"Free" CTA's Contribute to Higher Disqualification Rate - Funnel Science

“Free” CTA’s Contribute to Higher Disqualification Rate

B2B Training Company Reduces Bad Quality Web & Phone Leads

One of the most important optimizations that can be performed for lead generation is a review of the contributing factors to bad quality leads. After reviewing the leads that have been disqualified, there was a large percentage that have a reason “only wants free information” in the SalesForce CRM. Taking a deeper dive into what was causing the leads to expect something for free, we reviewed the keywords, ads, and the landing pages.  What we found was the client was using a lot of “free” promotional calls to action (CTA’s) and was causing the prospects to expect free stuff from the sales reps.

The free quote made a lot of sense but the leads expecting a free trial, free chapter, or free assessment found out that the sales team had nothing to provide other than the quote.

Landing Page CTA’s examples that use “free”

“Free Trial”
“Free Chapter”
“Free Quote”
“Free Safety Assessment”

After running some estimates, this 1 update will take the company many hours to complete as it requires searching across all 1,000+ pages. But the value of it will be tremendous costs savings to reduce leads from people with an expectation of free. It should also allocate more budget and sales time to better quality leads and have an projected increase in sales by 5 to 10%. This update is not a 1+1 = 2 but probably more like 1+1=3x because it will impact budget, conversion rate, DQ rate.

We could not determine how many leads come in from the “free” message and convert to sales. We can only see that “free” messaging correlates to the disqualification so this needs to be a controlled a/b test to determine the overall impact to your organization.

To optimize the conversion rate, it is important to increase volume of conversions and also reduce the number of bad quality conversions. This can be executed by negative blocking the keyword “free” in you PPC campaigns, testing new ad copy and landing page messaging. It is a low risk, low cost optimization that has a big impact on sales! However if your comany is B2C and you are marketing towards consumers, you might want to consider using “free offers” in your marketing strategy to increase sales.

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