How to Pinpoint Your Hottest Leads

So, you say that you've mastered clickthroughs and open rates, but haven't yet moved on to using ListManager's more advanced business tools?

ListManager's Interest Tracking feature takes campaign metrics to the next level by allowing you to identify your hottest leads—the prospective customers who may be close to converting, but who haven't quite made the leap yet.

A Recent Lyris Campaign

To see Interest Tracking in action, let's take look at one of our own mailings. For the recent launch of our anti-spam product, MailShield Server 4.0, Lyris sent an announcement to the 1,600 members of our "MailShield Announce" list.

Before sending the announcement, we used ListManager to generate special HTML tags called Interest Tags, and inserted those tags into the code of several MailShield-related web pages on our site. For each of the MailShield-related web pages, we chose an Interest Points value, and an Interest Stage value.

Here were the values we assigned to each web page.

Web Page Name	Interest Stage	Interest Points
MSS Product Information	20	10
What's New in 4.0 Information	30	10
Technical Requirements	40	10
Ask a Technical Question	50	15
Ask a Sales Question	60	15
Download Page	70	25

As you can see, the more a web page was related to purchase of the product, the higher the value it received.

The Results

The delivery rate for the mailing was 93 percent, the open rate was about 45 percent and clickthrough was 6 percent. Beyond these basic statistics, our Interest Tracking stats were much more interesting-and actionable:

By tallying up how many Interest Points the recipients accumulated, this report showed us which list members were most interested in MailShield Server. Note that several contacts accrued a large number of points, indicating multiple visits to many pages.

The next report showed us which Interest Stage each list member reached—that is, his or her place within our sales cycle.

The Difference Between Points and Stage

Take another look at the graphs and, you'll notice that timh@example.com has accumulated the most Interest Points but only reached an Interest Stage of 40. This could indicate that he's just evaluating different email filtering solutions and may have simply visited the individual product pages.

Notice that sylvie@example.com, on the other hand, has reached a much higher Interest Stage. Her score indicates that she made it all the way to the product download page, and is therefore further along in our sales cycle. She may be closer to a point where she's ready to purchase the software.

Next Steps: Following-Up

In order to convert some of these interested prospects, we could take any number of next steps:

• Send a follow-up campaign to everyone who has accumulated a certain number of Interest Points or more
• Send a follow-up campaign to everyone who's reached a certain Interest Stage or higher
• Send a general announcement to our entire MailShield list, but use ListManager's Conditional Content function to insert a special offer for this "most interested" segment.
• NOT to contact those list members with whom we already have an ongoing dialogue

You could be using Interest Tracking in this manner as well, remembering—of course—that good ethics and a light touch are important when using personal information. Used wisely, Interest Tracking provides valuable insights about your customers, and assists in the crafting of highly relevant messages.

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