What is More Important Lead Age or Filter?

Purchasing aged leads is like any other marketing technique. It requires trial and testing. One of the biggest questions in determining your aged lead buying strategy is weighing the importance of age versus targeting. Aged leads inherently present you with an additional variable in your marketing equation–time.

Customer Targeting

Finding the “right” customer is always a challenge. It is the fundamental art of marketing. Good filtering or targeting, to match with your product and sales offerings, is critical to the success of your aged lead buying.

Aged leads can present you a unique opportunity to really evaluate and test your customer targeting. Real time or self-generated leads provide you little control of what shows up in your sales queue. In contrast, an aged lead buy gives you the opportunity to pull and try very specific customer target groups–even try different sales and marketing methods.

Evaluating Age

Unlike other marketing methods, aged leads introduce another variable–time. This can be challenging if you don’t carefully think about your sales objectives.

It might be natural to assume that the newer the leads the better they are. This is an assumption that can be very misleading–leaving opportunity on the table and costing you more money. Take for example, loan modification or even mortgage aged leads. There is definitely a secondary opportunity in older aged leads in the current market. Many of the mortgage leads that are 30-90 days old were not qualified for loan modifications or mortgage refinance when they first applied. However, with additional government programs and assistance entering the market in the last 30-90 days many (maybe even most) of these leads are now prime targets.

Getting the Right Mix

The bottom line is that you need to understand the additional variables in aged leads and leverage the opportunities they present. Getting a smart mix targeting and aged leads can maximize your conversion, while minimizing your lead costs.

Testing

The other opportunity with aged leads is the ability to test a lot of marketing theories and assumptions in a very controlled way. Set up very specific methods and objective to test lead performance. Then you can very effectively kill the bad and double-down your marketing dollars on the winners.

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