It is a well known fact that you need to generate and deliver quality leads to your customers – to signup new customers and to retain the existing clients. However, it is very difficult to maintain the consistency of lead quality if you are using multiple sources and channels for online lead generation.

Many lead distribution companies and agencies, especially when they are new to the online lead generation and distribution business, struggle to survive and grow. While it looks easy and enticing from the outside world, it is often laborious and error prone, unless you understand the intricacies of the web lead sales business.

Customer Feedback

The other day, I was speaking with one of our long time customers who has branched out recently into online lead generation for a specific industry niche. Whenever I have a chance to speak with the clients, I always make sure that I inquire about their business with questions such as (1) if they are doing good, (2) how is the industry doing, (3) how their CUSTOMERS are doing, (4) their sales projections and actual sales numbers, (5) technology trends in the industry, and (6) how we could help them further by adding / enhancing our lead distribution and management software solution.

I make sure that this conversation is casual and personal, rather than formal and rigid. If you ask these questions genuinely, most of the customers respond positively and open their thoughts. It gives a chance for them to reflect on their business from a different (supplier’s) perspective. Unlike formal online surveys sent via email invites, which is a great tool to collect customer feedback and opinion, this personal one-to-one discussion can be constructed instantly based on the situation without any pre-planning. The conversation could be a couple of minutes or it can be 20 or 15 minutes depending on the customer’s comfort level and positive engagement.

Leadgen Case Study

Coming back to my specific discussion with a client, I inquired about quite a few support requests from him. He responded immediately saying that several of his customers have dropped out immediately and he had to make changes in the system configuration to alter the lead delivery flow for other customers.

When I probed further about the reasons for clients dropping out, he mentioned that they were buying leads from a new internet lead generation media agency and it seems that the conversion rates for these leads were very low.

He immediately started researching the lead sourcing practices. As you know, many leadgen companies will not give you the sources or methods of their leadgen practices. He found out after some research that the leads were generated using co-generation method! Obviously, it was not their first choice of the online subscribers. Probably the visitors were either forced or enticed into opting into the additional service categories.

Generally, the leads generated using co-registration methods will convert less. These could be used  for long term nurturing or up-sell processes, but not for immediate telephone follow-up.

This scenario shows how your lead quality can be affected without even your knowledge. Hence lead sourcing (or buying internet leads) should be taken as a continuous improvement process. The quality of purchased or outsourced leads can change overnight as the affiliates and media agencies change their processes.

Solution

If you want to be successful in lead generation business, you have to leverage third party lead vendors. If you need to use vendors, you have to be proactive in doing the research on their leadgen practices and make sure that the led quality is on par with the leads generated by your own company using pay per click (PPC) or search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Also, measuring the consistency of lead quality on an ongoing balance is an essential step. As mentioned earlier, you don’t need a special measurement tool for this; just speak with your clients. Another easy check is to see if they are placing repeat orders with you. If not, you have a problem on hand and you need to diagnose the same for treatment. Happy selling!

Higher Education Lead Generation is one of the major verticals in leadgen industry. There are several large, established companies involved in education leadgen business. Since this vertical is matured, several new entrants are coming into the market. The industry which started with catering to the requirements of traditional schools and colleges has now expanded into the online schools and universities.

With the recession in the economy and squeeze on student loan availability coupled with increase in tuition fees has led to significant growth in the online education industry. The lead volume requirement has gone up significantly because of focus in this segment by several universities.

In the education leadgen practice, content is the king. Unlike in other verticals, where lead companies focus on small websites and per per click (PPC) strategies, education lead generation businesses build significant amount of web content in order to attract the potential student community. While this is certainly a barrier to the easy entry into the education marketplace, the same fact serves as an attractive niche if you can build and generate useful content to attract student traffic.

Generally, the education leads are distributed to the schools in real time. Hence using a robust lead distribution and delivery system is a basic requirement. Also, most of the leads are delivered as dedicated, exclusive leads, though there is some market for shared leads.

Of late, there is a lot of buzz in the education lead generation industry. Quite a few M&A activities are also rumored and / or reported. It is reported last month that All Star Directories is in the market. All Star Directories is a Seattle based company which helps educational institutions attract students in a dozen disciplines, from engineering and business to culinary arts and psychology. Founded in 2001 by former Microsoft manager Mike Mathieu, All Star Directories met with early success through its lead generation model first designed to pass on qualified candidates to nursing schools. By 2005, the company was profitable and had annual sales of $15 million. Later on it was sold to Austin Ventures. The company says more than 5,000 schools use its lead generation service, including Johns Hopkins, Columbia University, University of Phoenix and DeVry.

In another development recently, EducationDynamics, higher education’s leading marketing services company, announced the acquisition of Education Connection, a valuable resource that helps prospective students find colleges that are ideally suited for their academic and career interests. EducationDynamics acquired Education Connection from Kaplan which is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company. The acquisition of Education Connection marks an expanded student prospecting portfolio held by EducationDynamics, which also includes several high-visibility websites such as eLearners.com, EarnMyDegree.com, GradSchools.com, StudyAbroad.com, and more than 50 special interest microsites. The company also offers a full suite of web-based solutions for higher education institutions proven to drive enrollment growth and increase student retention.

Western Governors University marketing director announced that she is noticing a surge in online education and they are ramping up online lead generation and conversion efforts.

When speaking about Lead Conversion, a recent survey pointed out that over 30% of the prospects do not receive a call from the school! If the prospects are not contacted within a few minutes, the chances of further follow-up and conversion is very remote.

This is another area of opportunity for small businesses entering into education leadgen vertical. If you can provide additional support to the schools by way of immediate telephone follow-up, that will serve as a value addition. However, engaging generic call center or agents will not help in lead conversion; in fact, you might lose prospects if the agents are not professionally trained. The team has to be a dedicated, fully trained team with a long term perspective.

Here is a checklist with 10 signs that shows your business needs an automatic web lead distribution system. If you are new to the internet lead generation business or a recently established the lead company and you are not using a lead distribution software system, compare your lead gen and delivery operations with this checklist. You might be surprised what opportunities (that will help you in scaling up the business) are being missed.

If you are already using some sort of lead management system and you still some of the problems described in the checklist, then it may be good time to reevaluate your software solution and match with your business requirements.

#1 Too much time spent in emailing leads: Are you spending too much time in emailing the leads received from your lead generation websites? When you started the business, probably it was good idea to focus on lead gen and business development. You could have emailed the few leads received to a handful of lead buyers. But, if you are following the same process, then you are not growing your business.

#2 Leads fall through the cracks: Are you missing the leads and the captured leads never reach the intended customers? Every lead missed is money wasted – in terms of lead generation efforts and cost. When you go on vacation, what happens to the leads? Either you need to subordinate to take care or your customers might slip away from you.

#3 Wasting time in re-formatting Emails to Customers: Even if you are dealing in a specific vertical such as Education Leads or Insurance Leads, each of your customer may be needing the lead data emailed to them in a specific format. If you sign-up more customers, more pronounced will be this problem. Your lead distribution and management system will support multiple email layouts and format to meet each customer’s requirement.

#4 Have to ignore potential buyers since they need automated Lead Delivery: I am sure that every has to avoid signing up one or two clients for some important reason. However, ignoring customers for want of an automated lead delivery management system will fatal to the business. Sophisticated / savvy / large customers will demand more automation features.

#5 Have more than a handful of websites or leads generated: If you have a more than a few websites, then managing the capture and distribution process is tedious. Also, measuring the performance of each website is essential to optimize your leadgen efforts. Even if you have one or two lead capture websites, if the volume of leads generated is high, then you will face the same issues.

#6 Using Google / Yahoo / Bing PPC for leadgen: Are you using PPC (pay per click) programs with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing AdCenter to drive web traffic and generate leads? If so, you cannot live without a solid lead management system to manage and analyze the leads captured on your PPC landing pages. Don’t waste your inbound marketing efforts without fully monetizing.

#7 Don’t find enough time for Lead Generation: Are you spending too much time on your operations management? You must be focusing on traffic generation strategies and activities. Another important aspect needing most of your time is the business development and enrolling more customers. Deployment of a lead company operations management system can take care of capture, delivery and tracking.

#8 Lead Buyers complain about delay in lead delivery: Have you heard any complaints from your lead clients that leads are not reaching them on time? If you promise real time leads, the leads should be delivered in real time. It means that the data should be delivered within a few minutes, not after 30 minutes. Remember, the first responders have the advantage of converting the prospect to a customer.

#9 Losing Revenue: Are you leaving money on the table? If you don’t automate the distribution process, you may not route the prospects to all buyers. If you are promising multiple quotes for the prospects, you need to deliver the lead info to multiple customers. For example, if you are generating insurance or mortgage leads and the routing is based on geography (zip code or state), imaging how error prone the delivery routing process will be.

#10 Spending time on analyzing leads: Do you know where the leads are coming from and how these are distributed? What is your profitable lead source? Unless you know answers for these questions you cannot optimize your investment and generate revenue. If you are not using a good lead distribution database system which will provide instant answers on questions such as these, you will be wasting time in trying to get a grip of the business operations.

If you think that even one or two signs are visible, then it is time to take an in-depth look at your business operations / practices and analyze if an automatic lead distribution system can help you.

There are tons of recent news items in the internet on online lead generation industry. Social media, coupled with web 2.0, revolution is increasing the decibel level. It is often difficult for newbies to select a niche and get into the web lead generation and distribution business.

Even experienced professionals and established businesses have to play catch up at times. Online scams and poor oversight bring in a lot of bad publicity for online lead vendors. However, invention and popularity of devices such as iPhone and iPad are bringing in more tech savvy consumers into the internet as potential online prospects. The number of areas of lead generation possibilities is growing rapidly. This provides new opportunities for entrepreneurs and small businesses in online marketing world.

Traditionally, online lead generation is restricted to very few verticals with large market sizes but ultra competitive environment. Newcomers may not even go near these business segments, unless they have deep pockets and business background. However, things are changing overnight and enormous new opportunities are opening up.

This is a good time to take stock of the industry scenario and review lead verticals, both old and new. Let us look at each one of these verticals (and possibly more) in the upcoming posts. Here is the list of vertical segments (or niches, as some would like to call these), both traditional and recent ones.

• Financial Services
  • • Mortgage leads
    • Insurance leads
    • New Credit Card leads
    • Pay Day Loan leads
    • Business / Commercial Loan leads
    • Loan Modification leads
    • Debt Settlement leads
• Franchise Opportunity Leads
• Biz Op / MLM leads
• Real Estate leads
• Education leads
• Satellite TV leads
• Time Share leads
• Auto Warranty Leads
• Home Warranty Leads
• Home / Improvement Services
  • • Windows and Siding leads
    • Basement Finishing leads
    • Remodeling leads
    • Pools and Supplies lead
    • Lawn Care leads
    • Painting leads
    • Solar leads
    • Home Security leads
• Home Care leads
• Home Care Medical Device leads
• Accounting Services / CPA leads
• Onsite Catering leads
• Auto Loan leads
• Automotive / Vehicle leads
• Medical Spa Service leads
• Dentistry Service leads
• Legal Service leads

If you are already in the lead generation business, you may be looking for expansion and diversification opportunities. If you are new to the industry, you must do in-depth research in the niche market you are planning to enter. Keep in mind that as a lead generation and distribution company, you need to find your customers as well as the leads for your customers.

Our LeadPro 24|7 Lead Distribution and Management Software System customers leverage the technology, internet industry knowledge and domain intelligence to succeed in their lead gen businesses. I am sure that everyone can succeed in their venture by applying the knowledge and right skills as there is enough space for growth. The industry will grow furiously in the coming years, although some niches may see growth fluctuations.

P.S. If you are an expert in a niche or vertical segment (whether listed above or not) or in the leadgen industry, please share your ideas and thoughts here.

If you are in lead generation and distribution business, you are most likely to leverage affiliates, partners and other third party lead gen companies for increasing your lead volume. Here are 5 important tips while buying web leads from the vendors and partners. Using these tips will help save a lot of time in managing the lead business operations, insure consistency of lead sales and improve client satisfaction.

#1 Lead Posting / Integration Options to meet your Customer Requirements

Most lead buyers will be have different lead posting requirements depending on their lead distribution, delivery and management system. The following are some of the options, which in turn will need customization or minor tweaking:

• Basic HTTP Posting
• Advanced HTTP Posting with return of critical information
• SOAP based API
• Advanced Authentication
• Fixed / Converted  data formats

If your lead provider cannot have multiple lead posting options with flexibility, you may not be able to satisfy certain customer requirements.

#2 Capabilities of Lead Vendor’s Technical Team

Even if the lead posting system is flexible enough, the customers will come with a ton of custom requests. Unless your vendor’s technical team is capable and willing to address these requirements, customer needs cannot be met.

#3 Response Time to address Technical Requests

The vendor support team should be agile and quick to respond to the requests. The turnaround time should be short enough to service the customers. Your lead providers should be flexible to accommodate the work at short notice. For example, if you need to post 100 sample leads to a large customer’s lead management or CRM system, the same should be done within hours; not in days or weeks, unless it requires super customization!

#4 Quality of Leads

Assuming that the vendor is able to deliver leads in time, the quality plays an important role in lead conversion rate. Understanding Vendor’s Web Traffic Generation strategies and processes might help you get an insight into the lead quality. Other traditional methods such as reference check will add great value in this area.

#5 Optimum Pricing

As pricing is relative to the quality and performance of the leads, evaluating and arriving at an optimum price is critical. The pricing is very elastic and hence the vendor’s pricing should be assesses based on both objective and subjective factors.

While evaluating lead vendors and partners, the above considerations should be factored in. If you are new to the business you may be content with your lead generation using Search Engine Marketing (SEO and PPC) and Social Media / Web 2.0 strategies. However using lead gen vendors who specialize in specific verticals and have long experience is required to scale up your lead business operations. Any missteps in lead buying will lead to customer churn and loss of revenue. Hence spend some time researching the vendors and their processes, ask questions and make a decision that will be a win-win for both the all the parties concerned.

If you have got into the blogging world recently or slow in catching up with leading bloggers and pros, you may be wondering how these folks are turning in so many blog posts. The primary motivation for prolific blogging is that it pays; provides great return on investment; number of leads generated can be multiplied.
Here is the link for a presentation on this subject by HubSpot and Vovici. While the presenters refer to HubSpot’s blogging tool, you can follow the best practices with any blogging platform. If you use WordPress, the most popular blogging software platform, make sure that you are using the self hosted version. Most of the web hosting service providers include WordPress as part of their hosting services and the entire blog system can be setup in about 10 minutes with simple clicks.

The following sources could be tapped to gather ideas and information for writing blog posts. Depending on the nature and objective of your blog, blog ideas can be generated from a number of internal and external sources.

• Your business whitepapers can serve as great inputs. However, the blog posts should be short and should not be mere reproduction of the content.
• If you are (you should be)  listening to the social media conversations around your business and industry, you can develop blog posts using the theme.
• You own customer surveys or subscriber / prospect surveys can be leveraged to create multiple blog writings. If you are using a web based survey software tool such as LeadPro247, it will be great addition to your idea gathering arsenal. However make sure that you are not over doing the survey strategy, which may backfire.
• New additions and enhancements to your product / service can provide basic ideas to explore on blog posts.
• You marketing and customer support teams are important sources to gather information that is relevant to the prospects and customers.
• If a particular idea / subject is large in scope, split the same into multiple posts. Long posts are generally ignored by blog readers. However, make sure that individual posts can standalone and will make sense, though all may be related to a specific subject.
• Keep an eye on the feedback and comments to your own posts. These could trigger ideas for additional posts explaining / improving the concept.
• Finally, blogging need not be an individual project. Your colleagues can contribute to the ideas as well as developing and publishing efforts.

By sparing a few minutes a day and keeping your eyes and ears open for blogging ideas will not only help you become a pro blogger but also bring a good number of leads leads to your business. Happy blogging!

MarketingProfs, a leading online marketing research organization, conducted a survey with over 5000 professionals regarding the usage of Social Media by B2B and B2C companies. The State of Social Media Survey results seems to show that the social media is beneficial to marketers and will help silence the skeptics.

Here is the summary of the survey results:

• 81% of businesses surveyed gained positive exposure
• 61% increased their online traffic or subscribers
• 56% created new business partnerships
• 52% boosted search rankings

This is a comprehensive report with over 240 pages containing detailed charts and statistics. Note that this is a paid report, but may be worth the money for those who are into social media as a marketing platform. If you are a lead generation /distribution agency or demand generation consulting service provider, the report contents would be a great addition to your knowledge base.

Whether you are a veteran in the internet lead generation and distribution business or just a rookie, driving affiliate traffic via CPA Ad Networks should be a key part of your leadgen strategy.  You may take a look at my earlier post How to Use CPA Ad Networks for Lead Generation and reduce dependence on Google Adwords PPC, if you are yet to get into the game!

Lead Quality is Key

The success of the leadgen business depends on the lead quality and resulting ability to retain the lead buyers as customers in the long term. If you are using your own traffic generation modes such as SEO, Google Adwords, Facebook Advertising, Banner Ads, etc., you will have pretty good control over the nature of traffic and resulting lead quality.

When you are using CPA Ad Networks, essentially you are outsourcing the traffic generation. In such a condition, you have very little control over the quality of the web traffic driven to your landing pages. As a result the lead quality may suffer, which will affect your business in the long term. This holds good even if you are using the leads generated for your own purpose (and not reselling leads).

Here are some key factors to be taken care of (while using CPA Networks) in the lead capture process, which will help you ensure lead quality to a great extent.

• Research, test and choose a right Ad Network in the first place.
• Design and test Landing Pages for proper / good conversion. Conversion rate alone should not be criteria.
• Track the leads by source. If you are using multiple networks, you should be able to analyze the performance of each network based on lead quality.
• If required, you may use multiple landing pages depending on your offer and ad network used.
• Depending on the quality of leads delivered, stop  / start using those ad networks. Typically, ad networks provide a 10% cushion for bad / invalid leads. However, this may not be acceptable to your customer!
• Customize landing pages as required; do not go with a basic lead capture form. Include filters, dropdowns, etc. so that the information captured will be relevant.
• Make sure that basic validations such as phone number, etc. are handled in the lead capture page in order to avoid bogus entries.
• You may also include security features such as CAPTCHA entry, which helps avoiding bot based submissions.
• Include additional lead verification processes after capturing the lead profile data in your lead capture, distribution and delivery system such as LeadPro247. Based on the verification results, you may filter out the leads to the lead buyer. Note that the lead verification process using 3rd party provider services such as TargusInfo, ServiceObjects, etc. incurs additional expenses (on per lead captured basis).

While implementing these ideas would not acheive 100% quality, it will certainly help improve the quality significantly, save money and retain customers.

Many lead business customers using our LeadPro247 Lead Distribution and Delivery software system that I spoke with have started experimenting with CPA Ad Networks in their lead generation strategies. During the discussions, I strongly encouraged them to test the waters with solid research and well planned strategies.

Since there are dozens of ad networks operating in the marketplace, it is essential to do a thorough research about the companies’ practices and support services before putting your offers on the networks. Also, the process is an ongoing one as new networks keep popping up in the field and some fade out of the scene.

Another area of research and exploration is that of the competition. By understanding the advertising strategies and offers of your competitors, you can avoid of a lot of mistakes and reduce the learning curve substantially.

Offer Vault service brings CPA Ad Networks and Ad Publishers together. The ad publishers (i.e. website owners and operators – known as affiliates) can compare the offers from various networks and pick the suitable ones. The ad networks send their offers (from various advertisers) to Offer Vault on a regular basis in order to attract more publishers. Your landing page and offer related information will be made available to the ad publishers.

Offer Vault service was founded by Mark Roth and I understand that Howie Schwartz, a well known internet marketer is also involved in it. The Offer Vault is completely free for anyone who registers on the site.

As a lead generation company and advertiser, you can leverage the features of the Offer Vault service to  compare advertisements from competitors and offers through other CPA networks. For example, you can visit and compare landing pages of other leadgen companies in your market segment.

CPA Ad Networks can be leveraged to maximize the return on your  lead generation efforts and reduce dependence on Pay Per Click (PPC) strategies. With the Google Adwords pricing sky rocketing in recent times and Google enforcing strict rules for quality assessment of websites and landing pages, it is critical that you diversify your leadgen practices, tools and strategies.

There are dozens of Ad Networks in the marketplace and hence you have a wide selection to choose from depending on your budget, nature of business and industry vertical.

How the Ad Networks operate?

The ad networks are basically centalized portals acting as intermediaries for publishers and advertisers. As an Advertiser you can submit your advertisements to one or more networks. Web site owners or operators (known as Publishers) choose the advertisements based on their specialization and preference and run the ads on their sites.

Typically you have to specify a rate per action performed, which is nothing but a lead acquired. This is referred to as CPA or Cost Per Action. You have to provide a suitable landing page to which the advertisers will drive the traffic from their websites. When the web visitors submit their information successfully, a thank you page need to be displayed. The thank you page will include a tracking pixel so that the ad networks can track the successful conversions and invoice you accordingly.

Importance of Landing Pages in Lead Generation via Ad Networks

As mentioned above, the Landing Page is the most important component of the lead acquisition process. Even if you get a ton of traffic to your site, if the landing page does not convert (i.e. visitors do not submit their info) you are not going to get any value out of the traffic. Make sure that the landing page is designed to convert and tested well.

You may take a look at the blog post on landing page design and optimization for lead conversion.

If you are using third party media planning / buying / ad agencies, they should be able to help you design the landing pages, negotiate the offer rates, choose suitable ad networks and track the ad performance.

CPA Ad Networks

Start with a small budget, test out the results and then ramp up your leadgen efforts with a network. Note that some offers (i.e. your advertisements) might work well with some networks and may not work with others. Also, the same ad might produce results at one time and might fail to perform at another point time. Since there are so many variables in play, it is very difficult to generalize and rate the networks. However, you should be able to evaluate their business practices, support levels, etc. over a period of time.

Here is some of the popular and not so popular networks listed not in any particular order. Note that there are dozens of networks operating in the marketplace and hence this is not a comprehensive list.

• Ad Canadian
• AdMedia
• Adjuice
• Adjump
• Admax Media
• Adscend Media
• Axon Media Group
• Clickbooth
• Click Fusion
• Commission Monster
• Commission River
• Commission Junction
• Convert2Media
• Copeac
• CPA Underground
• CPaway
• CXDigital
• DirectLeads
• eComLeads
• FluxAds
• GetAds
• HybrydAds
• Hydra Network
• Leader Markets
• Lead Expose
• Market Leverage
• Max Bounty
• NetPartner
• NeverBlue
• Offer Fusion
• PeerFly
• Pepperjam
• Revenue Ads
• Revenue Loop
• Revenue Street
• UniBlue Systems
• Unique Leads
• Y Multimedia
• Zeno Ads

Advantages and Disadvantages of using CPA Ad Networks for Leadgen

Just like any other mode of lead generation, using CPA Ad Networks has its own advantages and issues. If you understand the issues, you can plan and reduce the impact. Let us reserve this discussion for another post.