manyUP

Tips for Buying Debt Leads

Whether you're in the debt settlement, debt negotiation, or debt consolidation business, buying debt leads on the internet can be a difficult task.

Debt Leads are currently the fastest growing lead type in the finance vertical on manyUP. Unprecedented growth rates in consumer demand for the debt settlement family of products has led to an incredible demand for debt leads.

For those of you unfamiliar with debt leads, here is a quick summary:

Debt Leads
American consumers are flooded with hundreds of credit card offers every year.  Often the consumer "bites off more than they can chew," and the minimum payments become overwhelming. A number of services and products have been developed to help consumers who find themselves in this situation. The debt settlement product provides an agent who negotiates with the consumer's creditors to: reduce balances, reduce interest rates, forgive late payments, waive late fees, and more.

Debt Leads on manyUP

• Sold as Exclusive Leads
• Fields available include standard contact information, plus: Unsecured Debt Amount, Days Late (30 days late, 60 days late, etc.), Primary Creditors, Account Balances, and more.

Tips for Buying Debt Leads

• There is a "sweet spot" for debt amounts. Experiment with buying leads at different debt ranges. Many buyers are quick to go for the $50k+ leads, but these may not convert the best for you and may not provide the greatest ROI. Many lead buyers recommend trying leads with a stated debt amount of $15 - $25k.
• The same thing goes for how late the consumer is. Someone who is "about to be late" may not be as far along in the sales cycle as someone who is 30-60 days late. On the same note, someone who is 90-120 days late or more may be too far gone.
• It is important to look at the data points available to you (especially the two mentioned previously) and consider who the best prospect for your service is. You want someone who is not already in a financial situation where they cannot afford the debt settlement services. You also want someone who needs your services now, and is more likely to be a "one call close."

Lead Nurturing Best Practices by MarketingSherpa

As reported on Brian Carroll's B2B Lead Generation Blog, MarketingSherpa has released their Lead Nurturing Best Practices. Jon Miller from Marketo also wrote about this.

From Brian:

MarketingSherpa just published data on lead nurturing best practices based on a survey of 1,000 marketers. Sherpa's research focuses on the following nurturing best practices [..]

From MarketingSherpa:

Only a small percentage of the leads you generate are likely to be “sales-ready” – especially during tough economic times. So, nurturing prospects for conversion down the road is a critical process.

Lead Nurturing is a critical part of converting leads for products and services with longer sales cycles. MarketingSherpa's best practices focus on 3 things:

• Using multiple channels to follow up. (Email, phone, postal mail, etc.)
• Quick response to web leads. I couldn't agree more, and I just wrote about this in my Initial Contact Latency post.
• Use a lead scoring system. The idea here is to help you prioritize your leads and ascertain where they are in the sales cycle, how they should be contacted, and by whom. This is one of the tenets of manyUP.

Brian adds some insightful commentary, Jon linked to some great MarketingSherpa podcasts, and there are some stats worth checking out in the original MarketingSherpa article.

Initial Contact Latency

Initial Contact Latency has a dedicated section in a white paper I'm currently authoring about lead followup. It's a very important topic for anyone using direct response (especially internet-generated) leads.

Initial Contact Latency, or ICL, refers to the amount of time that occurs between indication (a prospect indicating intent/interest, by submitting a lead capture form for example) and that prospect being contacted for the first time.

The full results of the study will be included in the white paper, but I've included some interesting facts and findings here to pique your interest:

• The difference between contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes results in your contact ratio declining 100 times. This means if a lead originally had a 20% chance of being contacted (or 1 in 5), it now has a 0.2% chance (or 1:500.)
• After 20 hours have lapsed since indication (see above for definition), every telephone call that an agent makes to the prospect, more often than not, harms your chances of eventual conversion.
• While observing the latency rule, the best day for contacting leads is Thursday. The worst is Tuesday. Contact rates on Thursday over Tuesday are a 49.7% improvement.
• The best time for contacting leads is 4 to 5 p.m. This is a 114% improvement over 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., and a 288% improvement over 7 to 8 a.m.

Follow this link to the manyUP White Papers page and sign up for free access to all of our white papers, you'll receive a link by email when this white paper is released.

The sources for the whitepaper (and for the facts presented here) come from aggregate manyUP data, research done by educational institutions, and other studies. References are available in the white paper.

Leaps and Bounds

It's somewhat difficult to convey the progress we've made over such a short period of time, and while "leaps and bounds" is typically an impressive indicator, the team really has gone well beyond just leaps and bounds.

It's a very exciting time for us - check out our new website - manyUP!

More big announcements and details soon...

manyUP Gets a Blog

It's true!

manyUP Covered by Popular LeadCritic Blog

I was interviewed by LeadCritic yesterday and we talked about manyUP and its' potential in the industry.

One area where companies typically miss the boat is in the area of cross selling there leads. In today’s market we see a number of mortgage companies taking on debt settlement, financial services and of course investment real estate and successfully are able to cross sell a lead into these different verticals if they can or cannot fill the consumers mortgage needs. What ManyUP provides is a network to refer and cross sell leads into other verticals without specifically going into the vertical itself.

I'd like to thank LeadCritic for the opportunity, and for sharing his insights and opinions.