Recycling your marketing leads
Reduce (close lost), Reuse (your funnel), Recycle (leads)
Sales teams often get stuck in the conveyor belt mentality of always needing more, and new, leads. Leads either go into the closed won bucket, or into the abyss. Recycling your leads and putting them back into the top of a recycle marketing funnel helps you milk the value out of the leads you’ve paid and worked for.
Think of it this way, if you’re paying $50/lead and $100/closed won account, it means you’re closing 1 in every 2 leads (a fantasy, but let’s keep it simple).
If you recycle the 50% of leads you don’t sell to, you’re putting them in a new funnel where you’re paying $0 per lead. If you close 1 in 10 of these recycle leads, then your cost per closed won goes from $100 to $90.
The only investment you need to put into them is the time of creating the funnel. In my day job, we place a huge emphasis on recycling leads especially because we know we don’t lose that many leads to our competitors, but instead we lose them to ‘no decision’.
A ‘no decision’ tells us that the leads aren’t saying “no”, but they’re either not sold on the value, not educated enough on the product, or they’re scared of making a mistake.
So, we put them into a new funnel, aimed at hitting those pain points. We’re already paying for our email service for our regular leads, so any additional email journeys aren’t costing us anything except the time used to create them.
Here’s some great emails that have worked wonders for us on re-engaging our recycle leads:
A direct email from our country manager. Plain text, with his real email signature, we use this strategy very rarely to prevent it from being gimicky. The trick with this one is not to over-engineer it, to make it authentic, personable, and very empathetic.
Product updates. When you do your first dump of recycle leads into the top of the funnel, some of them may have been sitting there for 12+ months. You need to keep your recycle leads up to date on product features, especially if there’s a big one you’ve been getting requests for!
Of course you can use lists of your closed lost leads to create custom audiences on paid social and re-target them, but then you’d be paying twice for the same leads.
If you have mobile phone numbers, do a text message campaign, the open rates are insane (almost 100%) and it’s relatively cheap to run one. Depening on your product you can also give out a free trial (or extended trial), a sample of a part of your product, or something else that is cost effective for you to give away but that still shows the value of the full product.
Got a deeper question about recycling leads?
Click clack front and back
Funnily enough, right after I planned writing this issue about recycling leads and funnels, Mark Ritson published an article about juggling long term and short term marketing funnels.
Zebra Public released a State of Gen Z report. It’s very B2C focused, but I did learn some emoji habits of the youngin’s.
Another report, this time from B&T about B2C v B2B marketing skills.
From the Habit, a music industry marketing newsletter, I found this cool guerilla marketing campaign (geez, remember those?) from a band called Private Function.
Coming up next week…
Another interview! This time with Assembly Payment’s Vanessa Samut. We’ll be chatting fintech marketing and being an all-rounder.