How to Create Lead Generation Offers That Work

by Alan Sarkissian / Audience of One

Do you just focus on the contact us form on your website to attract clients? Maybe you’ve tried sending out letters but received no results? With variable data printing, businesses can print lead generation material for an audience of one that can achieve outstanding results . . . learn how to produce effective lead generation programs that attract clients.

THE almost-reckless abandonment of printed communications in favour of online media in recent years seems to have created the perception that print and direct mail marketing are no longer effective forms of communication.  At the same time, after attending seminars and conferences on customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing, you have developed a passion for getting closer to customers.  Your approach appears sound, and the potential to create more profitable relationships promises a breakthrough.
The challenge now is to bridge the gap between the powerful philosophy of one-to-one customer relationships and the reality of resource constraints and operating commitments.
How do you practice relationship marketing, initiating dialogue and treating different people differently, to deliver results today?

Don’t wait for that special day.  As a small to medium sized business, you don’t need to wait to take advantage of the CRM process you’d like to get involved in now.  It’s easy to find ourselves being philosophical marketers — talking about what we have read and what we’re going to do, and have stuck to what we’ve always done – waiting for that moment when we can buy the right software to do all this.  We’re missing the benefits of the one-to-one concept.

Remember the ‘dialogue’ thing within relationship marketing?
If in your marketing activity, for instance, you ask your customers for feedback, they will give you the most important information for a relationship marketing needs-based solution.
Almost any point of customer contact represents an opportunity to solicit and use feedback in a meaningful way — especially during a lead generation process, which is the start of a business relationship and dialogue with prospects.

 Open dialogue and get results at the same time, the first time.
Variable data printing (VDP), or personalised print, while not as sexy as the Internet or telemarketing solutions per se, is garnering some impressive lead generation results for its adopters.
With VDP, the content of marketing communications material varies based on database information about the recipient. This technology has been available for more than a decade, as has the one-to-one concept. However, it is only in recent years that both technology and concept have developed into affordable, full-colour, offset-print-quality, direct mailed pieces.
Businesses are printing personalised and highly customised booklets, brochures and product sheets for an audience of one.

Going beyond “Dear Alan…”
“We use personalisation now”, you say.  Note that many marketers and businesses do ‘personalise’ — but what they call personalisation is a mere act of importing name and address details from a database into a form letter.  This does not constitute a one-to-one relationship marketing approach.
VDP is a valuable tool for treating different prospective customers differently, but there are a few bad practices inherent with lead generation that should be avoided.

Best Practices in Lead Generation
What’s on offer?  The two most common offers used to promote business-to-business are ‘Send for additional information’ or ‘Have a salesperson call’.  Why?  Most of us have a fear of being ‘sold’ by a salesperson and will avoid such meetings if possible.  As a lead generation effort is planned and implemented, there is little thought given to the offer that will be promoted.
Remember, at the root of one-to-one marketing is the prospect who you are communicating with — what’s in it for them?
Offers should communicate to the prospect (even though they may be a very senior manager) at the personal level, and not speak to them as if they are the owner or the managing director. What are the personal benefits the prospect will achieve if they respond?  And stop using the ‘saving of time and money’ argument as your basis.
‘Sending out additional information’ tends to involve the mailing of a features-specific brochure, after which the prospect is still sent a salesperson.

Leads are generated ad-hoc.  Many lead generation programs are executed to satisfy short-term requirements and are rarely planned in advance.   Analysis-paralysis.  We seem to lose sight of who is benefiting from lead generation and tend to focus internally, instead of on the prospects. In our pursuit for quality leads to satisfy our sales goals, we tend to write up telemarketing scripts and have inquiries ‘pre-qualified’ and ‘qualified’.   

Begin focusing on why the prospect should help you.  By definition, lead generation is a multi-step process where you attempt to get someone to respond and then attempt to sell them your products or services.  Quite frequently, we forget about the other steps involved and attempt to move the prospect directly to a buying decision.  Instead of trying to convince a prospect to buy or accept your proposition in the first step, begin to focus on what you can provide to respondents to help them determine if they need and can afford your solution.  In any direct marketing lead generation effort, you should be selling your offer, not products and brands.  Rather than asking a series of meaningless questions, tell your prospect what they will achieve by responding and allow them to understand the relative price of your solution in the process.

Step by step.  Successful lead generation efforts use a multi-step platform to bring a prospect closer to the buying decision before they are even considered a qualified lead, and before they are passed onto the sales person or department.  You can use several direct marketing steps to better qualify each prospect.   A respondent to multiple steps in a program has indicated a better understanding of the solution to their problem and a stronger and growing interest in moving forward.  This is an excellent one-to-one platform on which to base all future activities.

Remember that you sell the offer – not your product or company or brand.  It is very easy to sell a non-threatening fulfilment kit, for example, to create the lead.  This is a two-step program.  The first step is the generation of the initial response to fulfilment with an information kit.  The second step is the response from the kit.  Unfortunately, many of the fulfilment kits used to satisfy the requests for information are designed to describe product features and not to generate high-quality sales leads.  But those people who do respond to these kits are acutely interested and should be relatively high-quality leads. 

Case in point.
Great Plains Software created a two-step effort offering prospects The Accounting Systems Evaluation and Planning Guide.  The subsequent offer made in the guide was a free Business Systems Efficiency Audit. The company tested the initial planning guide offer using both a letter kit and a double postcard.  (I have found that the simple, easy-to-use double postcard will often outperform a more detailed letter kit).  If a recipient failed to respond to the initial mailing, Great Plains used a reminder to generate as much response as possible.  The kit is designed to explain the benefits of becoming a customer and to make another offer encouraging the prospect to respond again.  The second response becomes a qualified lead.   A significant effort should be devoted to creating the fulfilment kit, as it will be your primary offer in the initial promotion. It should offer a significant benefit to the prospect.