Five things I wouldn’t have guessed about lead conversion at the start of the year.

When I last wrote about online lead conversion in January, I was coming off what seemed like an incredibly steep learning curve.  At that point I expected a levelling off of my understanding, but if anything we’re discovering more new things and more often. Some of these are obviously just further nuance to a general idea, but others are things that I would not have imagined this time last year.  This then, is a run-down of some of the most important things that have come up since then and some of the ways we’re dealing with them.

Lead source plays a significant role in retention

As a dialogue fundraiser I always assumed that the influence of the lead source would be tiny compared to the influence of the other systems.  If you consider that you’ll convert around 6% of contacted leads (I’m talking about surveys here) to regular givers, you’d expect the quality to be driven by the conversation with them rather than the criteria of initial selection.  However we’ve seen that different lead sources have a significantly better, or worse retention rate.  When comparing across all our different phone suppliers we’re seeing a difference of up to 5% on second donation. That’s a substantial  amount and will make a noticable difference to ROI to even medium term ROI.

Still not eveyone is uploading data on a daily basis

The recency with which someone has taken an action, be it a survey response or a petition ask is directly relevant to how likely they are to convert. More than one fundraising phone room looking to take on live uploads in six months’ time it seems unlikely anyone will be looking at weekly uploads. .

Older data has value too

Although the biggest and easiest wins will come from the first week after someone has responded, that is not the time to throw the data in the bin.  I’ve seen some phone rooms have success with data that’s a month or two old when using it as “filler” and, assuming that you have a decent amount of volume, asking the donor via email or other inexpensive streams can produce some exciting results.

The market hasn’t finished growing

The market has matured over the last 12 months.  Penetration and conversion results have dipped marginally, but not enough to suggest the market is full. That may change with rumours that some charities with much the bigger budgets are planning on increasing their presence. However, for the moment there seems to be plenty of room for growth.

Face to Face agencies should be worried

With the Australian face-to-face market being short of quality volume (there are some great agencies, but overall quality is dropping), lead conversion is becoming a much greater part of the fundraising mix.  Not only are ROIs and donor retention significantly better but volumes much more consistent than face-to-face as well.  With F2F (anecdotally) trending in exactly the opposite direction on all those aspects you have to if anyone is going to be growing their F2F campaigns.

(There are of course F2F agencies who have moved into the lead conversion space incredibly successfully).

How are you finding online lead conversion?  What’s surprising you?