Also expect Utilities, Equity Release and some exciting
Voice products in the coming months!
We always like to hear suggestions for any potential
products, so do feel free to send me an email at nic.ingram@leadpoint.com. I
lookforward to hearing from you all.
If you are attending ad:tech do come by and see
us at stand 146, where not only will you meet our charming selves but you can
try our delicious LeadPoint-baked cupcakes.
Nick Chapman (LeadPoint UK MD) and Alain Desmier (Head of
Business Development) will also be hosting a seminar at 11.50 am on Thursday, giving you
invaluable insights on how to beat the credit crunch with Lead Generation.
"Persona based what?" I hear you cry. What on earth does that mean? It's a term I came across in very interesting blog article by Bryan Eisenberg. He outlines a very interesting theory about how different types of customers interact with a website and looking at navigation paths etc. can tell you some very interesting information about your customers.
The world of lead generation can be hectic to
say the least. If we’re not replying to emails on our Blackberry phones at some
godforsaken hour then we’re probably still in the office! At LeadPoint we are
big believers in a healthy work/life balance so here are a few pointers to help
you work out when you are in need of a long weekend or two to recharge your
batteries. If you answer “yes” to any of the following then it’s time to submit
that holiday request form.
You sent
out this year’s birthday party invitations via Outlook
You wish you could Ctrl+F lost keys in the mornings
The thought of actually speaking to someone rather than instant-messaging them
terrifies you
Your emotional range extends to smiley and sad faces
You start to develop strong opinions about biscuits
You get really excited when a new font is brought out
You attempt to recall drunken text messages
You have succumbed to ‘LOL’ or even worse ‘ROFL’
Your thoughts automatically fit into 140 characters to make using Twitter
easier
Wikipedia is the font of all knowledge
You have started entering the competitions in the industry magazines
The only communication you have with your friends is trading buy-one-get-one
free vouchers for noodle bars
You have a favourite highlighter
Email- Email marketing has
a number of different strands attached that make up an overall email campaign.
The success of an email campaign depends on the purchase of good quality data,
that is to say data that has been used properly and hasn’t been spammed/fished
in to the extent where a consumer has activated a spam filter. The best email
marketers target lead campaigns to relevant lists that they have acquired from
list managers, for example homeowner lists for a remortgage campaign. Crucial
to the success of an email campaign is the ability to beat spam filters and to
be able to design eye catching creative that draws a consumer in whilst
sticking within the boundaries that our Business Development team sets for all Sellers.
As with other marketing methods, all the leads are generated in real-time as
the consumer receives an email and if they are interested in the product or
service on offer, they click through to a website where they will submit their
information to be contacted. Our Business Development team is copied on every
email sent out by our Sellers as part of our evaluation process.
Display Advertising – This type of marketing involves buying inventory
(banner/advertising space) on popular websites (e.g. Facebook, MSN, AOL). The Seller
designs marketing banners that attract the attention of the consumer. If the
consumer clicks on the banner advert they are taken to the Sellers website
where they can submit their information if they want to be contacted. The
advantage of this type of campaign is the guarantee that traffic can be
driven to a site, the disadvantage is the cost. A week’s inventory will cost
anything from £5000. The Business Development team has to balance supply and
demand before they can ask a Seller to commit to this type of marketing given
the obvious financial danger of a dip in price point.
Today we have a guest post from Mark Roberts, Head of Financial Regulations at the ifs School of Finance which provides financial education to financial services professionals the world over.
The credit crunch continues to have a significant impact on the mortgage advice community and adverse market conditions are rapidly becoming the accepted status quo.
The effects of the crunch are self-evident. For example, the most recent Council of Mortgage Lending (CML) figures show that mortgage lending in July 2008 declined to £24.8 billion in July, down 27% from July 2007.
Furthermore, only 22,448 new loans were approved for people moving home during July. This represents an astronomical 65% drop on the figures for July 200.7
Lending levels are likely to remain subdued for the remainder of 2008 and probably well beyond.
In such a climate mortgage advisers need to increasingly consider ways of diversifying their business models.
With tougher times ahead, those brokers who distinguish themselves from their competition are likely to reap the rewards, not simply of maintaining business volumes but of actually increasing them.
Attainment of specialised qualifications is a good way not only to gain knowledge of new areas but of demonstrating additional technical expertise and professionalism to both customers and peers alike.
Take one area of particular growth, Equity Release. Chris Cummings, Director-General of the AMI, recently said, "Equity release is one of the most interesting areas of the mortgage market. It is certainly a growing sector and it is also growing in national importance as well as slowly beginning to gain recognition in the political arena."
The fact Equity Release has been regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) since April 2007, requiring practitioners to have an appropriate qualification, means this is an area where consumers can now have greater reassurance that they are receiving knowledgeable advice from a competent adviser.
This, coupled with the fact that most Equity Release providers are now signed up to SHIP and abide by their reassuring and rigorous code of practice, means ever greater numbers of consumers are viewing this as a mainstream financial option. This is borne out by figures which suggest £1.4bn of equity was released in 2007 – a 24% increase on the previous year.
This trend has continued into 2008 as times have got tougher, with business volumes produced by SHIP members in the second quarter of the 2008 increasing to over £275m.
Recent survey results from Hodge Equity Release showed that over 50% of mortgage advisers were looking to diversify their advice offering with many considering a move into advising on Equity Release products.
However, the choices extend to far more than just Equity Release, as the thousands of advisers specialising in other areas will know!
Commercial Mortgages are another good example. Although commercial mortgage lending is perceived as higher risk by lenders - hence the higher lending charges - it is also an area that many lenders, particularly Barclays, are keen to increase in 2008. Commercial mortgages therefore represent another opportunity for mortgage advisers to maximise their potential.
The past few months have also seen an encouraging commitment to TCF as firms and individuals seek to clearly demonstrate that they have adequate awareness and procedures in place to test whether they are treating their customers fairly.
Mortgage professionals do appear to be taking control of their personal development and long may this continue. Providing the trend continues, the vibrancy and health of the industry will not only be maintained during these challenging times, but enhanced.
The online marketing partners that LeadPoint work with (our Sellers),
generate their traffic through a variety of techniques detailed below. All
LeadPoint Sellers are monitored and managed by the LeadPoint Business
Development Team to ensure marketing compliance. That team also ensures that
seller websites make consumers aware that after they have submitted their details,
they will be contacted. In the case of mortgages, the consumer will be
contacted by an FSA authorized adviser.
This post will cover two of the main marketing methods that our
Sellers use:
Pay Per Click(PPC)
marketing – Sellers buy ‘key words’ that are associated with the
lead product they are trying to sell. Marketers choose a series of words
or phrases that are linked to the search term that a consumer is searching e.g.
, “remortgage”. A Seller who has bought the keyword ‘Remortgage’ would appear
in the sponsored links at the top and on the side of the search results page
each time a consumer types this word into a particular search engine. Sellers
are charged every time a consumer clicks on their keyword advert which then
takes a consumer to the Sellers webpage. This is an extremely effective but
expensive way of generating leads. To attach a sponsored link to the word
‘remortgage’ will cost a Seller £10 every time a consumer clicks on their
advert. If you consider that not every consumer is going to fill out a form
after they’ve clicked on a sponsored link a badly converting form can cost a Seller
thousands of pounds. For this type of marketing our Sellers rely heavily on a
stable price point.
Organic Search
- A website can rise to the top of the Google natural listings (i.e. without
having to pay for a PPC advert) by attracting significant traffic to their site
from a variety of other sources. Sellers do this by writing relevant articles
and blog posts, and by having a number of different websites linked to their
own. This type of marketing requires a dedicated team of copy writers who
produce content that is picked up by the search engines – this pushes a Seller’s
particular site higher up the natural listings. Organic search is a profitable
way of marketing online but only the very best Sellers can do this properly
because of the time commitment required which is balanced against their cost
per lead income.
Next time we will look
at email marketing and display marketing.
In the world of lead generation,
to determine the success or failure of your lead buying campaigns you need access
to as much information as possible and it needs to be presented in a way that is
useful. This can only be done through good reporting which will alowl you to turn
information into action so you can improve and optimise. LeadPoint UK’s own
Samina Haffejee gives us an insight into some of the reports available at
LeadPoint and what they are for.
Over the next two weeks I will be taking you through the
different buyer reports. The intelligent reporting suite can be utilised to
understand your lead activity better. It’s all part of the service!
As a lead buyer you have access to 6 core reports:
1.Account Summary- Filter by product and date to view
number of leads bought, returns processed and cost.
2.Payment Summary - Shows all payments within a
specified time period.
3.Order Performance Report- Track your cost per application
and cost per closed application.
4.Feedback/Return Review- Check the eligibility of returns,
monitor your feedback and returns.
5.Lead Data Export- Contains all lead attribute data, by
individual lead id, for all text leads which you have purchased. Valid for most
recent 21 days of activity.
6.UK Mortgage Marketplace Bids Report-
Allows you to
select a mortgage product and view the available lead volume and average cost
by market segment.
The Account Summary Report
For example, today I received a request from a buyer who
would like the following information daily:
·Number of Leads bought month to date
·Number of Leads refunded
·Net spend month to date
In this instance you would want the Account Summary
report.
LOGIN TO YOUR ACCOUNT->CLICK ON ‘REPORTS’-> SELECT
‘ACCOUNT SUMMARY’-> SELECT THE APPROPRIATE FILTERING INCLUDING DATE RANGE
The data can help you track how much you are spending and
which orders are working the best for you. Other reports such as the Lead
Data Export can be easily pivoted to give you a detailed understanding of
the types of leads that you are working. For example, you can find out the
average LTV being worked by region. (No need to be scared by pivots or
spreadsheets! If you have Excel 2007 it’s a breeze!)
Tomorrow’s topic..
One of the most important reports is the Feedback/Return
Review, for this report to provide value and insight you need to provide
feedback on your leads. Both positive and negative feedback enable Leadpoint
and our affiliates to know what is and what isn’t working for your orders. We
have tried to make the feedback process as painless as possible. Tomorrow I
shall cover how to get started on the feedback and explain how to benefit from
the report. Ultimately we just want to help you get the best ROI!
If you have any questions regarding the reporting shoot them
across!
There are millions of people who use Facebook every single day of their lives. And for some reason many of them spend hours and hours playing scrabulous,"poking" each other and enjoying all sorts of online activities many of which you wouldn't believe unless you had seen for yourself! While for some, Facebook might seem like a strange place to want to spend your time, for manyit is seen as the golden egg in online advertising.
Marketers all over the world are probably salivating right now at the prospect of being the first one to crack making money from Facebook and other online social media sites. Brand conversations, reputation management etc. are all very important but hard currency is king. So perhaps lead generation will put the golden egg within reach?
As regular visitors to this blog will have read before, there is "lead generation" and there is "lead generation". In the end the two key elements are 1) does the consumer have a good experience and 2) does the marketer/advertiser make a decent ROI?
TechCrunch examines some of the companies who claim to have cracked the social networks and the kinds of things that they are up to.
Capturing
basic non-specific consumer data is not challenging - Win an iPod! Win a car!
Win! Win! Win! Now, the more discerning web-users amongst us will realise that
what they are actually saying is “Masses and Masses of Untargeted Emails –
Right to your Inbox!” - Yes, that’s right, for your details and the permission
to sell and resell to over a million partners, we will give you a one in 32
billion chance of winning a Kit-Kat*.
Sounds
great, everyone’s happy. True, but only for the 5 seconds before the spam
begins to flow.
When
consumers realise they haven’t won the new Apple iPose (chortle chortle) and
find their inbox has five thousand new messages, they are suddenly quite keen
to have their details removed from the system. When I say keen, some are
insistent and some genuinely aggressive (I have a sneaking suspicion that the
risk-takers out there don’t even read the T&C’s...). So, the first problem
is the number of consumers opting-in and immediately opting-out.
Secondly,
in the increasingly savvy web-user world we live in, no amount of email subject
title angling can hide obvious spam:
“RE: That
conversation we were having”
“Hi Jon,
it’s me....Your Friend”
“Jon - Your
Requested Quote For That Thing You Wanted”
Of course,
the other issue is the fact that this is untargeted. The data held is the bare
minimum for data owners to send off as many “special promotions” as they can,
before the consumer invests in a magnifying glass and finds the opt-out
instructions in size 0.002 font at the bottom of the initial email. This lack
of customer information and circumstance simply results in massively
misdirected offers:
“Jon, get
the curves you want... today!”
“Jon, are
you tired of your current speedboat?”
With such a
low percentage of conversions through co-reg, it’s clear that when capturing
databases via this method it is essential to build a genuine profile of each
customer. Every piece of information gathered significantly improves the odds
of targeting the correct demographic.
So, ask the
right questions, message sparingly and be rewarded˚
*If
not available a store brand alternative will be supplied
˚
You may not be rewarded
If you do not wish to be contacted by email simply give
up all hope – we have you now.
