An established database is the key to expanding your business; it’s a funnel filled with insights about current and potential customers. That’s why every business’s concern is to have a rich lead generation database. For a database to truly be accessible and helpful, you must know how to collect qualified leads and how to maintain a clean and enriched database.
The definition of a lead
A lead is a person who shows interest in your company’s products and services. A cold-call conversation with a person about your products or services can turn them into a lead.
Even though leads are an important part of any business, it doesn’t mean that all leads are tangible, each lead (person) has its own category and depends on what interest stage they are on. Even a study showed that 91% of marketers find lead generation as their most important goal. Let’s take a look at the four main types of qualified leads:
- Marketing qualified lead. The types of leads that connect with your marketing teams but prefer not to receive sales calls.
- Sales qualified leads. These leads are the ones that show a proactive interest in buying your products or services.
- Product qualified leads. Such leads have used your product or service, have a good experience, and turn into paying customers.
- Service qualified lead. These are the leads that show a big interest in your business and are interested in new services, subscriptions, and upgrades.
Lead generation database process
Since generating qualified leads is important to maintain a business, it’s important that you use various promotional sources. While your marketing team might be top specialists at generating leads from one source, this still won’t get you as many prospects.
When lead generation is outsourced, it brings in 43% better
results than doing it in-house, added Digital Roo, a lead generation agency. Let’s discuss the channels you can use to generate leads.
- Content. As consumers are getting more careless, they won’t bother reading long texts, one of the only ways to catch their attention is to produce eye-catching content.
- Email. They are a great marketing source only for those consumers who are aware of your brand and possibly connected with it. Otherwise, a person who receives emails from an unknown band will report them as spam.
- Blog. The creation of a blog is perfect for promoting a particular product or service, it’s a way to open out about some new aspects, features, and cool elements, that users otherwise wouldn’t find out about.
- Social media. An organic marketing strategy will get your product mixed in with other feed posts, which is a great way to advertise a product or service without being so obvious. In fact, 66% of marketers use social media to generate leads.
- Referrals. Showcase your brand among people, and spread information from mouth to mouth; with this, you will open more opportunities to generate leads.
Tips to improve lead database quality
Mostly, the lead generation database is messy and full of holes. Within years of a business, collecting leads for their database they usually find it with multiple records, incomplete addresses, and limited segmentation.
All of these factors ultimately limit the possibilities and goals that you want to achieve. So here are some tips that will only take up a few hours of your time but will improve your databases and will enrich them.
Manage records
Marketers often hesitate to automate de-duplication, they rather seek duplicates themselves and then remove them because of a fear that automation will eliminate the wrong records. However, this is not the case, a professionally programmed automation can’t make any mistakes, whereas when marketers complete the process on their own, there is always the human factor of mistake.
Fix bad emails
Emails often fail to send because of typos, which could be a wrong letter, a come instead of a period, or extra spaces. Instead of losing communication with customers whose emails are messed up, it is better to take a few hours and look through the typos.
Review geographical data
It is bad enough having emails messed up and not contacting specific customers, but it’s even worse when you have typos in geographical data. Such typos can lead to missing a whole segment of customers rather than just a few specific ones who stated their email wrong.
Segment as much as possible
A well-organized lead database is one with many detailed segments; this can include segments by job function, job level, company size, and location. The more segments, the easier you will have it when choosing a marketing strategy.
Summary
Lead generation is the foundation of any business. Collecting new leads and prospects is important to expand your business, but your focus should also pivot around keeping lead databases clean and enriched with data. The combination of an excellent lead-sourcing strategy and a quality database is what runs the success of a business.
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