Over the last 8 years, I have coordinated working with 100’s of affiliates and publisher sites for the purpose of lead generation. My client was in higher education market and to be specific was a leading online MBA provider where had I dealt with almost all the publisher sites, job portal sites, education portals, affiliate sites from different parts of India and abroad. All gifted with me new learning experiences of which I would like to share some of them with you. This will help you have a generic idea on how to deal with the digital marketing vendors of the era.
Before signing a contract with them, we mutually agree on an insertion order where the expectations on the quality of leads and cost will be clearly mentioned.
Mostly, when I approached these kinds of vendors, they told me that I need to pay only for the good quality leads. This made me happy customer. But I realized later that this was another way of saying that they also produced bad quality leads out of punching. This made me think over why the good quality leads can’t be produced all the time.
I learnt the real fact behind the scenario. The truth is that, if these vendors had done a sincere email campaign to produce leads, it will result in good quality leads only. The bad ones will be negligible.The bad quality leads were generated out of punching or some other wrong practices.
How to measure the quality of a lead?
The lead will not be a duplicate or redundant entry of the database and will be unique in all aspects. A lead which responds to your promotion call is defined as a good quality lead. They will mention clearly if they are interested or not to take up your product/course. However, sometimes the phone numbers are wrong or they might ring but may not respond. These leads are called the bad quality leads.
To make it little clearer, you need to calculate the ROI (Return on Investment) of a publisher. If ROI is not met, the publisher is fake.
How to find the right publishers?
You should first keep in your mind to work only with the Direct Publishers. The peculiarity of the direct publishers is that they would be having their own publisher website with traffic from the targeted audience. They also maintain their own database. Due to the heavy traffic on the website, they get lumpsum fresh emails/ data every day. They would also possess proper email marketing platform through which they send emails of our product to their users.If the user is interested in our product, they will open up those emails which are in turn tracked by the email software and redirect to our own website. This will give a high conversion rate.
During the process of sending emails, please don’t allow the vendor to use their landing page. This is a precaution from your end to prevent selling of data to your competitors by the publisher. So always give your landing page so that data is collected at your end. Email creatives also need to be verified on your end before the publisher does a bulk email campaign of your product. Else the publisher will use email creatives as they wish to serve their own purposes.
If you are marketing your online courses through the publisher sites, make sure to add up job portal sites into your list. The job portal publishers will have a huge data set of working professionals which is a targeted pool of audience.
Fraud activities of the publishers
- Punching Data: The punched data will never end up in a conversion. The data should always be OTP verified to avoid punching.
What’s data punching?
I can explain this with reference to a higher education scenario. Sometimes the publisher or the affiliate site collects data from a school database or some other sources. These emails are passed on to us as the enquiries even without their knowledge. Until the enquiries are generated from the customer end, none of them would get converted.
Some agencies give punched data only.
- Some agency will have their own sim cards and make a fraud enquiry to our website during the email campaign. Later when we call, they will say they are not interested.It’s difficult to make out these issues from our end. In this scenario, OTP verification also fails. But DoptIT has developed a system to tackle this scenario also.
- Pre-filled campaign: Don’t work with pre-filled campaign models.In pre-filled campaign models, the user doesn’t even enter our website to make an enquiry. They don’t even see the product or the course. So, these generate leads of very bad quality.
- Mix of Good quality data and punched data: Some agencies give a mix of good quality email data and mix it with punched data. So, the data seems to be good in disguise.
Leads generated from the agencies, publishers and affiliates are of very low cost unlike the big fishes like Google, Yahoo etc. This is the most attracting feature of the agencies. So if you want to get good quality leads, you need to associate with a good publisher and has to be done with the help of an expert in the field.
