SOLVING THEPROBLEM OFINACTIVELEADS

INTRODUCTIONMany companies call them “inactive leads”. Some organizations call them “cold leads” and others call them “dormant leads”. Some even refer to them as “dead leads”. Regardless of what you call them - the challenges organizations face are the same when it comes to these prospective customers that accumulate in the section of your CRM where leads go to die.

But, how do you know which leads to try to re-engage, when? How can you determine if they are all even worth your resuscitation efforts?

IT’S A BIG PROBLEMAccording to Marketo, companies typically have as many as 25-50% of their prospects classified as inactive. If you have a large database of consumers you are marketing to, that can be an overwhelming number of inactive leads to manage. If you have no indication of where they are or are not in their shopping journey, you are wasting a lot of time and resources on consumers who may never convert into customers for your brand.

TIMING IS EVERYTHINGOne of the most crucial ingredients in a successful sale is timing. A consumer might be wholeheartedly interested in your product or service if the timing is right. But, we all live busy lives and there are never enough hours in the day. If you are messaging and calling that consumer at a time when purchasing your product or service is not at all on their radar, you are wasting time and resources that could have been spent on consumers who are actually in-market.

The challenge lies in knowing which of those consumers that you’ve not been able to reach may still be in market or have recently reentered a paused shopping journey. Additionally, when they are back in market, you want to know where they are in their decision journey, so you can revive your contact efforts and get back in front of high-intent consumers at the right time with the right message to increase conversions.

HISTORICAL METHODSThis challenge plagues most organizations and the most common way those organizations have handled it is with spray and pray methods.

• Leads that are not contacted after initial outreach attempts are moved to a “closed” status, and no additional contact attempts occur.

• The inactive leads are entered into nurture campaigns, with the same messages and offers being sent to the entire segment of inactive leads. After all, when they are contacts that haven’t engaged with your reps, how else can you determine ways to customize your messages to them?

• Many companies will have their sales development reps cold call these leads when they have no active leads to work on.

• Sometimes, the marketing team will put together a special, clever campaign to try to revitalize the leads.

Occasionally, you get lucky and one of these tactics hits some of the leads at the right time and they become active and finally start to move through your funnel. But, in some cases, the consumer may have changed their mind or wasn’t far enough along in their decision process to speak with you directly at the time you reached out.

But, what if some of those consumers rejoin their journey, or progress in their journey, and show signs that they are now ready to learn more about your offering? Wouldn’t you want to know which leads should be revived in your dialing queue?

THE SOLUTIONToday, there are technologies available that can provide you with an updated view of consumer behavior at points in time after initial lead submission. This means that even if a consumer pauses their shopping journey, you can identify when she becomes re-engaged, so you can be right there when she does.

Remember, timing is everything. When you have access to these insights, you can use them to time your outreach to consumers who haven’t responded before, increasing the likelihood that those consumers will now engage with you. When you reach out to a consumer at a time you know they are actively engaged, your chances of engagement are vastly increased.

Once you have identified a vendor who can provide these types of regularly-scheduled queries for behavioral data about your consumer’s shopping activity, you can monitor your inactive leads until you see indicators that they are actively researching, then reach out with the right message.

When one Jornaya client compared attempting to

contact a random sample of

previously inactive consumers in their lead funnel versus

contacting prospects who showed further

shopping activity, the client saw 2X the performance

from the re-engaged sample.

CONCLUSIONOnce you have identified previously inactive leads that are reengaged, you can then deploy a variety of tactics to re-engage them. You can invite them to a webcast or a demo, offer incentives, and reach out through new channels. What matters is you are focusing your efforts on consumers you know are actively shopping and maximizing your chances for conversion.

Jornaya is the consumer journey insight platform that provides marketers, data analysts, and compliance professionals with the highest-resolution view of the consumer buying journey. It is the only technology platform that witnesses both first- and third-party consumer interactions in real time and across devices. Meeting consumers at these moments of intent enables businesses to shorten the distance between data, decision, and action. Jornaya seamlessly integrates with any buyer journey decisioning process or toolkit.

Get started at www.jornaya.com | 267.460.7287

(c) 2016 Jornaya, Jornaya.com & Lead Intelligence, Inc. d/b/a Jornaya. All rights reserved.