Lead Qualification Case Study: Infant Nutrition

An infant nutrition company engaged ActiveProspect to help it reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of a cost-per-lead advertising campaign targeting pregnant women.  While this was an opt-in campaign that required the explicit consent of the consumer, the company regularly received leads from partners that either never requested contact or didn’t fit the target criteria. These unqualified leads resulted in wasted media spend and a negative brand experience. The need to significantly reduce the number of bad leads was particularly acute because respondents received a gift package of product samples, which was costly to ship.

Requirements

The client had basic requirements for a qualified lead:

• Women of childbearing age.
• Respondents who proactively completed a web form requesting the gift pack.
• Leads that were not duplicates of ones already in the company’s customer database, or of leads received from partners.
• Respondents with verifiable contact information (email and postal address).

Additionally, they required:

• A simplified process for onboarding and integrating new partners.
• Better visibility and control over vendors of purchased leads.
• The ability to reject bad leads in real time so they would not have to pay the vendor for them.
• Real-time reporting for tracking and optimizing the campaign.
• The ability to independently verify that lead data collected was authentic.

Solution

• Processing of all partner site leads through ActiveProspect’s LeadConduit marketing automation middleware.
• Verification of lead source, lead authenticity, and legal compliance through ActiveProspect’s TrustedForm lead certification service.  This includes getting a real-time screenshot of the form as viewed by the consumer.
• Email address verification through best-in-breed service provider.
• Real-time confirmation email to verify the intent of the user. The email includes a screenshot of the web form the respondent filled out (collected by TrustedForm). Respondents who indicated they never filled out form were automatically rejected.
• Appending third-party lead qualification data. For example, data from which helps determine age/gender.

Results

• Reduced the cost of qualified leads by 32 percent.
• Filtered out more than 350,000 bad leads in first year.  These included: fraudulent submissions, bad email addresses, duplicates, leads that failed confirmation email verification, leads that didn’t fit target demographic, etc.
• Increased lead response time by implementing real-time processing.
• Dramatically reduced offer fulfillment costs by no longer sending
• gift packs to unqualified respondents.
• Helped identify best- and worst-performing lead sources for ongoing campaign optimization.
• Improved email deliverability by only adding clean, verified emails to company database.
• Improved targeting by appending demographic information through third-party data providers.