For most businesses, leads, customer data, or CRM records, represent the lifeblood for driving sales. Unless you can get your hands on good information about the people you want to buy your product, regardless of what that product is, how are you ever going to get in contact with them?
It’s a tough racket. And depending on the approaches you use, and the success of those approaches, it can be an expensive exercise.
There are lots and lots of different ways to get data into your CRM. That’s what I’m going to talk to you about today. Partly to give you information. Partly to make some marketers feel a bit better about their conversion rates and costs. And partly (or mainly) to talk about Purple and the part we can play in getting good data into your system.
SPOILER ALERT: if you read to the bottom, I’m going to tell you how to get at least a 100% better conversion rate (based on industry averages) from your WiFi than you get from your website.
Average cost per lead
It’s probably best to start with what the world is telling us about the cost of a lead. A couple of years ago Hubspot’s Demand Generation Benchmarks Report outlined that the average cost per lead was a little less than $200 – which I’ll admit sounds a bit steep. At a similar time, SurveyAnywhere came up with this handy little table which bought the costs much lower by looking at different industries which seemed a bit closer to my thinking.
Still, seem expensive?? Well, let’s do a little experiment. Let’s say that you thought the cost per data record was $5. If you had a target market of 1 million people, that’s going to cost you an awful lot of money. So getting leads/CRM records is looking expensive. And that’s before we’ve even started to dig into the quality of them. Or the legality of using the data.
Buying data
One way of getting more leads is to just buy it. You’ll never struggle to find companies online that are willing to sell you the data you are looking for. And the cost can vary massively. But then again, so can the quality of the data. If you’re flush with cash, you might use Discover.org, ContactOut or similar. Or you might buy lists by the bucketload from data brokers. Obviously you need to be careful that it’s all compliant.
Getting people to your website
I’ll talk in a minute about converting people who show up on your website into leads. But first things first – how are you going to get them there? It’s another one that is going to cost some money (although you should be including this in your cost per lead calculations).
Here is another handy image from Survey Anyplace about the cost per channel.
(Source: https://surveyanyplace.com/average-cost-per-lead-by-industry/)
Most people use Adwords, so I’m going to concentrate there for today. Here’s a cool looking infographic from Wordstream on conversion rates:
If you’re using Adwords, the average conversion rates are 3.17% on the Search network and 0.46% on the Display network. So we’re kissing a lot of frogs to get a click. And Search Engine Journal suggests that the average cost to kiss that frog (or Cost Per Click) is $2.69 for search and $0.63 for display.
There are lots of other ways to get people to the website, but I’m hoping you get my point. To some extent, you need to pay to do it.
Website
Everyone who has a website is trying to convert their visitors in some way. If it’s an eCommerce site, it’ll be through buying something (at which point they can also collect the data they need). Or they might be living the Inbound Marketing dream and creating content of some variety to coax the visitor to part with their email address.
Here’s an inbound marketing strategy and method infographic to inspire some ideas from Galactic Fed.
Ready for some more conversion rates? Of course, you are!
Invespcro says that the average conversion on an eCommerce site globally is 2.86%. So 97% of the visitors are tire kickers. They come and they go and you don’t know who they are.
Wordstream on the other hand says that the average landing page conversion rate, where someone fills in a form, is 2.35%. And they go so far as to say that companies with more than 11.45% conversion would be classed as Unicorns (pat yourself on the back folks if you’re in this category). Either way, we’re still seeing a lot of people leave without telling us their name (and email address).
I don’t know about you, but I’m frustrated. Anyone ready for some good news?
Guest WiFi
I warned you that I was going to talk about Purple. And here it is.
You currently have people visiting your venue (if this is not the case, you’ve probably got bigger problems than I can currently help you with). If someone has walked through your doors, regardless of the type of venue, that is a moment of truth for you.
The other thing in your favor is that due to historically high costs of mobile data, the mobile networks (thanks guys) have conditioned the average mobile user to seek out and make use of WiFi, particularly free WiFi. And unlike content marketing, which can be a bit hit or miss, takes a lot of time and needs constant attention – people already know that they like free WiFi and you can just turn it on and let it do the hard work for you.
Here is where the conversion rates get interesting (and much higher than your website).
This is an infographic we’ve created based on the 110 million users of our platform. But on average, our conversion rate from visitor to logging in to the WiFi (and giving us all of the (compliant) customer data we crave) is 20%.
And it’s not just their email address. If they sign in through social, you can also start to understand more about their social profile, likes and dislikes, so that when you put the data to good use, you’re personalizing it in a way that will resonate and make them want to do what you want.
If you’re interested in knowing how much data you could be getting your hands on, we’ve produced a cool little tool that you can use to do just that. You can find it here.