Lead Nurturing: Cost or Return? By Carson Poppenger, SqueezeMyLeads.com
In the past few months I've written several articles about lead nurturing and lead recycling. We're seeing a contraction across the market, everyone is trying to look for new ways to generate more leads. Lead nurturing is an often overlooked way to increase the ROI on sunk costs from front end lead acquisition. However, while these programs generate additional top-line revenue, they come at a cost. It would be nice to generate a steady ongoing stream of leads from a single investment, but that's not likely. You'll need to invest in systems, technology and resources to ensure your program is efficient. Think of it this way, when you nurture leads your recouping revenue and converting customers that you otherwise wouldn't get. I've seen examples of sales people holding onto leads, companies that have no visibility and quality sales leads that end up collecting dust. What is the cost of that? How you look at the costs depends alot on your companies overall strategy. In some environments, you can continually generate new leads. However, you'll come to find out that after a certain penetration in the market, you're attracting the same people you've already acquired. If you're on a CPL model, working through affiliates and other web traffic, you could even be paying these groups for LEADS YOU ALREADY OWN. It would be far less costly to nurture that lead to the point of conversion. If you're setup properly, the leads you already own should be closer to purchasing than new leads you'll receive tomorrow. If you nurture the leads you already own, you'll increase the return and it has a residual effect over months and years. Can you afford to nurture your leads? The question that I ask, is... Can you afford not to? What do you think? Do you have any experience in assessing the ROI of remarketing efforts? I'd love to hear your cases....