Do you throw lost leads to the trash? Close 16% of them with this re-targeting strategy

No matter how great your lead generation process is, a majority of your leads always go to trash. Together with your cash, unfortunately…

An average lead conversion rate varies from 3% to 10%. Meaning – 97% of all the leads – bring no value in the end (but take your money and time to be generated).

But what if I tell you that it’s possible to close 16% of those lost leads from trash with little efforts – by ?recycling’ them?

Why lost leads might be of any value after some time?

Very few business decisions are made entirely and permanently. Customers’ habits, business conditions, needs are constantly changing. Once you’ve heard ?no’ from your leads – it’s not the end of the journey. Such leads aren’t lost yet (maybe for some time only).

There is another popular reason why companies fail to convert all the leads into sales – salespeople don’t work enough on them. And it’s not salespeople’s fault! (yes, yes, a marketer just said that!)Salespeople have to focus on highly probable deals – that’s the core principle of their effectiveness. But because of this, many other leads stay without their proper attention (=convincing power).

If you keep track of the leads you failed to convince once, later on you can return to them just when they are ready to make up their mind. To succeed – do it strategically. Here is how we do recycling/re-targeting strategy at RightHello:

Start tracking the leads (if you haven’t yet)

Only companies that keep tracking their leads’ status, contacts they make/receive, can convert leads effectively. And there should be a clear system and a tool for doing that (so no info gets lost and all the efforts are well coordinated).

If a company deals with not many leads (up to 100), excel spreadsheet can be perfectly enough for this purpose. If it operates on a bigger scale though(which is usually the case) – a CRM tool is ?must have’ to start recycling leads. We use Pipedrive CRM system for that.

Dig into your CRM and pick leads for ?recycling’

So what leads you should contact again and how to find them in your database. Here are few tips:

• Sort your contacts in the system by status.
• Pick those contacts who didn’t want to buy from you and didn’t come to you afterward.
• Exclude those leads who appeared to be not your target. Chances to convert such leads are close to zero.
• Check out if enough time (min 3 months) has passed from the moment you’ve been in contact with those contacts last tie. It’s not a good idea to annoy your lost leads more often. Besides, if you wait a bit, you get higher chances that due to some changed factors your leads will change their minds.
• Also check for how long salespeople were in contact with those leads. If they spent few months on converting them into sales with no success – do not recycle them.

Interested how you can use your CRM at its max capacity? Talk to our CRM gurus and learn all the pro’s tricks.

Find a reason to re-start a conversation

Lost leads are very easy to talk to again. You’ve been in contact with them, explained them the industry problems and the solution you have. Now you just need an occasion to re-start a conversation.

Try not to annoy people with repetitive messages, rather update your leads – let them know that you can give them more value this time. It can be:

• your new offer or even small improvements of your solution
• a new price-list or different payments schemes
• a special offer, sale, discount, bonus…
• better process that you’ve established
• your achievements (obtained quality certificates, recognition by
• case studies that you can brag about (perfect if your lost leads can feel connected to them – same industry, problem)
• etc.

Moreover, there might be changes on your lost leads’ side that can help you to convince them this time, like:

• now they have money to afford your solution
• now the need for your solution is stronger 
• the decision maker or the contact person has changed – a new person can be more willing to buy from you
• a company grew/expanded and now it makes sense to use your solution on a larger scale
• new target, new products, a company pivoted, etc. – all these changes can make your leads reconsider their need in your solution.

All you need to do is to match changes that happened on the client’s side with changes/improvement that happened in your business to create a mutually beneficial new offer.

Personalize the campaign

Use the fact you’ve been in touch with these lost leads before. These are not “cold” contacts whose attention and trust you have to deserve. You did all the hard work before. So refer to your previous conversations – use it as your benefit.

Learn what were the reasons why your lost leads didn’t want to buy from you – use this info in the campaign. Win over those reasons by adding new values accurately picked for your leads.

Make ?lead recycling’ your habit

To get max benefits from this retargeting strategy you should make it your habit. Do to that – implement the process and contact lost leads regularly. This way you’ll increase your sales rates with min efforts and resources spent.

Remember to monitor the leads’ behavior and adjust the strategy to it. If contacting them after 3 months since your last contact appears to be too soon – contact them less frequently. Ideally – remind about yourself when you have something new to tell/offer to those leads or when some changes happened on their side. So do research, monitor the situation on the market.

What results to expect?

I want to share some interesting data from re-targeted campaigns we did at RightHello.

At the chart below you can see the results from ordinary cold emailing campaign compared to re-targeted (recycled) one. Surprisingly, the re-targeted campaign is even slightly more successful than the ordinary one.

And here you can see results from two re-targeted campaigns. In one case the contact person was the same as before. In the other – we sent emails to a new contact person. The latter case showed significantly better results.

If you face difficulties with implementing this strategy, or with your lead generation in general – get in touch with our specialists who’ve been working with our clients on these matters and will gladly share our experience with you.