In late 2012, telecommunications company Level 3 Communications began a large and expensive email marketing campaign, sending almost 80,000 emails to tech companies.
But though the campaign reached a lot of people, it didn’t result in more sales for the business. In fact, not one lead from the email marketing led to a sale (BtoBOnline).
The problem was that though the campaign was highly visible and generated a lot of potential leads, the leads it did generate weren’t of a good quality – meaning resources down the drain.
This example illustrates the importance of having good quality leads. There’s no point spending time and money generating a thousand leads if none are people interested in buying your service or product.
What’s vital is that your leads are of a good quality – people interested in your business or even ready to buy. It’s of more benefit to you to generate a hundred leads that might lead to sale than a thousand that never will.
Quality of leads is one of the key performance indicators for measuring website effectiveness in B2B organisations. Strong lead quality is the most important KPI for 34 per cent of organisations and ranks above visitors and sales.
A case in point is the company McAfee. In 2012 McAfee changed the way they generated leads to improve their lead quality. This led to a reduction of leads by 35 per cent – but a conversion rate of lead to sale that had increased four times over (Eloqua, B2B Marketing). This demonstrates a clear return on investment for McAfee.
