Million Leads Case Study For the Telecommunications Industry

Albert Einstein said that compounded interest is the eighth wonder of the world. This applies to marketing also. The compounding savings on invalid leads over time also adds up to amounts you could probably run a presidential campaign from.

The quick case study of over one million leads generated for a telecommunications company, the average CPA on the back end is high, volumes are consistently high all year around and the product is nearly infinitely scalable… the only thing they need is a life source of consistently high quality leads, located below are the statistics that we will delve into.

Below is listed all of the leads that were bought, sifted, sorted and screened. If they are in specification and validated for that advertiser they are accepted, if not they are rejected.

This case study will cut into the knowledge of how the world’s most advanced lead generators are perfecting the marketing art into a science.

For far too many telecommunications advertisers there is no real thought given to the notion of getting high quality leads consistently, every single time.

To know the solutions first we must analyse the main reasons that cause costly mistakes for Telco’s

The Issues

The issues that cause leads not to be accepted are numerous and being able to set up the specification for leads helps a tremendous amount to hitting a campaign home run.

The following reasons were just some of the things our system picked up on in running the campaign and the reasons why the leads may have been rejected

1. Validation failure
2. Missing fields
3. Duplicate leads
4. An existing customer
5. Current prospect
6. Potentially wrong payment type for campaign (PAYG, or Contract)

At certain times, the % of reasons for rejections changed. For example, with new suppliers it could be missing fields, for more established sources it was more likely to be a current customer of the network.

The missing details are quite obvious, but drilling down into it further, its possible to decide that some fields can be removed, the CPL changed as a result and the campaign still be effective. For example, removing the email address from this particular campaign would have much less of an effect than removing the mobile number, because of this, the mobile number is mandatory, but the email address isn’t. However, with an email address it potentially makes the lead slightly more valuable as the individual can be sent an automated email with a link to purchase when the lead is received.

How money is saved

Because databowl works in real time, it means that before you have paid out for the lead it verifies that the data is real and not fraudulent and also checks it is in the specification that is needed. By even waiting a couple of hours to find out if the lead you have received is valid or not, you risk that lead going from warm and in specification to cold and no longer interested in your product.

You see it can be easy to generate leads, but if you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there. Getting leads that are in specification and genuinely interested in your product is the real challenge to advertisers. When you have in specification leads, money is saved from the out of spec leads that you are no longer receiving. Simply put, in spec is more important initially than interest level – You can’t convert something that you can never actually sell to (this could be due to geographic location, age, payment method, financial demographic, etc etc).

Comparing suppliers

If you can combine all leads from the various different traffic sources where they were acquired you can leverage the value of consistently producing the best leads from the best sources for your company in the future.

Yes, without an advanced lead management platform in place, I’m afraid that this part requires you to become a serious student, observer, and analyst of the top lead generation sources, and reverse engineer why those leads work so well – Using a platform like databowl, you can develop a killer sense instantly for which leads from which sources will work because you have the data and reports at your finger tips to analyse.

As you can see from the image below, which are the results from an individual supplier - 44% of the leads were rejected in the first instance, and another 25% were rejected by the client in real time. With only 29% of the leads actually accepted, it flags up an inquiry to look at the CPA results and make some serious decisions on the source:

If we look at further at the reasons behind some of the rejections, interesting patterns occur. The large majority of the failures were from consumers being current customers of the client (this is despite the leads being collected with the clients brand and asking the users which telco network they belong to) and validation failures.

Live but inactive mobile numbers 11% Duplicate Lead 7% Current Telco Company Customer 67% Validation Failed 15%

From all of the validations that failed the reasons largely came from the telephone number being dead, or the number being live, but not active (switched off, or out of network). For these leads, we tested the number 3 times over a set time period to ascertain if became live again, or not…if not, they eventually get rejected. This gives the suppliers the best chance of having the lead accepted, and the client not missing out on potential valuable customers just because the consumers mobile phone is out of signal.

Databowl allows it’s users to make sense of the raw granularity of telco lookup reports – Here is an example of the actual, technical responses:

The next screen shot outlines an example of a successful traffic source with 81% of leads being accepted and 18% being rejected largely due to the client already having the consumers on their prospect file:

Scaling

As seen in the previous images having accurate tracking metrics allows 20/20 vision to be realised in the present moment. Data driven decisions can be taken by your team to know which sources of lead generation to scale up on and which ones to fall back on.

There are four components that you need to have before scaling;

1: You need to have access to traffic sources that can handle the volume. 2: You need to be able to immediately remove out of spec leads and invalid records 3: You need accurate, immediate and accessible reporting of all your key KPI’s 4: You need to have good campaign ROI.

The reason for having good ROI is because to increase volume you will need to bid higher for leads that could be going to other advertisers, and also you will need to transfer your campaigns to other traffic sources that may be of diluted quality. For these two reasons alone it hugely increases the need for having a lead management process in place. Costs can quickly spiral out of control without having access to key information that can help you grow your lead generation campaign.

Consistency & Compounding Conclusion

You can see how small changes in analysing leads sources can have a massive impact on increasing the quality of leads that you will receive.

Being in this mode will allow you to be proactive and not reactive to your campaign. Implementing systems into your set up takes you deeper into the reasons of why your campaigns really work and the science behind consistently generating good leads, not just reacting to poor information when it is already too late. Telco’s face ever-increasing competition. 11 out of the 25 top advertisers in Britain are in the telecommunications industry. Now is the time for Telco’s to implement systems and get smart about the marketing that they are doing.