How to Measure Lead Quality

We are talking about low-quality leads - how to solve one of the main problems of a marketer and sales manager?

Some marketers are sure that the main indicator of the effectiveness of lead generation is the number of incoming leads. They consider all leads without five minutes to be real buyers and boldly redirect their data to sales managers. However, this strategy quickly shows its fallacy, when for every 10-15 applications received there are only 1-2 sales. And as a result, the question arises - how to improve lead quality and weed out useless applications.

In our new article, you'll learn what is lead quality, how to measure it, why increase quality lead, and why it's so important. We will also provide a specific set of recommendations for improving the quality of leads.

The question of the quality of leads sooner or later confronts every marketer, after the first complaint of the sales department about the low conversion rates of applications received by them. To solve the problem, you first need to formulate increase lead quality meaning and criteria for this very quality, because you will not be able to optimize what cannot be measured. As a rule, to determine this indicator, all incoming applications are divided into three categories: “hot”, “warm” and “cold”. There is another sorting scale with the division of leads into sales lead and marketing lead.

Hot leads come from already determined customers who know exactly what they need and are ready to immediately buy a product or order a service. Applications from this category have the highest chances for the subsequent conclusion of a transaction, therefore they are considered to be of the highest quality. According to another Facebook lead quality rating scale, they are called sales leads - that is, those that lead directly to a sale.

Warm leads come from interested customers who have a need for a given product, but there are also some doubts or uncertainties. In this case, they need to give additional information or push for a deal. Also, warm leads are called marketing leads - that is, their transformation into sales leads is the task of the marketer. For these purposes, they use tools for growing and heating leads.

Cold leads also belong to the category of marketing leads, leaving these applications are either not at all interested in buying (they sent an application by mistake or by accident), or have little interest in it. Most of the recommendations on how to improve lead quality apply specifically to cold leads. And this is logical, because they are considered the least quality, but at the same time they are often quite numerous.

Measuring the quality of a lead is an important preliminary task on the way to its improvement. It will help you highlight sales leads and marketing leads, as well as sort the least promising cold leads and move them to a separate category. To achieve this goal, you need to define the criteria for a high-quality and low-quality lead.

Then you can set a single lead quality standard and use it to qualify absolutely all incoming requests. When analyzing an application, it is worth considering such information as user behavior on the site: comparing different goods or services, adding products to the basket, studying the terms of payment and delivery, etc.

You can also pay attention to how detailed he filled out the lead form and what additional information he indicated in it. Finally, you should study the history of this potential client's interaction with your company, if this is not the first time they contact you. After analyzing all the available data about the lead, it will be possible to classify it and add it to one of three main categories.

Hot leads are ready to be immediately sent to the sales department, warm and promising cold leads need additional “warming up” by the marketer. And the least quality leads should be excluded from advertising campaigns altogether (by adding them to the list of impression exclusion) so as not to waste the budget in vain.

So, after successfully compiling the criteria for evaluating the quality of leads, it's time to understand how to improve the quality of lead generation. To achieve this goal, you will need to optimize your advertising campaigns by making them more targeted and targeted. We have prepared a small selection of recommendations, the implementation of which will help to improve the quality of applications received from potential customers.

Pay close attention to the content of contact collection forms hosted on websites or advertising platforms: Facebook Lead Ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, Google Lead Form Ads.

We offer the following tips for optimizing lead forms:

Mailing base segmentation is another effective solution to the problem of how to increase lead quality. With its help, you will be able to get targeted leads, most of which will become your real customers. First of all, to achieve this goal, you need to collect the most complete amount of data about each subscriber. First of all, his personal information: name, gender, age, city of residence, profession, etc.

Also, here you can select a number of additional segments, for example, distribute the audience according to the level of its activity: new, active (opened 1 or more letters in the last 5 mailings), inactive. It will also be very useful to segment subscribers according to the actions that they have performed in previous mailings or on the site. RFM analysis is considered to be a more advanced level of audience segmentation; it helps to distribute existing customers according to their degree of importance to the company, using three criteria:

Conducting an RFM analysis takes more time than simply distributing an audience by demographics or location. Meanwhile, it allows you to get more valuable marketing data by identifying key customers and those who did not bring you a penny of income.

The next effective method to improve Facebook lead quality (or leads from other sources) is to optimize your online marketing campaigns. This way, you will be able to attract a more targeted and motivated audience without going over your budget. One suitable tool for optimizing MC can be narrowly targeted targeting such user segments as those who:

In addition, you can achieve good results if you direct advertising campaigns to a lookalike audience - that is, those users who are similar to your customers in certain ways, so they are more likely to be interested in your product. Along with connecting additional target audience segments, you should think about excluding potentially low-quality leads, which will help you optimize your advertising budget. To do this, you can also select the relevant segments according to lookalike criteria and disable ad impressions for them.

One of the most common signs of a low-quality lead is incorrect or incomplete data in the lead form. Such requests are a real headache for sales managers, forcing them to waste time trying to contact a potential client using irrelevant contacts. There are several ways to solve this problem:

In this article, we answered the popular question, how to improve lead quality, by providing proven methods to solve this problem. It is worth remembering that in order to effectively improve the quality of leads, you must first determine its criteria and parameters. Also, to achieve the fullest effect, you should apply a set of optimization methods, and not just one. This includes setting up subscription forms, audience segmentation, adjusting advertising campaign parameters, and automated lead data validation tools.

SaveMyLeads is a simple and effective service that will help you automate routine tasks and optimize business processes. Stop wasting time uploading leads from Facebook manually – you can do it automatically, saving a lot of time and money. Eliminate routine from workflows and achieve more with minimal investment of money, effort and human resources.