In the land of lead generation, first-party data is a gold mine – and it has never been more valuable than it is now, with POPIA placing a stronger emphasis than ever on customer consent.
There’s just one problem: when you’re mining first-party data, a lot of gold can get lost along the way. Say you send an SMS to 20 000 people. Statistically, about 100 of them will be likely to reply YES – and of those 100 consenting customers, only 15 to 30 will convert to a sale.
This means that every single day, on average, a massive 70% to 90% of your hottest leads are dropping off your sales funnel conveyor belt. And because that lead generation conveyor belt is always moving, delivering lead after lead into the call centre, it’s easy for those lost leads to become “lost leads” – as tomorrow is another day.
But we can’t afford to do this anymore. Add Covid into the mix, placing unprecedented pressure on businesses’ bottom lines, and it’s becoming important to squeeze as many sales as possible out of the consented customer data you already have in the building. And in truth, there is plenty of gold to go around – you just have to know where to look.
Mining your first-party data mine dumps
There are two major places where people drop off the average lead generation campaign’s conveyor belt: firstly, in the marketing effort, where the leads are generated, and secondly, in the sales conversion process, where those leads are converted into actual revenue. Both of these activities have large drop-off rates – and both of these drop-off areas can be mined.
With all of this in mind, making the most of your first-party data boils down to three Rs:
- Reengaging hot leads
A customer becomes a hot lead when they reply YES to your SMS. Why? Because they want to buy your product, and the only thing standing in their way is the agent’s ability to contact them. Unfortunately, uncontactability is a massive problem for businesses, with some financial service companies losing at least 50% of their sales to this phenomenon alone. Reengaging these customers is a simple matter of collecting the uncontactable leads and then sending them a follow-up SMS. This approach works really well for our clients and requires little to no effort. Don’t believe us? Click here to see how it boosted MotorHappy’s response rates by 500%!
- Rewarming cold leads
Here we are talking about prospects who dropped off during the marketing phase. Perhaps they didn’t respond to your SMS, or perhaps they clicked on an embedded link but never completed the contact form? There are several ways to rewarm these leads. You can contact them using a different channel – such as email – or you can change the way you engage with them. If, for instance, your first SMS was a reply YES, you could try sending another type of SMS, or you could pique these prospects’ interest by offering some kind of incentive or promotion. Needless to say, the right approach depends on your product and audience.
- Refining follow-on campaigns
Examining today’s first-party data can improve tomorrow’s campaigns. A high drop-off rate, for example, could be the result of too much time passing between a prospect’s response and an agent’s call. This is a key failure on the sales funnel side, creating uncontactable leads – and it could be avoided by setting up a direct call centre connection for high-priority leads.
When you build this into your campaign, the prospect will receive an immediate automated callback, with the system automagically connecting them directly to a call centre agent, right there and then. (If you can’t get your call centre system to do this, call us and we will do it for you.)
Refining follow-on campaigns also involves testing every aspect of your campaign, from the language you use to the degree of personalisation, to the inclusion of an embedded form. Doing this will help you to minimise drop-offs and optimise campaign results. Because let’s face it: when it comes to making the most of your first-party data, nothing beats fully engaging as many prospects as possible the first time around.