This is a great question to ask when planning an outreach campaign. Deciding whether to purchase leads or a marketing list, or even a blend of the two, needs careful consideration.
Purchasing a cold list:
Renting marketing lists is the traditional method for call centres. A broker like Dataphoria can assist a client in selecting people based on demographics, purchase behaviour and self-reported survey questions. As we progress into the 21st century, sales agents are less comfortable calling people without a reason and consumer and business trust is at an all-time low.
It still makes sense to make cold calls using a marketing list for some campaigns. For example:
- You need to reach all people in a set target market
- You are unable to generate enough lead volume with internal and external lead sources
- You are looking to train a sales team and need to ascertain their lead compression ability
Purchasing leads:
Exploring the option of purchasing leads is always recommended. Having a reason to pick up the phone will make it a lot easier for an agent to “warm up” a call and to get past the crucial initial seconds of the call.
You may already be generating leads on your website now or via referrals. While the methodology you have used will greatly impact the quality of leads you are generating, it is highly unlikely that your sales team will find these leads more engaged than cold calling suspects.
Your sales team will be significantly more effective if they spend their team purchasing leads that fit your target criteria for a good customer and are in market in a sensible timeframe.
The success of leveraging the option to purchase leads from a 3rd party effectively is dependent upon aligning your goals with those of the party you are working with. Time and time again, we have seen marketers burned with poor quality 3rd party leads, where lead providers undertake negative behaviours:
- They are selling the same opt-in to multiple competing parties, which confuses the buyer and pushes the marketer into a “red ocean” environment, where they end up competing on price.
- They didn’t understand what makes a lead effective for the marketer, so they didn’t assist by qualifying out leads that are not eligible for the related offering.
- They used an incentive to draw in leads that did not relate to the offering, which drove down the quality of the leads.
Over-qualifying leads prior to calling can also create challenges, as, while you may improve lead quality, asking too many questions in the data collection process may create leakage in the funnel, as people grow impatient with too many qualifying questions. It may also drive the price of the lead up.
Warm lead partners will fall into 2 groups:
- Agencies that assist you in building leads on your own website, by assisting with offers, landing pages and related media traffic. These agencies will normally charge for time + media. These types of leads are often good quality, though the volume you can generate will be dictated by the point of diminishing returns of the media spend (when you spend more money on media, eventually the lead price become untenable).
- Turn-key providers that build leads off-page and usually mitigating your marketing expenditure risk, by charging on a cost-per-lead basis when you purchase leads, often rejecting duplicated leads automatically, to reduce budget wastage. These lead types can add significant scale to your campaign. Dataphoria offer this service.
Generating your own leads only will often hit a point of diminishing return, where the cost per lead becomes unlikely to enable a positive return on your investment.
It is worth exploring both lead generation options, as an effective blend of the 2 will likely enable a good mix of scale and quality.
Summary:
Purchasing a marketing list carries a range of challenges for a telemarketer:
- A significant percentage of the people you target with a cold-call campaign are unlikely to be in market for your product / service.
- Unless you have a very strong brand, they might not know who you are, so they are often less likely to trust you.
- It is often a natural reaction to say “no” to a cold caller, without really listening to the offer, as the contact has not been solicited.
Performance-based warm leads often provide greater ROI than cold-calling, as they remove many of the barriers of a cold-calling campaign:
- The consumer has opted in to hearing from you, so you know they are in market for your product / service.
- They have acknowledged your brand through their response, meaning that they will have a greater brand-recall when you contact them.
- It is much less easy for a consumer to say no to a business that they have requested to call them.
The combination of these benefits set up a campaign for improved results and a reduced cost of sale.
In conclusion the decision as to whether you should purchase leads or a marketing list will come down to a range of factors, but warm leads will usually make life easier for the sales team, when these are available.