Cost per action marketing may be a smart way to capture leads from online ads, but it’s a much stronger strategy when you have robust lead verification and closing processes working in your favor. Unfortunately, building internal teams to oversee these kinds of tasks may be burdensome, time-intensive, and expensive. However, a reliable lead source can defray some of these costs. Here’s how a regular lead generation source may be pivotal to your company’s CPA strategy.
Lead Generation Sources Offer Verified Leads
Sure, with CPA marketing, you’ll experience a lot less lead fraud than you would with pay-per-click advertisements. But the leads you do get still won’t be verified by human agents. It’s difficult to know why a lead decides to fill out a form—or how close they are to purchasing—until you actually speak to this potential customer directly and learn the details of their situation.
Online advertising may offer lower overhead than other marketing channels, at least on the surface. However, there are some hidden costs behind those initial fees that typically are not calculated into their expense. Leads acquired from CPA campaigns must be contacted, verified and scored for their likelihood to convert. And in the home remodeling or construction business, where customers are making high-dollar investments, they must often be wooed with several touches from your marketing team. All of this factors into your eventual cost of acquisition.
If you are willing to invest the time and money to score and nurture leads internally, CPA campaigns may be an ideal source of potential leads. However, this method is not cost-effective for every business. From the context of your economies of scale, it doesn’t make sense to train teams of marketers to nurture leads when you could essentially outsource this work to trained professionals.
CPA Lead Generation Is Only As Strong as Your Landing Page
One of the major obstacles to a successful CPA marketing campaign is that it relies on the strength of your landing page and form. Lead generation form building is essentially an art form—it takes a great deal of attention to detail and testing, along with a dash of intuitive UI design, to get it right.
Forms can be lengthy, especially if you offer several different services, such as a kitchen and bath remodeler might. The simpler a lead gen form is, the more successful it is likely to be with visitors, particularly for mobile users. Mobile input is also subject to errors and typos, which makes the process much more cumbersome for a key segment of users. Considering that mobile now holds over 50% of the market share for internet users (vs. about 44% for desktop), losing out on that market could be devastating.
Here again, a steady supply of reliable leads can bolster conversion rates when CPA forms fail. Obviously, if you are engaged in CPA campaigns, you should work towards refining landing pages and forms to capture more leads on a diverse range of browser platforms. However, lead generation professionals, who have years of experience refining landing pages for increased conversion, can help fill in the gaps here.
Time Is Money When It Comes to Lead Conversion
We probably don’t have to tell you that leads have a short shelf life. The average lead is much more likely to convert if they receive an instant response. In fact, connecting with a lead within an hour after initial contact makes that lead seven times more likely to convert.
Lead conversion also takes finesse. Leads may need to be contacted several times throughout the sales process in order to close a sale. Ideally, your team should have access to a thorough CRM database and automation tools that can set up alerts every time a lead takes a potential action, such as revisiting your website. This level of detail can ensure that you aren’t contacting leads without context—a jarring experience for any client.
This again calls for robust and potentially expensive marketing and sales teams, which is why many businesses choose to outsource lead management actions like these.
Can You Trust Lead Generation Services?
In theory, the lead generation model follows a sound business logic. In practice, many lead outsourcing services have proved themselves otherwise, delivering cold, dead leads or sending the same leads to multiple businesses, hence flooding the market.
However, these kinds of shoddy services can be avoided by doing a little bit of research. Obviously, you should always review the company’s reputation and weigh their cost-per-lead before deciding to engage a lead service provider. You’ll also want to clarify as to how many different companies various leads are sent, since this can certainly impact the success of your campaigns.
Another thing to consider is the lead source’s area of expertise. For instance, at Modernize, while we do provide leads for all sorts of remodeling trades and industries, our focus has typically been in the solar, roofing, windows and HVAC segments. Therefore, we’re intimately familiar with the customer sales process for these types of projects and can help clients that contact us as they work through their decision. And that may result in significant cost savings overall. In other words, not all lead generation services are created equally.
Ready to put your lead generation process into overdrive? Contact us today for more information about Modernize leads.
