Lead Acquisition 101, or How Phonexa Solved the Lead Quality Dilemma

I know it, you know it: nobody is willing to pay for mismatched leads, turning any lead market into a delicate dance between affiliates and advertisers.

Lead acquisition marketing is simple, but also quite complex: as an affiliate, you’d like to sell as many leads as you can at the highest price; as an advertiser, you want to pay a reasonable, if not minimal, price for the leads that you think are going to convert into customers.

This is why software suites like Phonexa are at the core of lead acquisition. 

Phonexa removes all the noise so you can focus on the data that matters – demographics, psychographics, or firmographics. Stripping it down to bare fundamentals – whether the lead is worth the price – makes you a winner in the lead acquisition marketing game.

“Phonexa serves pretty much anyone in the customer acquisition space, whether that’s media buyers, affiliates, brands – anyone looking to grow their book of customers or generate customers for other product providers and track their marketing from an end-to-end perspective, all the way from the first impression – where this customer first sees your advertising – to the final destination of buying your product.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Unlocking Affiliate Sales with Call Leads, Email & SMS Marketing

Read on to learn how to get the purchase-ready leads that are worth the ask.

Want to kick things off right away? Get started by talking to Phonexa experts.

How to Step Up Your Lead Acquisition in 5 Steps

Step 1: Track Leads Through and Through to Collect Actionable Marketing Data

When it comes to lead acquisition, tracking is the key to success. Not only do you need to generate leads, but you must also ensure they match specific campaign requirements and are therefore worth the money and time you’re going to spend nurturing and converting them.

With Phonexa, you can unlock valuable insights into your lead acquisition campaigns, even before you’ve purchased leads or submitted them to an advertiser or affiliate network. The tracking capabilities we provide are unmatched, helping affiliates, advertisers, and affiliate networks stay ahead of the game: cost-effective, reliable, and constantly evolving.

Below are the details on how our core products, LMS Sync and Call Logic, solve lead acquisition and management.

LMS Sync to Track Lead Acquisition Campaigns

With LMS Sync, our core solution for web lead acquisition and generation campaigns, you can access an overarching set of metrics, including daily revenue, total number of leads in your system, earnings per lead, acceptance rate, and more, as well as lead-level metrics.

Here’s what the LMS Sync dashboard looks like:

You can customize the dashboard to display the most relevant metrics and delve deeper into publisher-level and lead-level performance to see how many leads were generated, accepted, rejected, and sold across traffic sources and time periods.

And if you’re an affiliate network, you can configure a ping tree as your lead distribution backbone. For example, you can prioritize certain advertisers when routing your leads and factor in other parameters, such as the immediate availability of a matching sales rep.

Here are the lead distribution flows supported by Phonexa:

Here’s what setting up a ping tree in LMS Sync looks like:

 

Call Logic to Track Call-Based Campaigns

 

More and more companies are now diversifying into call lead acquisition on top of web lead campaigns. At Phonexa, we’ve addressed this by developing the LMS Sync for phone call tracking and acquisition – Call Logic. The core product in the suite, Call Logic uncovers insights into the phone calls you buy, sell, or manage.

Much of what is available through LMS Sync is also available through Call Logic, with some additions. For example, Call Logic can track the average duration of calls for a specific campaign, as well as the number of calls terminated due to the caller hanging up, IVR errors, and IVR rejects, among other metrics.

Likewise, within Call Logic, you get access to a ping tree, IVR flows, and fraud prevention architecture to reject leads that don’t match your safety criteria. Ultimately, you get a comprehensive view of your call lead acquisition campaigns through the Lead Info report.

Step 2: Apply Real-Time Filtering to Inbound Leads and Phone Calls

One of the most critical decisions you make when acquiring leads is whether to accept or reject an offered lead in the first place. Even if you’re slightly off, your lead acquisition campaign won’t be optimal in both conversion and revenue.

With Phonexa, you can develop a well-thought-out lead qualification system that screens leads and phone calls in real-time against internal and external databases. Then, depending on the results of the screening, it accepts or rejects the lead or flags them for manual verification.

The software that handles lead verification within Phonexa is called iClear, and it can perform multiple types of checks in real-time or in parallel with the purchase of the lead.

• Real-time lead screening (synchronous check) pauses the lead acquisition process until the verification is complete, which is near-instant but may still slow down lead acquisition, especially in competitive markets.
• Parallel lead screening (asynchronous check) doesn’t pause the lead acquisition process, so you can purchase the lead without delay, albeit with a somewhat increased risk.

iClear allows you to verify the lead’s email address, IP, ID, background, and industry-specific data like their criminal history, history of bankruptcy, whether there are judgments, liens, or foreclosures associated with the lead, and more.

Depending on the features of your campaign, your risk tolerance, and budget, you can skip checks altogether (high risk), do basic checks (moderate risk), or do all relevant checks and look for convergence of the obtained risk parameters (lowest risk).

Lead Verification with iClear

Likewise, iClear issues an overarching score for subsets of parameters, like an email score or IP score. For example, an IP score considers the lead’s IP reputation, behavior patterns, and threat intelligence, including whether they are using a VPN, proxy server, or TOR network, whether their IP-derived location matches the location on a form, and other factors.

Read also: How To Decrease Bounce Rate on Long Lead Capture Forms

Example: You’re a solar installation company in New York. If so, you must ensure that all your leads are from the covered area, allowing your installation crew to reach the site for solar panel installation. In this case, address verification may be your first line of defense, which you can reinforce with IP verification to ensure the IP-derived location matches that indicated on the form.

Take a product tour to explore the synergy of LMS Sync, Call Logic, and six features within these two core solutions.

Step 3: Distribute Your Leads and Phone Calls to the Best-Matching Sales Rep or Business

Once the system accepts leads or phone calls, you need a well-thought-out distribution system to route them to the best-matching sales rep or advertiser while, if possible, continuing to collect marketing data so you can gradually zero in on your best audiences.

There might be several lead distribution scenarios based on whether you’re acquiring leads or phone calls for your company or reselling those for other companies. For example, if you’re buying phone calls, you use Phonexa’s IVR and AI Call Agents to engage and qualify callers.

If you’re an affiliate network, you can use a ping tree or a ping post lead distribution system:

• Ping tree lead distribution is essentially a cascade of buyers, from the most fitting to the least fitting buyer. First, the lead is offered to the best-fitting buyer – the one with the highest position in the ping tree. If rejected, the lead is offered to the second-best buyer, then the third-best buyer, and so on until the lead is sold or the minimum sale price is reached. If the lead isn’t sold, it is returned to the publisher, who can then lower the price and resubmit the lead.
• Ping post lead distribution is a competitive market where the lead is offered to several buyers simultaneously, who make their bids based on the lead details they received:  location, age, gender, etc. Once the bidding is complete, the winning buyer gets the remaining lead information, such as their name, email address, and phone number.

“With ping post, a lead is sent into the marketplace in the form of a ping, which means you’re using some level of customer data to ping data into your marketplace in one go, essentially giving all of your advertisers – buyers – the chance to review that customer and decide in real-time whether they want to acquire that customer. Ping post allows for dynamic bidding, enabling advertisers to bid against one another. In fact, you’re asynchronously pinging all the data to everyone in one go, essentially saying, “Hey, I have a customer. Do you want this customer? As for the ping tree, it’s more of a one-by-one routing logic where you’re applying some kind of filtration initially and ranking your list of advertisers or buyers by a priority of some sort, for example, by the price they’ prepared to pay, or you might have an advertiser you’re wanting to send 80% of your traffic or some other prioritization model. For example, you may want to split-test advertisers against each other to distribute calls between the two equally. A ping tree is typically used to have a distribution logic with a little more control than a ping post, with a little bit more deliberation around it.” – David Pickard, CEO at Phonexa, from Pioneering Pay-Per-Call Excellence

Step 4: Synergize Lead Data from Different Campaigns for Omnichannel Coverage

With customer journeys becoming ever more complex, it’s crucial not to lose leads when they switch channels and touchpoints. And it’s much simpler to do when you have an all-in-one system that consolidates all collected data, automates most marketing routines, and recognizes its limits, enabling human intervention when needed.

Phonexa might be your best bet if you need a system that takes care of everything without forcing you to juggle between reports and systems. For example, if you’ve identified that a lead is on the Do-Not-Call list, you may want to exclude them from your other marketing campaigns.

Step 5: Simulate Lead Acquisition Campaigns at No Risk with Predictive Modeling Software

With Phonexa, you can simulate campaigns before you run them in the real market. In practice, our predictive modeling algorithms forecast marketing outcomes based on the collected lead and call data. For example, you can identify the best times and locations to display your ads.

With our predictive modeling software, you can run hundreds of simulations with any pre-set of parameters, changing platforms, audiences, and timing until you’ve identified your most profitable campaigns. Then you bring the best strategies to life with much less risk.

 

Your All-in-One Lead Acquisition & Management Software Suite

At Phonexa, we’ve solved the number one performance marketing problem – the need to switch systems and reports to stay on top of things – by developing an all-in-one ecosystem of two core performance marketing solutions for leads and phone calls – LMS Sync and Call Logic.

 

But that’s not all – you get six more features on top:

Book a demo to discover how Phonexa can elevate your lead acquisition game.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between lead generation and customer acquisition?

Customer acquisition is a broader term that refers to generating, nurturing, and converting a lead. In contrast, lead generation focuses on obtaining the lead’s contact information so that you can reach out to them with your offer or marketing content. The cost per acquisition is always higher than the cost per lead.

What is the best lead acquisition strategy?

The best lead acquisition strategy is to analyze leads across relevant parameters – for example, location and phone number, if you’re providing local services like home improvement or solar installation – before purchasing them, and continuously refine your focus on your best audiences and traffic sources. 

This data-driven approach minimizes the risks associated with purchasing low-quality, irrelevant, or fraudulent leads, making your lead acquisition cost-effective and flexible.

Who offers scalable lead acquisition services?

With Phonexa’s all-in-one lead acquisition ecosystem, you can scale your lead acquisition almost infinitely while also tracking all inbound leads and phone calls at a granular level. Moreover, you can screen the offered leads before purchasing them, a safety layer you need as a large-scale buyer.