— December 4, 2010 —
You may have considered buying leads to help your iPhone, Android or iPad apps business? If so, we hope this post will help you.
Here we talk about the good and bad points of paid iPhone leads, and also share some statistics which you might find interesting.
A Bit Of Intel…
We have recently been doing some intel on our sales pipeline, with the aim of saving time spent on sales. In particular, we’ve been looking at the quality of the leeds we actually pay for.
In 2009 we were fortunate to establish a UK exclusivity deal with a top lead generator in the US. It is responsible for 40%-50% of our leads; we have up to 50 leads in the pipeline at any time. We pay around $25 per lead, and get 2-4 leads a week from this source.
Overall we receive sales enquiries from four main sources:
- Word of mouth
- Our Website
- A USA based lead generator
- Business networking events
In this post, we’re looking at how well the USA based lead generator works for us.
Quality Of Leads From Our Lead Generator
The leads we buy from the paid lead company bring us many brilliant ideas for iPhone and iPad apps, along with some not-so-inspiring ones. Its great fun, we get to communicate with so many differing types of individuals and business’s. We are also lucky enough to get to know some of them personally.
The trouble is, our intel shows that we lose a lot of time managing these leads. Despite our 8% conversion rate, we would still rather be in the pub than waste hours on unlikely leeds :) Check these figures out:
- 25% of the paid leads come back to us and then fade away.
- 9.5% of them dont say hello back to us at all.
- 10% have been found as digital agencies trying to peep through our window.
So thats 44.5% dead leads without us even really getting started or even receiving a brief. Put another way; it’s also 16 hours a month lost!
Apart from the two days spent each month on phantom leads, thats over 30 days lost in a year, and possibly over £3000 a year. Eek.
Of course its not all bad, there are many genuine reasons a project doesnt go ahead. And, we accept we’re not perfect for every potential client.
Over the last year we have really enjoyed building apps for our customers, and we only know of 3 potential customers who have walked away to our competitors.
Interestingly, only 1 of those potential customers actually has an app on the App Store.
Obviously, the successful leads are a major factor in us building the foundations of ERA up to a team of eight members in little over 12 months. Happy days.
The questions we’re looking really closely at are:
- Is time wasted really waste time? Or, is it all just part of the paid lead process?
- Should we chose to ignore certain enquiries? We hate that idea.
Answers on a postcard please…
