expensive lead – for YOUR organization.
I agree that email marketing campaigns are generally an efficient, affordable way to get your message across, and that uniting email campaigns with social media campaigns should push both forward in terms of reach and response.
The only thing I would add: a good, affordable marketing automation system can do wonders in terms of tying together all of these elements and ensuring their success. Once you implement marketing automation, all the steps outlined in the article become much more doable.
There’s no easier way to measure marketing effectiveness than with marketing automation. Marketing automation enables you to measure individual message and cross-campaign effectiveness; to track each and every lead – in fact you can start tracking leads while they are still anonymous; and to effectively nurture those leads, following their actions on your website and their responses to your emails, to help you get a full picture of each lead and of where they are in the buying process.
It’s much easier this way to determine when you should get in touch with a lead, whether she is ready for another email, what type of content she might be interested in, and – most importantly – whether she’s ready to be contacted by Sales.
I also agree with Mr. Burstein that lead segmentation is a must – and I’ll add that there’s no easier way to segment leads than to use a good marketing automation system.
The only caveat: The marketing automation tool you use has to be affordable. We’re concerned with costs here, so an expensive tool would not make any sense and could in fact backfire. So make sure you get an affordable marketing automation tool, and also make sure the system is user-friendly and easy to install and operate, to ensure that you would in fact use it.
Marketing automation is one of the fastest, most reliable ways to significantly improve marketing results, marketing accountability and marketing-sales alignment. Don’t overlook this powerful tool in your quest to improve lead quality and lower the cost of leads.
Google+Tags: cost of leads, Lead Generation, lead quality
