Modern Insider – Online Marketing Blog

I’ve had the opportunity to work in lead gen with several past companies and in multiple verticals but regardless of the logo over the front door, there’s always one discussion that remains the same – do we get more leads or more data in our leads (thus assuming better quality)? I certainly don’t pretend to have an absolute answer for this question but rather want to focus on the missing part of the question – how the lead gen process impact the user and your bottom line. My theory, if you go after either one of these targets alone you’re missing the big value opportunity.

I’ve had the opportunity to work in lead gen with several past companies and in multiple verticals but regardless of the logo over the front door, there’s always one discussion that remains the same – do we get more leads or more data in our leads (thus assuming better quality)? I certainly don’t pretend to have an absolute answer for this question but rather want to focus on the missing part of the question – how the lead gen process impact the user and your bottom line. My theory, if you go after either one of these targets alone you’re missing the big value opportunity.

Quality. Lead quality is something that’s a bit ambiguous – on one hand you have data authenticity (am I who I said I am, is my address valid, does my email work, etc..) but on the other hand you have actuality — something rarely looked at (heck I may have made up the term) but huge to the user and to your bottom line. We all know about actuality from our own experiences yet we often ignore it at the office but think about it: you’re signing up for a trial video game that you heard great things about but never got around to buying. So you go to the company’s website and click download but first they want your name, email, address and phone number. Well the first piece of data isn’t a big deal and heck, your email address lets you get updates, maybe even a download link. But the rest of the form makes no sense to you. Your address isn’t needed to download software, you don’t want junk mail and you sure don’t want a phone call about a $29.95 video game, so you make it up. If all the company getting your information looked was data quality the first response they’d have is that the lead is garbage – it’s got in accuracies and errors. It’s not quality.

But they’re wrong. The lead is quality because what mattered to you, the user was authentic. But this company just wants to review things by machine so they reject your lead form as having a bad address (USPS doesn’t know it) and a bad phone number (the area code doesn’t match the address zipcode) and you can’t get your download. Now you’re left with two options – give them data you don’t want them to have and that takes more time or abandon. It doesn’t matter what you chose, they’ve already left a bad taste in your mouth and impacted the entire conversion process. They’ve impacted converting a truly valuable prospect for the sake of passing data checks.

Quantity. Now let’s flip the table and look at what happens if they stripped away all the form fields except name and email. This is something Microsoft actually did on their Office 2007 trial website – a few weeks ago it had a long form with address fields and customer segmentation and now it has basic first name, last name and email capture. This let me whiz through the forum, skip the USPS validation and get their trial up and running in no time at all. Of course there’s a downside… no possible direct mail drop, no phone call, more chance the lead is entirely bogus and so on and so forth. Quantity goes up, quality is said to suffer.

But again that’s wrong. Whether or not I enter data has very little to do with the quality of my lead. Sure a business like Microsoft has to draw the line somewhere and using systems is a great way to try and infer validity but I suspect they found a lot of bad data and a lot of abandonment on the form and decided to test something shorter and easier. I also suspect they’ll get more conversions… perhaps a lower rate of conversions but more people getting access to a program means more chances to impress. And that brings us to actuality.

Actuality. When you become a lead you do so because you want something, that’s true of your visitors as well. The question in lead quality is what the something is worth. A free trial, white paper or any other soft cost item isn’t worth a whole lot no matter how good and useful it is. Getting a white paper in exchange for a month of sales calls and emails stinks for a b2b setting as does spending 5 minutes typing in address and profile data for a b2c software trial that will likely never be used. Even when there is value (a free item with a face value) there’s still an impact from actuality – fatigue. I’ve had clients with surveys that go on for days and somehow they thought the results on question #199 would be accurate. Ya right. Even if the user wants to be honest there comes a point where it just doesn’t make sense or even become feasible to read every question and option properly and one bad selection quickly ruins most

So the solution is to think about actuality and not your business’s false sense of controls. I can remember half dozen past addresses and a few dozen friends. Change one or two numbers and I’ve got a valid USPS address that doesn’t belong to me. John Doe makes a great name for long forms and 1234 Main St. in Beverly Hills, 90210 must get loads of junkmail. As marketers we spend a ton of time testing abandonment rates and trying to get quantity cranked up all while maintaining a perceived quality but through actuality I have and will continue to argue that the more you ask for the more you hurt your quality. You must be able to tie a user to an action and while there will be some bad data in any lead system, if the form makes sense I think you’ll find more intent, more interest and more opportunity. Think about the user’s view of your form not in terms of can they or will they complete it but rather at what cost does your data take by asking for more of it, by asking for a complete contact profile when you’ll never write or call.

Want to segment? Add a few optional fields, let the person register and then ask them to categorize in exchange for something else, as a poll or just to do it. And that gets us to micro-profiling.

Micro-profiling. A potential solution. In addition to the solution I’ve already outlined I’ve become an increasingly big fan of a relatively new concept which I’ve started calling micro-profiling although many other names make sense. Users who become leads do so for some sort of value, maybe an opt in for website access, newsletter or a coupon but almost always something that lets them return later on. As someone in the business of converting you want better leads but trying to force people to categorize themselves while they’re just on the hunt to get what they came for stinks and the first option in a drop down often wins (I can’t tell you how many lead gen companies must think I am an assistant because it’s the first option in “career” or how many times I’ve lived in Albania because it’s the first country).

The smart sites know this and offer limited barriers up front but they don’t stop the profile there, heck they don’t even start it there. Just like you track campaign codes you can track pages and actions. If I land on enterprise but click over to student and then look up local stores selling software at student rates you can bet I’m not an enterprise lead and mark me as such. Once I register ask me a question or two… poll me about how I intend to use the software. Ask me about the next version release. Simple questions not required but instead something where I can have input. Suddenly I’m trying to get through a form and lying to do so but rather I’m contributing, I’m talking… I’m valued.

Micro-profiling has just begun to take place but I think it’s the real future of lead gen. Yes someone coming for information on college education programs probably isn’t going to revisit the random lead gen page they found 5 times to provide more data but that’s the broker problem, not the brand problem. You’re capturing leads to convert… to a sale, to a user, either way you’re already in the business of retention so use that retention methodology for more than just ad sales and upsells, use it to pick up data and build real segmentation, real profiles, not just user-selects-all, one shot snapshots. Think actuality… think about what the data really does for you and if you don’t need it, scrap it.