Using e-Marketing to Generate Warm Leads for Complex, High-Ticket Items

Your investment in targeted post-click messaging and content now will reap two more benefits: higher conversions and warmer leads”

If you sell a complex or high-ticket item, you know how hard and expensive it can be to generate quality leads. The more that’s at stake, the smaller the market and the longer the sales cycle. Generating better leads can make dramatic differences in your close rate and revenue. If you’re using email online advertising or search engine marketing you can generate higher quality leads by focusing your energy on what happens after you earn the first click.

When you think of generating leads online, you probably think conversion is your number one priority. Think again. If you want highly qualified, warm prospects, focus more on pre-conversion segmentation than conversion. That means focusing on a guided path of choices, not just a single ‘landing page.’ But don’t worry—focusing on segmentation will also bring you more conversions, so you’re not missing out on anything.

Of course, pre-conversion segmentation must be self-serving to your respondent’s interest, while serving your interests, as well. Remember, industry-wide, 95% of e-marketing respondents abandon without converting. Properly designed pre-conversion segmentation can entice 40-80% of all respondents beyond the initial click, and get you valuable data in the process. Step by step, you’ll engage your respondents, earn their trust and profile them. It’s a win-win for everybody.

Let’s walk through an example of an enterprise software company selling to elusive decision makers like CIOs, CTOs and CEOs. Let’s say you promised a white paper to entice the first click. Immediately upon landing, you should offer versions of that white paper that allow you to segment your respondents in a way that’s strategically valuable to you. Perhaps your software is especially effective within certain industries. In that case, offer white papers that are industry specific. This offer should be graphical—with very few words—and formless. With this next click, you’ve earned trust by keeping your promise, and you’ve engaged the respondent; you’ve made them want the white paper even more, as you’ve made it more specific to them, and you’ve learned their industry. Now you can use sub-segmentation to weed even further.

So far, you’ve learned the respondent’s industry and eliminated some poor fits. Now you need to determine if they’re decision makers or not. For this, you should segment them again. Perhaps this time you offer industry-specific pain point choices that help you determine their role within their organization. The pain points of a C-level executive are far different than those of a mid-level manager, so you design your white paper solution choices to ferret out the C-levels from the rest. You should be getting down to some extremely good prospects. Now it’s time to convert them to leads.

The last thing you want to do is lose your highly qualified respondents before you get them to submit their name and contact information. But the last thing they want to do—now that they’re engaged and invested—is miss out on that tailored white paper. Present them with a short, simple data capture form, along with an obvious, one-sentence privacy promise. Don’t ask for more than you need: name, email address and country—maybe phone. In many cases, you can get away with one, optional scoring question like number of employees. And be sure to let them know you’ll be delivering their white paper via email, so you’re sure to get a valid address.

This example shows how two sets of rudimentary pre-conversion segmentation can yield invaluable data on a high percentage of all respondents—not just on the small percentage who end up converting. What’s better is that your investment in targeted post-click messaging and content will now reap two more benefits—higher conversions and warmer leads. You can leverage the pre-conversion data and track it back to your traffic sources to know exactly which vehicles and messages are delivering your best prospects. And you can compare your pre-conversion and conversion profiles to know if you’re converting your most qualified traffic. If not, make some adjustments to your conversion mechanism until you are converting the best respondents. Pre-conversion segmentation is the backbone of an efficient, high-quality, lead-generation machine.

Before you convert a respondent, you should be using multi-step segmentation techniques to learn where your best prospects are coming from. You should also use that segmentation information to tailor targeted messaging that sub-segments and sifts your respondents even further. By the time you seek a conversion, you should have built trust and you should be speaking very specifically to an individual. That makes it easier to get the conversion—and you can pass valuable behavior-based profile data to your re-marketing or sales team. Bottom line: by focusing on what happens after the click, you can make e-marketing your best source of high-quality leads for complex or high-ticket items.