The Short Life of Online Sales Leads
In the next 10 years the eCommerce business is estimate to grow 5x the traditional brick and mortar market.
Companies in any industry – financial services, insurance, retail, telco, media or fashion just to name a few – are deeply investing in online activities and their Online advertising spending is growing steeply.
But are they catching the full potential of the online generated leads?
Harvard’s research shows many organisations are too slow to follow up on these sales opportunities.
“We audited 2,241 US companies, measuring how long each took to respond to a web-generated test lead. Although 37% responded to the lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours — and 23% of the companies never responded at all,” the report states.
The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.
“These results are especially shocking given how quickly online leads go cold — a phenomenon we explored in a separate study, which involved 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the US. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later — and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”
As an extension, imagine what will be the effectiveness of a real-time engagement, connecting with the lead while she is till browsing the site and being able to share web content with her providing all the answer needed to close the sales.
It’s time to get the most out of your eCommerce projects. Online Engagement
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