Digital marketing experts have long touted the undisputable advantages of qualified and warm leads over cold leads, but what do these terms refer to and how are they related to the effectiveness of your marketing actions?
Lead Generation Qualification Process
Before moving on to the key traits of each kind of lead, let’s focus for a moment on the lead generation qualification process itself.
In simple terms, it is the process of categorizing leads into different groups depending on their likelihood of purchasing from you. This process allows you to better target your marketing messages and highly personalize the content you provide your audience with.
Once you capture a significant number of leads using your cutting-edge landing page, you should try to segment your audience depending on their potential to make a purchase and tailor your marketing message for each group. If you still wonder, “how I can create a landing page for free,” you should make use of online landing page builders which offer free trials.
Cold Leads
Cold leads are those who haven’t had any previous experience or made any purchases with your business in the past and, at the moment, they don’t seem to be extremely interested in your offer.
They may have signed up for your newsletter as you offered a valuable lead magnet or they may have commented on your industry-related article you posted last week. This should be interpretted as only minimal interest in your offer.
You can try to promote further engagement by providing them with low-risk and low-commitment content that will help you determine whether they can become warm leads in the future. If you don’t get any positive feedback or signs of improved engagement from these additional efforts, you should just let them be and focus your efforts on different leads.
Warm Leads
On the other hand, warm leads are those who have shown interest in your products or services by commenting on your posts on a regular basis, following you on your social media channels, responding to your surveys, and asking about your offers, but do not seem interested in making a purchase soon.
With warm leads, you should primarily focus on a proper lead nurturing strategy in order to increase their trust and engagement with your business and make them qualified leads in the future. Warm leads have a lot of potential to become your prospects, but you need to give them sufficient time to make a decision without you pushing for sales.
Qualified Leads
Last but not least, qualified leads are obviously the best type of leads as they are the ones that are the closest to the purchasing stage of the sales funnel. They have engaged numerous times with your business, you know they are looking for something that you offer, and they are almost ready to finalize the transaction.
Marketing experts frequently mention adopting the BANT approach in order to determine whether a lead is a true prospect. BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. With this method, if a lead can afford your offer, can make a final decision, has a need for your solution, and they need it in a defined period of time (that suits you), you can classify them as a qualified lead and try to slightly push them for sales (a contact from a salesperson or an email with a final offer).
As you can see, the difference between cold, warm, and qualified leads stems from their willingness to become your customers. Once you assign all your leads to proper groups, you will be able to improve the effectiveness of your marketing actions and save both time and effort.
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