Inbound marketing is highly effective even today. As long as the content used is of high quality, generating high-quality leads is never a problem. It is no surprise companies are generating ample lead quality through their websites and blogs. However, there is one major problem that is hindering the performance of many businesses, and they don’t even know it.
Generating leads is important, but identifying quality ones is even more important. In a fast-paced world that we live in today, you can’t afford to waste time on prospects who are unlikely to close.
How to maintain Lead Quality
No matter what kind of CRM system, databases, and marketing tools you are using, you have to shell out a decent amount of cash for them. Depending on the scale of your business the database itself could be making a big dent in your profits. It goes without saying that cost-per-send rates can never be overlooked, and when there are a large number of bad leads in your database, then it could be quite costly for your business.
Other than directly increasing your costs and time wastage, bad leads can also disrupt your sales metrics and result in data incoherence.
Here are three ways how you can maintain quality leads in your database easily:
1. Filtering at The Forms
One of the best ways to ensure bad leads don’t end up in your database is to prevent entry at the first interface. Since online forms on a company’s website are often a major lead generation point, you can set appropriate rules and triggers that limit the low-quality leads. You can also add additional form fields that can help with the lead qualification.
Email Form Fields: You can filter a significant number of leads by merely comparing their email addresses. Competitors often use their personal addresses to hide their business identities, and likewise, vendors fudge forms with spammy email addresses to exploit the service. You can create a standard list of email service providers and compare them with the addresses provided through the email form field. This will significantly limit the number of bad leads entering your databases, and also ensure that the forms not exploited.
Additional Form Fields: While comparing information provided through online forms can be helpful in determining the quality of the leads, it may not always work. People can come up with a workaround for filtering mechanisms on online forms. Dealing with this through stringent methods such as CAPTCHA fields can be a bad idea, as it will make it difficult for high-quality leads who have good intentions to connect with you. A better solution thus is putting a few additional fields in the form.
You can seek information such as geographic location, industry type, the size of the company, etc. which can be effective in sorting the leads. This is because only real prospects will be able to provide details that are consistent with each other.
2. Dealing With the Ones That Have Slipped
Of course, no matter how hard you try you can’t develop a foolproof filter mechanism that works for every single person who tries to convert through the online form. There will be a good number of bad quality leads that will manage to slip through and get stored in your temporary database. The good news is- you can deal with them still.
Separating Via Lists: Creating smart lists is one of the best ways of filtering entries on the temporary database. You can create as many lists as you want by different factors. For instance, if your business is based in India, then any leads from other countries won’t be relevant to you. Thus, you can create an IP based list that contains only those entries that were provided by Indian IP addresses.
lead generation One of the best advantages of smart lists is that these can be automated easily. The system will itself create the lists for you, thus saving precious time.
Manual Filtering: While smart lists can eliminate bad leads to a great extent, you will need to filter some entries manually. For example, entries with fake names (abc, test, etc.) and phone numbers (_1234567890,1111111111,_etc.) can’t be identified through automation. There are so many ways false information can be provided and developing a mechanism that can check all of these can be quite difficult. Thus, you can set one day of the week or month (depending on the frequency of the entries) to manually check the entries in the database, and remove the seemingly bad/fake leads.
3. Monitoring Engagement
The final step to lead quality maintenance is engagement monitoring. The way your leads engage with the content provided by you can be helpful in determining whether they qualify or not.
Email Marketing: Email marketing is powerful, but it is also useful in identifying quality leads. When a leader wants to unsubscribe to your newsletter, they have to click a link in the email, which can be used for tracking their activities. The same goes for the leads which include your email address in their spam list, or have it go through a filter that bounces back your emails. These leads are of low quality and should be dropped.
Suspicious Website Activities: Harmful activities on your website can also be a sign of a poor quality lead. For instance, if a lead is trying to make multiple conversions from the same IP address they might have ulterior motives.
Sales Automation for Maintaining Lead Quality
Lead quality is as important as lead generation, but often the former is more challenging than the latter. A lot of companies still lead generation on manual data maintenance, and thus quality support. Not only this approach is less efficient and cumbersome, but also prone to inaccuracy. Clodura is a highly automated platform, a state of the art service; that tackles all the problems businesses used to have with lead quality maintenance. From lead generation to lead qualification, and lead quality maintenance to lead conversion, it does all for your business.
Using highly sophisticated and tested algorithms, it identifies prospects for your business through a variety of mediums (web, social media, emails, etc.), then provides the recommended time and approach for each individual lead, helps in conversion, and finally filters the database so that you can work with the best leads that are most likely to convert.
Without a doubt, you need a system like Clodura if you want to take your business to the next level in today’s increasingly automated world.
