Don’t call a zombie hunter when lead decay begins! As we have learned in our recent blog posts, generating leads and following a lead score is important when it comes to turning those leads in to clients. But what happens when the leads don’t become clients? In the spirit of the Halloween season, we thought
Don’t call a zombie hunter when lead decay begins!
As we have learned in our recent blog posts, generating leads and following a lead score is important when it comes to turning those leads in to clients. But what happens when the leads don’t become clients? In the spirit of the Halloween season, we thought it best to discuss the not-so-scary “Lead Decay”.
What is Lead Decay?
Lead decay, as much as it fits the season, doesn’t mean it will be “night of the living dead” to your sales quotas. It simply means your accumulated data needs a little cleaning up.
By definition, lead decay, or endangerment scoring decay are leads that have been left alone too long without engagement. This can happen because of a lack of follow-up or a lack of response from the potential lead.
There are different ways you can recognize and clear up your lead decay.
Recognize signs of decay
One way to determine if a lead will become too hot or too cold is through lead scoring.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning values, generally on a point system that ranges from 0-100 to each lead that enters your pipeline. You can attribute points to things like age, location, company size, etc depending on your business model and marketing plan.
Businesses can create an effective lead score by calculating some of the following:
Thankfully, there are several marketing automation platforms out there that allow their clients to utilize a lead scoring range for each potential lead. SharpSpring allows their clients to set up a customizable scoring range so you don’t have to write it all down.
According to SharpSpring, organizations using lead scoring experience a 77% increase in lead generation ROI.
By utilizing a lead score calculation and allowing lead decay option, you can easily spot your decaying leads, prevent them from getting too cold and maybe even resurrect them.
Hunting down the decay
SharpSpring, a marketing automation platform, allows their clients to set up a lead score decay time period in their scoring range. The decay will then be calculated across a chosen time, a day-a week or so on.
If you have the decay period set up to track a lead and the lead does not partake in any further activity, the lead’s score will decay to be half the value of their initial score.
This allows you to keep track of which lead is decaying and where you can focus your marketing strategies towards. However, lead decay is a natural part of the marketing lifestyle and sometimes you cannot save the leads that are too far gone.
The silver lining is that you can use decayed leads as a way to change up your marketing game if need be.
Killing the Decay – Walking Dead Style
Okay, while being the Rick Grimes of marketing sounds cool and a little messy, there’s an easier way to “kill the decay”.
Clean Up Your Data
Utilize a marketing approach by removing outdated information that may cause the decay and implement an inbound marketing strategy.
Some instances of lead decay are due to outdated information on the lead, like old email addresses, phone numbers and so on. You cannot control if the lead contact you were communicating with has left the company. This is more relevant now with the rise of the novel COVID-19 virus. With so much turn-over within the last few months, the leads you have may not even be in the company you are looking at as a potential client.
The easiest way to upkeep your data is to pay for a data append to fill customer information gaps.
Automate Your Marketing
Another way of killing the decay is by utilizing different forms of inbound marketing. Though it may sound expensive and invasive, it really isn’t going to break your budget; you simply need to put time and effort into inbound marketing to reach your leads.
By automating your marketing strategy, you can take out the stress of reaching out to your leads every so often. Certain marketing platforms allow you to customize email campaigns to your lead contacts.
This means you can draft who to send customized emails to and schedule a time for them to receive your emails.
You can also automate your website through chat bots and analytics to view what page your potential leads were on and what questions they may have. This will help you to adhere to their needs better.
A chat bot, like the one featured below, can help to guide your leads through simple questions they may have or it can take them directly to a contact or quote page without having to scroll endlessly through content.
While it may sound like a lot of work to do, that may not necessarily be the case. Many of these automation campaigns only require a few hours of focus and a general understanding of your budget needs.
Once you have set up the campaigns, the platform will do most of the work for you. All you have to do is prepare notes for when you are ready to close the deal with your lead.
At the end of the day, lead decay can mean a series of things; Outdated information, not enough contact with a lead, or a leads slow decay of disinterest. Just know that the decaying of a lead does not mean it is at the end of its life cycle – it can be revived!
Ready to hack lead decay apart and send it back to the grave where it came from?
Talk to our team about how to use the best marketing strategies and tools to optimize your B2B lead generation.
