Trademob, a mobile app marketing platform, found “that 40 percent of clicks are essentially worthless, creating a conversion rate to install an app from an app store of less than 0.1 percent. Trademob found that 22 percent of clicks are accidental, while 18 percent are fraudulent.” While Trademob’s research was focused on mobile apps, it’s not unreasonable to assume that click fraud can occur anywhere online. For companies that rely heavily on online lead generation to sustain their customer acquisition programs, click fraud can result in a major waste of budgets and have a negative impact on your overall sales pipeline.

Imagine you ran an ad on a popular industry website for a month, costing you $250, and 100 people clicked on that ad. 100 “leads” from one ad for $250 sounds like a pretty fantastic deal, right? Your CPC (cost-per-click) is $2.5 which is considerably lower than your company’s usual CPL (cost-per-lead) of $8.50. However, if 40% of those clicks bounce right away from your landing page you’re really only getting 60 “real” clicks from your ad. Now your real CPC is $4.16, almost double your original calculations!

But remember—just because someone clicked on your banner ad that doesn’t mean they’ve automatically converted into a lead. Chances are your ad takes them to some kind of lead form where they can download a white paper, register for a demo or take some other action. Of the 60 clicks that arrived on this landing page, maybe only 10 actually bothered to convert. Now your real CPL is $25, three times your usual CPL!

So was your $250 investment really a “good deal?” You may have earned 10 new leads for your sales team, but the end cost was much greater than you had originally anticipated.

One of the biggest issues with most online lead generation tactics is that you pay per click, not per lead. If 1,000 people click on your link or ad and you have to pay $3.50 per click that’s a cool $3,500 out of your lead generation budget and there is no guarantee that even ¼ of those clicks will become solid leads, or that they are even real people! A large portion of your budget is wasted on click fraud and “curiosity clickers” that have no real intention of converting. While online lead generation can be very valuable for companies dependent on their industry, it’s not foolproof nor is it always the cheapest option.

By the way, new developments in performance-based campaigns leverage the customer voice channel as a net new opportunity to acquire customers. Unlike traditional online lead generation programs, the SalesPortal partnership marketing network lets marketers bid for live lead transfers from contact centers with branded enterprises, giving them much needed control over the real costs of their customer acquisition program. Additionally, companies are only required to pay for live lead transfers that stay connected for at least 20 seconds, essentially eliminating the chance for a voice-channel version of click fraud.

Lead generation is an integral part of any business. But while generating more leads is good, generating the right leads is better. What if there was a better way to cultivate new sources of targeted leads that required little extra effort on the part of your organization? What if there was a unique and profitable customer acquisition program that delivered qualified, live phone leads directly to your sales team AND in a consistent volume to reliably meet and exceed your sales goals.   SalesPortal’s partnership marketing network is that solution, delivering lead-to-sale conversion rates of over 15%.

Enterprise contact centers handle thousands, if not tens-of-thousands, of organic customer service and sales calls for their own products every day. SalesPortal’s unique partnership marketing network and pay-per-call campaigns give your brand the ability to bid for live phone lead transfers from those contact centers.  Our cross pitching process solves the pain points of traditional cross-selling and up-selling in contact centers by allowing both the contact centers and the marketers to create as many partnerships as they want without the typical one-to-one partnership restrictions. Since all the contact centers in your partnership network exist in similar, yet not competing niches, your brand and products are presented to the widest audience possible while still remaining highly targeted.

After the contact center agent presents the most relevant and highest bidding marketer’s cross-pitch offer and the caller agrees, live customers are transferred to the marketer’s contact center. It’s a win-win for both the marketers, who determine their own customer acquisition campaign parameters (pay per call lead price, lead qualification criteria, daily budget), as well as for the contact centers that are now efficiently monetizing their organic phone traffic.

Several factors result in the highest lead-to-sales conversion rates for marketing lead generation programs with the SalesPortal software:

1. Relevancy of products – only partnerships and offers are presented that have agreed upon relevance to a caller.
2. The caller opts-in to be transferred to the partner based on the offer presented.  They are pre-qualified and pre-disposed to speak to a partner phone agent to learn more about the offer.
3. The caller is immediately engaged live with trained, product knowledgeable partner agents.  Couple this with the relevancy factor and that dramatically increase the odds of a sale.
4. The caller is often being transferred from a sales call with credit card at the ready.

A customer acquisition program with the SalesPortal partnership marketing platform helps protect marketers and their budgets by allowing marketers to establish their own price point for leads (helping lower customer acquisition costs) and making sure only qualified and interested leads are being billed and paid for.

Against the backdrop of today’s ever-progressing digital technology, just how effective is traditional telephone-driven lead generation? In the hands of SalesPortal: very effective.

In fact, we are proud that it is the advanced technology of SalesPortal is greatly altering the way marketers and contact centers perceive the value of phone based lead generation.

Marketers tend to think of contact centers as cost centers – a necessary, albeit costly, part of required marketing operations.  SalesPortal helps change the equation – making contact centers a major resource for generating qualified leads and by extension, a profit center that can generate additional revenues for an organization without commensurate increase in costs.

While online methods of lead generation – search engines, email marketing and social media – may be grabbing much of the spotlight, traditional phones continue to make lead generation both efficient and effective.  Either a traditional line phone or smartphone is at the immediate beck (and call) of consumers everywhere 24/7, maintaining telephone communications’ ranking as the single most ubiquitous form of interaction.

But its really what’s behind the phone that counts.  SalesPortal is a fine-tuned lead generation platform that plays the music marketers really want to hear: qualified, warm, live phone leads seamlessly to your agents.

The ingredients going into the SalesPortal mix are:

• Contact centers whose team of experienced telemarketer agents realize the value of quality customer service.
• Advertisers with offerings that are relevant or adjacent to the primary product being marketed.
• A powerful auction-based software that matches sellers and buyers of leads in real-time based on pre-defined criteria
• A simple mechanism that enables an agent to read a script and transfers opt-in callers to the winning advertisers contact center

Live interaction continues to remain the key to customer satisfaction and sales. Online technology might be a significant part of the lead generation mix – but guided by the SalesPortal platform, the phone will continue to remain the dominant real-time lead generation tool.

Are/Were Third Party Membership Clubs a Cancer to Our Industry?

With constant pressure to squeeze out every dime of revenue from consumer callers and responders from Direct Response offers, has the industry practice of selling third party membership clubs possibly caused more long term harm than good to our industry?

Not all that long ago, the “clubs” were like a gold mine for our industry. The “clubs” were new to the consumer callers and conversion rates were much higher then. The financial benefits to these “negative option renewal” offers of “30 day trial memberships” were tremendous for product marketers and the call centers alike. However, over the years, consumers have come to view these products as valueless and have complained in great numbers about the hard selling tactics deployed by marketers. I believe that many got caught up in the frenzy of making new revenues in previously undiscovered territory and cared less about whether they were of any value to consumers. Did we once consider the possible long-term damaging effects to our industry of this practice?

Offering non-relevant, third party upsells has gone unabated for years. One negative result (or positive) result depending on which side of the fence you’re on, is that consumers have complained enough to convince Legislators to outlaw some of the practices of “club” programs and introduce new proposed legislation that would allow “overreach expansion of FTC powers”, e.g., current consumer legislation that has been passed in regard to data pass and the proposed amendment of S. 3217, etc. This is another step in further regulating our industry, (on top of others), and further so-called protecting consumers from the blatant abuse as to how their credit card accounts are captured and then charged. Visa and MasterCard have also imposed their mighty rules to Merchants to protect their cardmembers from further abuse. The rules have changed the game dramatically!

Faced with legislative headwinds as well as consumer resistance, companies are starting to look for other methods of incremental revenue generation. Recent technological developments now provide solutions which can offer legitimate, high-value, and legally compliant alternatives to these low value and low conversion club membership Up-sells.

If the industry continues to offer irrelevant and uncomplimentary 3rd Party “club” memberships to the consumer callers, will we continue to experience diminishing response rates to toll free numbers and the web from savvy consumers who have been burned with this practice. I think so.