Lead generation is a great way to drive sales and build qualified marketing lists. But when you’re putting in place a plan to work with digital lead suppliers beware: not all leads are born equal.
Australia (click to enlarge graph)
New Zealand (click to enlarge graph)
Lead generation has been a growth digital channel in Australia and New Zealand over the last few years. There are many suppliers – local and international - offering their services to help build email databases or generate a constant stream of telemarketing leads.
Leads are generated from many different audiences and in many different ways. Three key lead sources include membership, ecommerce and publisher sites. These sites have one thing in common: they exist to provide a service to their audience with lead generation an ancillary revenue opportunity. There are also sites that exist for the sole purpose of generating and selling leads.
A review of data from actual campaigns run in Australia and New Zealand indicates that the value of a lead differs significantly based on its source. In other words: not all leads are born equal!
The analysis was carried out on leads from source to a sale on the client’s website. A subset of the results is presented here which focusses on the conversion rate from an email lead to the acquisition of a new customer.
The study found that 3Di’s own member rewards website Great Sites recorded the highest conversion rates in Australia and was also a strong performer in New Zealand relative to other lead sources. Great Sites was not only a top source in terms of lead conversion rates but was also able to deliver a high volume of leads. There are a number of reasons for this result.
- - Quality traffic sources used in member acquisition
- - Engaged and loyal membership
- - Multiple touch points across;
- - offer path
- - on-site featured offers
- - email promotion
Another category of site that consistently produce quality leads are offer paths that are presented to users on ecommerce sites once the user has completed their purchase (transaction). Post-transactional paths – by their definition – are full of prospects with income that they are happy to spend online.
Publisher email databases and competition pages were also shown to be quality sources. When referring to ‘publishers’ we are excluding sites whose sole purpose is to generate leads. One of the contributing reasons publishers typically outperform standalone offer paths is that they generate quality traffic via their primary content.
The final group are sites that have been designed for the sole purpose of generating leads, often using competitions as the incentive to register and view offers. These sites can generate a large volume of leads and can play an important role in any lead generation campaign. They tend to produce lower quality leads in terms of conversion rates. They can also demonstrate large variations in quality from one path to another, and even in the same path over time. The reasons for this include:
- - Lower quality traffic sources
- - Misleading offer presentation
- - Too many competing offers
- - Incentivised registration
- - Incentivised leads
The leads from the standalone offer paths on average converted 60% less often than those from membership sites like Great Sites, ecommerce sites and publisher sites. And the best standalone offer path was almost 4 times as good as the worst. It is therefore vital to constantly monitor, optimise and manage these offer sources. The key is to know how each source actually generates traffic and how they convert this traffic into leads. This robust tracking and optimising is critical to maximising your lead generation return on investment.
To provide advertisers with a reliable, effective and transparent service 3Di has developed its own sophisticated lead generation platform and methodology and offers an end-to-end solution that takes the guess work out of lead generation. It allows advertisers to focus on their business while 3Di manages and optimises all their lead sources.
Talk to an Account Manager today:
Contact 3Di (Sydney)
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