Not all leads are built the same way. There is a time in any business when you have to separate any traffic from good traffic to get more for your investments. Think about it, instead of spending to talk to everyone, you spend to speak to the target that actually wants to buy from you. That sounds like a good business move, right?
That’s the purpose of recognising high-quality leads. Gives you a better picture of who is ready to make a purchase and who’s just window shopping.
The numbers don’t lie, studies have shown that brands that nurture leads can see 50% more sales at 33% lower costs. Knowing what leads to concentrate on is the beginning of your strategy. So you can focus your marketing budget on the most profitable audience.
What are high-quality leads?
High-quality leads are potential customers that have shown interest in your product or service and have a high chance of conversion. Meaning they know your product and are ready to buy.
The better the quality of the lead the bigger the chance they will buy from your company. Most of these types of leads share a strong product fit with your brands. It can also indicate a higher lifetime customer retention and value.
To summarise, high-quality leads are the target you want to attack because they have 3 very important characteristics:
- They are ready to buy
- They already like your product
- They are more likely to buy again
How to know the quality of a lead?
Data is going to lead the way in learning which are the better leads for your business. Tracking customer behaviour is the key to qualifying leads.
Once you have set up data tracking you will need to create a lead scoring system to separate the high-quality leads from other leads.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is when you assign a numerical value to customer actions so you can get an end grade or rating for each lead.
For example, if you see that users who subscribe to your newsletter buy more than those who just visit your site, then leads from the newsletter will get a higher score.
How to create a lead scoring system
- Start with customer criteria.
The basic characteristics your ideal lead has to have
- Define your customer journey
Where do the quality leads start, how do they navigate your page, etc
- Create a scoring table
Give actions, characteristics, and other factors a number
- Automise your scoring system
This helps lessen the burden of work and identifies high-quality leads in real-time to make your sales force more effective
- Check data and make improvements
See where users quit in the customer journey, improve on weak points and strengthen channels that lead to conversions
Metrics for lead quality
There are some metrics readily available through existing data collection like Google Analytics and some your marketing department has collected. These you can use to get a better understanding of where your quality leads are, what the customer journey is and where to improve.
- 1. Click-through rate (CTR)
- 2. Conversion rate
- 3. Time to conversion
- 4. Cost per lead
- 5. Leads per channel
- 6. Return on Investment
How to improve your lead quality in 5 steps
Not only will you want to identify which are your high-quality leads but you also want to get more of them. To do so you can try to create lead improvement strategies and experiment to see what actions work for your target.
- 1. Define your ideal lead and its characteristics
- 2. Identify your most effective channels
- 3. Optimise your communication
- 4. Nurture high-quality leads
- 5. Stop focusing on bad leads
