The phrases “lead generation” and “lead acquisition” are two closely related terms with different meanings that are often conflated. While they both fall under the “customer acquisition” category, each refers to different parts of the customer acquisition process. 

Because it is common for these terms to be used interchangeably, and I’ve never read an article differentiating the two, I’ll explain the differences here. After all, understanding the difference is critical to building a scalable, efficient marketing funnel. 

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting potential customers and encouraging them to share their contact information, typically through a web form (since the term “lead” is used in many ways, I’ll limit the scope of this article to digital marketing and define a lead as a consumer who has filled out a web form requesting to be contacted about goods or services). In some B2B contexts, this can be complemented by prospecting tools such as a Linkedin email finder that help identify accurate contact details for outreach.

It begins with media buying (such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or native advertising), supported by content creation and landing page optimization. Alongside these methods, many B2B companies actively scrape Google for leads by extracting public data from sources like Google Maps to build highly targeted prospecting lists. For example, if you buy search traffic on Google with the goal of convincing those site visitors to submit a form on your site, you are generating leads. 

Similarly, buying pre-qualified leads for a specific vertical, like real estate or insurance, falls under the broader lead generation umbrella, even if you’re not generating them directly.

This process involves targeting the right audience, driving traffic, and converting that traffic into leads. It’s a specialized function requiring roles like media buyers, affiliate managers, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts who fine-tune every element to increase form submissions and reduce cost per lead.

A lead can also be a consumer requesting contact by a salesperson, an email newsletter subscriber, or someone downloading marketing content in exchange for their contact information. These are also known as internet leads or web leads.

In this modern context, where platforms like TikTok and chatbot for TikTok play a significant role in digital marketing strategies, understanding how to effectively get TikTok followers can also be seen as a form of lead generation, encouraging users to engage more deeply with your brand. 

To qualify creator partnerships on TikTok, marketers can use a free TikTok engagement rate tool to check influencer performance, assess authentic interactions, and predict potential lead quality before investing in sponsored content or whitelisting campaigns.

This adds a new dimension to the lead generation process, reflecting the evolving nature of customer interaction in the digital age.

For nonprofit organizations, Google Ad Grants offer a powerful lead generation channel, providing up to $10,000 monthly in free Google Ads credit.

However, maximizing this opportunity requires navigating strict compliance requirements and performance standards. Digital Tabby specializes in helping nonprofits optimize their grant campaigns to generate high-quality leads while maintaining program compliance.

What is lead acquisition?

Lead acquisition is about what happens after a lead is generated on a form. It covers the process of capturing, filtering, enhancing and delivering leads to your various systems. This includes, but isn’t limited to, the practice of purchasing leads from third-party lead vendors. 

For example, if you buy a mortgage lead from LendingTree, you acquire the lead. LendingTree is the company that generated the lead. The goal is to make sure the highest quality leads from any source make it into the appropriate conversion process, while blocking those that don’t meet your criteria.

Digivate for conversion rate optimization focuses on refining that process, ensuring that once leads enter the funnel, they’re guided through a seamless experience that maximizes the likelihood of conversion.

Think of a lead acquisition strategy as the infrastructure that only allows the right leads into your funnel.

How to build a lead acquisition strategy

Creating a solid lead acquisition strategy means building the processes and systems to help ensure every lead you acquire is usable, compliant, and routed efficiently. Done right, it can also amplify your lead generation by improving conversion readiness from the very first touchpoint. Here’s how to do it:

1. Map your lead sources: Identify where leads are coming from: paid channels, organic traffic, referral partners, or vendors.
2. Implement real-time validation: Use tools to confirm contact info, detect duplicates, and block junk leads the moment they enter your funnel.
3. Score and prioritize leads: Apply lead scoring models to prioritize leads most likely to convert. Use custom rules based on demographics, behaviors, or fit.
4. Maintain compliance: Track consent to stay compliant with regulations like TCPA. Use proof-of-consent tools to protect your brand.
5. Route intelligently: Send leads to the right destination in real time, whether that’s a cloud-based CRM system, call center, or email platform, based on rules you define.
6. Measure and optimize: Monitor source performance, lead quality, and downstream outcomes to fine-tune your acquisition efforts.

To further clarify the difference between these two areas, let’s look at some key differences:

Lead generation vs. lead acquisition

Understanding lead generation vs. lead acquisition requires examining their distinct roles in the marketing stack.

Lead generation

• Primary goal: Attracting potential customers and converting site visitors into leads
• Key activities: Media buying, landing page optimization, SEO, AI content marketing
• Lead source: Typically refers to the media channel (traffic source) that generated the lead (attribution is a big challenge as it’s not always clear which source drove the lead).
• Conversion rate: % of visitors who become leads
• Tech stack: Ad platforms, analytics, website CMS, form builders
• Example metrics: Click-through rate (CTR), form fills

Lead acquisition

• Primary goal: Filter, enhance, and deliver leads to internal systems
• Key activities: Lead validation, scoring, routing, consent verification
• Lead source: Usually either the flipbook/website/ landing page where the lead was captured, or the lead vendor that provided it. I prefer to distinguish these two by differentiating between traffic source and lead source.
• Conversion rate: % of leads who become customers
• Tech stack: Lead management software, API integrations, verification tools
• Example metrics: Lead quality score, acceptance rate, compliance status

In short, lead generation is about getting people to raise their hands, while lead acquisition is about making sure those hands are worth shaking.

How TrustedForm and LeadConduit power lead generation and lead acquisition

ActiveProspect offers two powerful tools that enhance both lead generation and lead acquisition:

TrustedForm

TrustedForm helps document and verify consent for TCPA compliance while providing transparency into the consumer experience, origination, and authenticity of leads. TrustedForm is an essential tool for lead generation and lead acquisition. 

With TrustedForm, lead generators can protect their brand, reduce legal risk, and provide a competitive edge when working with lead buyers or downstream partners. For those acquiring leads, TrustedForm lets you reject non-compliant leads and mitigates TCPA risk when buying leads from third-party sources.

LeadConduit

Our LeadConduit platform is an example of lead acquisition software and acts as the central nervous system of any successful lead acquisition operation. 

LeadConduit integrates with various other services involved in the lead acquisition process, like: lead verification/validation, lead scoring, data append services, and lead certification (to verify and document proof of consent for TCPA/CASL compliance). 

It also enables data enrichment to provide deeper context on each lead, improving qualification and routing.

Final thoughts

Understanding the difference between lead generation and lead acquisition remains vital to assembling the appropriate marketing stack for your entire customer acquisition process. Using technology designed specifically to handle each step of the process enables marketers to easily iterate and optimize existing and future campaigns.

By clearly defining and optimizing each phase and leveraging tools like TrustedForm and LeadConduit, you can build a comprehensive, high-performance strategy.

Optimize your lead generation/acquisition efforts today.

The post Lead generation vs. lead acquisition: What is the difference? appeared first on ActiveProspect.

As companies evolve, naturally the products and systems they use evolve too. Over the years, we have seen a number of clients switch contact systems to better fit their current needs. Unfortunately, migrating and deploying a new system can often be extremely slow and costly. These migrations can take months (and sometimes years) to complete! While we will focus this discussion on CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) software, it also applies to Marketing Automation, Call Center/Dialer solutions, and Email platforms.

Switching systems is a notoriously slow and painful process because as companies grow and expand, so do the number of services and tools they use to power their business. CRMs are particularly tricky because they are often an end-point or delivery for dozens of integrations as well as the primary storage of customer and prospect data. Down time is often unacceptable for large businesses that operate globally, across time zones, which can make switching a CRM feel like replacing the engine of a running vehicle.

To further complicate matters, companies often collect leads from many places that feed directly into their CRM. This adds additional layers of complexity and frustration to the process of migration. Each integration point must be rebuilt for the new CRM. More importantly there is a coordination issue – at what time do you cut over from the old system to the new system? This complexity grows exponentially with the number of lead sources (integration points). The greater the number of lead sources, the harder it is to coordinate a switch. Many companies receive leads from third party partners (aka lead vendors) who must make the change on their side and may not be able to adhere to your desired schedule.  

For LeadConduit clients this process is quick and painless. When your  various lead sources (lead forms, Facebook Lead Ads, and third-party lead vendors) post to LeadConduit, there is no heavy lifting. LeadConduit can simply redirect all of the leads to the new system of choice in real time. With LeadConduit, switching CRMs involves changing only a single integration, as opposed to every integration. This allows administrators to focus on the migration of existing data and not worry about the new leads that are constantly flowing in, removing much of the complexity from the process.

We’ve assisted many clients with this process. We just need to know the new destination for leads and when to make the switch. We take care of the rest. A few recent examples of migrations between systems we’ve handled for our clients:

• MS Dynamics to Velocify
• Home-grown CRM to Salesforce
• Eloqua to Hubspot
• Siebel to Marketo
• Vici Dialer to Five9

Note: This is not a product endorsement for any of these systems and we are not insinuating that any of these systems is better than the other. These are simply examples of work for individual clients.

If you have an integration that looks like it might be a pain or are interested in LeadConduit as a lead acquisition platform, don’t hesitate to contact us.

The post Switching CRMs shouldn’t be a headache appeared first on ActiveProspect.

It’s a common story for performance marketers: You arranged to purchase opt-in leads from a marketing partner on a cost-per-lead basis. You found and vetted the partner. You negotiated the contract and lead pricing. They integrated with your lead management system. Everything looks great, so you go live.

But instead of being the hero who drives tons of revenue for the company, the campaign fails to produce the desired results. What went wrong? 

Let’s start from the beginning with cost-per-lead purchasing and explore what cost-per-lead is, how you can assess your campaign strategies, and how ActiveProspect can help optimize your approach with LeadConduit.

Why Didn’t My Cost-Per-Lead Campaign Work?

Cost-per-lead campaigns sometimes have issues that can cause them to fail. We have detected the most problematic areas and would like to share helpful insightful tips to help decrease your cost-per-lead and cost-per-qualified-lead:

1. You had no idea what type of lead you were buying.

Did you investigate your leads? Ask yourself these quick questions every time you acquire leads:

• Did these leads really opt-in for your product or service?
• Was it an exclusive lead?

Often buyers don’t take the time to verify what they are buying. Remember: all leads are not created equally, and it is critical to identify the type of leads you are buying for your cost-per-lead campaign.

2. You bought all the leads that were sent to you  (in other words, incentives were misaligned)

Lead sellers still get paid whether the lead meets your criteria or not. If you’re buying leads from a third party, your incentives must be aligned with your provider’s; otherwise, you will purchase leads that do not meet your criteria, thus escalating your cost-per-qualified-lead. 

Ideally, you align incentives so that you only pay for the leads that meet your criteria. Many lead vendors allow for real-time rejects so that you don’t have to pay for unwanted (a.k.a. bad) leads.

Bad leads usually include the following:

• Fake or incorrect contact information
• Recent duplicates
• Leads submitted by bots
• Lack of compliance (Understand compliance further specifically as it pertains to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) here.)

You should be able to reject the leads that don’t meet your criteria in real-time, and you should have a lead return process for bad leads that make it through your real-time screening process. Align your incentives with your seller to only pay for the leads you want and pay nothing for the leads you don’t want. 

With ActiveProspect’s LeadConduit, you can manage your leads in real-time by rejecting the bad ones with enhanced data qualifications and directly send them to your CRM.

3. You didn’t track performance by source and optimize accordingly.

More than likely, you’re buying leads from multiple sources. Just as every lead is not created equally, the same goes for your third-party sources. Even if you are only working with one lead vendor, each vendor typically uses multiple lead sources.

You need to use consistent and reliable source identifiers (such as the site domain where the lead was generated) so you can track performance. The bottom line: know which sources are sending the best quality leads at any given time so you know which sources allow for purchase optimization.

4. You didn’t follow up immediately.

No matter where someone opts in for your offer, they should get a real-time confirmation email and, if applicable, a follow-up phone call or text. Don’t waste money on a cost-per-lead campaign by not having a plan to follow-up.

It may be necessary to work with sales and create a service level agreement (SLA) regarding how quickly sales should be following up with the leads from the campaigns you run. This way, both marketing and sales remain aligned throughout the process. Oftentimes lead buyers blame their vendors when the leads don’t convert when the real reason was a lack of timely follow-up by the buyer.

5. Your follow-up sales/marketing process to convert the leads was flawed.  

Perhaps your process wasn’t appropriate for the type of leads you were buying. For example, does your sales process match the offer you promised the consumer in the ad? It is imperative to make sure you coordinate your campaign plans with the sales team, especially with regulations concerning TCPA that dictate clear and concise language about what the consumer is agreeing to. You do not want to be in a situation where sales calls are made when there is no prior consent or agreement to receive a call from the consumer.

Furthermore, if you buy a lead that you cannot contact during this privacy centric time this will cause you unexpected lost revenue. Utilize ActivePropsect’s ROI calculator to understand the impact on your bottom line in the event of department miscommunication. 

By coordinating with the sales team, goals are aligned, compliance is further ensured, processes are streamlined, and leads are converted to customers. Always double check your steps with ActivePropsect’s TCPA Compliance Checklist.

Take Action on Your Leads

As a company that processes millions of leads per month for major buyers of internet leads across many industries, ActiveProspect possesses insight into what drives a successful campaign. 

Our LeadConduit product is a real-time lead optimization platform that empowers you to take action on your leads by customizing lead flow, enhancing leads with additional data, filtering and rejecting leads, and delivering it all straight to your CRM. LeadConduit supports over 100 pre-built unique integrations, including lead sources, data enhancements, and recipient systems, such as CRMs and autodialers. 

Additionally, LeadConduit has an Open API, so you can customize it as much as you’d like. LeadConduit helps guarantee that every lead is a qualified lead and keeps your cost-per-lead as low as possible.

By effectively lowering your cost-per-lead, you can boost the ROI of your marketing activities while continuing to acquire new, high-quality leads for your sales team to convert.

We’re ready to help! Read this resource to learn more about LeadConduit and how to decrease cost-per-lead and increase your marketing ROI.

Schedule a demo today!

The post 5 Reasons Your Cost-Per-Lead Campaign Didn’t Work appeared first on ActiveProspect.

This content was originally published by Suncast Media and can be found here. 

The post Podcast: Suncast on Customer Acquisition from Online Lead Generation appeared first on ActiveProspect.

At ActiveProspect we process millions of leads per month for all types of customers. We split B2C leads into two main categories- marketing leads and sales leads. Before explaining the difference between marketing leads and sales leads, let’s start by defining a lead. A lead is someone that has proactively expressed interest in your product or service by taking an action such as filling out a web form. Marketing leads are used for ongoing marketing campaigns, and sales leads are sent directly into an outbound sales process. 

At ActiveProspect, we collect both marketing leads and sales leads on our website. Below are examples. We use different lead flows in LeadConduit for our marketing leads versus our sales leads. Note we also give visitors the option to call or chat on the site. 

Marketing Lead Form:

Sales Lead Form:

There are lots of articles about marketing qualified leads (MQLs) versus sales qualified leads (SQLs). Those terms are about the stages of a lead primarily in the context of a B2B sales process. While there might be some overlap, this is a different discussion.

Marketing Leads

Marketing leads have expressed an interest in learning more but aren’t necessarily ready to buy. In fact, many companies acquire opt-in marketing leads that don’t even have a sales team.  A marketing lead could be a subscriber to your email newsletter or your SMS list. An E-Commerce company might acquire marketing leads in the form of email subscribers with the goal that they will eventually make a purchase on the site. A Consumer Packaged Goods company might use marketing leads for a loyalty program to distribute special offers or samples to their customer base.Many brands now use delivery management software and include QR codes on packaging or promotional inserts to drive engagement. Marketers can track QR codes with Uniqode to monitor user interactions and measure campaign performance.

Their marketing database provides a means to build and maintain a relationship with their customers – even though purchases are made through retailers/distributors. 

Marketing leads are typically comprised of only a few data fields (name & email/mobile number) and are cheaper to acquire than sales leads. A marketing lead might be generated via Facebook Lead Ads or a CPL ad placement on a registration path. A marketing lead might eventually turn into a sales lead, but that is not necessarily the goal.

Sales Leads

Sales leads are meant to be contacted directly by a salesperson. They are leads that have requested contact by submitting your “Talk to Sales” form on your website or completing a quote request on a comparison site.

For example, when a mortgage lender buys a lead from LendingTree.com, that is a sales lead. That consumer has filled out a form to get mortgage quotes from multiple mortgage lenders. They are in the market to purchase your product now. Sales leads are typically comprised of more data fields (name, email, phone and address) and are more expensive to acquire than marketing leads. 

While it is important to respond to all leads quickly, when dealing with sales leads every second counts. Companies that buy shared leads from comparison sites often try to call the consumer within seconds of form submission.

Even if your company doesn’t collect sales leads, lead acquisition should be part of your marketing mix. At a minimum, every company needs marketing leads to fuel their ongoing marketing efforts.

Editor’s Note: This article is based on a post originally published February 7, 2018 and has been updated by the author.

The post Marketing Leads versus Sales Leads for B2C appeared first on ActiveProspect.

I just read the following blog post by Vince Cersosimo, CEO of Webbula, titled “Reliable Email Verification May Be Gone Forever”. This type of straight talk seems to be increasingly rare in the marketing industry so I applaud Vince for educating us about this issue. Like Webbula, ActiveProspect stands for transparency, and being transparent to earn trust is a topic I have written about in the past.

As Vince details in his blog, Yahoo, Verizon, and AOL emails are now returning “unknown” or “Accept-All” for email bounce checks. This is an issue that will impact all email verification services. This is an important issue at ActiveProspect because many of our clients rely on email verification services as part of their lead acquisition process. We enable our clients to use a variety of best-of-breed providers, such as Webbula, in their lead flows.

Thanks to Vince for keeping us informed about this issue. It will be interesting to see how things evolve. It appears that more advanced methods of verifying email quality will need to be utilized. Services like Webbula’s mult-method email hygiene service become more important with this news. That service is available in LeadConduit as a marketplace integration, which means you can try it on a usage basis with no minimums directly in the app.

The post The end of reliable email verification? appeared first on ActiveProspect.

We are passing on some new research that was shared with us by our friend Chuck Davis of Webbula. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Webbula, they provide email verification and hygiene services.  We offer their services directly in LeadConduit as marketplace integrations. This means you can add them in seconds through our point and click lead flow editor. There are no minimums and you pay for usage directly through your ActiveProspect account. Give it a try!

The research was just published by The Relevancy Group and sponsored by Webbula.  It explores the value and power of email verification and multi-method hygiene. You can download the report for free.

Key Questions:

• What is the state of email deliverability?
• What are marketers doing to improve the quality of the email marketing lists?
• What framework should marketers use for maintaining clean customer data?
• How confident are marketers in the ability for email hygiene and verification to have an impact on business results?
• Are marketers that are embracing the power of verification and multi-method email hygiene experiencing net improvement in business results?

Key Takeaways:

• Email delivery rates have been trending downward over the past three years, and as of the second half of 2018 had dropped to 87 percent.
• When asked about the verification and hygiene methods that marketers were using we found that most are not doing enough.  
• Real-time email verification is a necessary tactic to ensure that email addresses are valid, but it is an incomplete defense. To improve deliverability and suppress against multiple threats, marketers need to adopt verification and multi-method email hygiene.
• When asked, 53 percent of marketers stated they were very confident in the ability for verification and hygiene solutions to positively impact deliverability and revenue.
• The Relevancy Group survey data suggests that those that are using verification and multiple methods of email hygiene outperform those that do not. Based on actual performance metrics, the mean annual budget for email verification and hygiene is ROI positive and necessary for advancing revenue.
• Verification and multiple method email hygiene equate to approximately $2 million additional dollars in monthly revenue. Hygiene is not a cost, it is a profit center.

The post Research: Email verification and multi-method hygiene appeared first on ActiveProspect.

Imagine grabbing a can of Coca-Cola from a vending machine. You hear the familiar sound of the aluminum plunk through the machine, as your hand reaches instinctively for the cold can. Something is off, though. The can is navy blue. Oh, and they changed their logo font. It’s Helvetica. What does this mean? Did they change their recipe too? Did someone buy them out? Is this even real Coca-Cola? You’re probably a little scared to drink it now.

Chances are your company isn’t as large as Coca-Cola, but that doesn’t mean branding shouldn’t be just as important to you. A brand is more than what people see; it’s how it makes them feel. Consistency builds trust which is the foundation of loyalty.

What does branding mean and what does it encompass?

Branding is not just your company’s logo and color palette, although both are critical. As a designer, there’s nothing worse than seeing your logo design stretched out, pixelated, or used with the wrong color, branding is much broader than those two elements.

Effective branding includes:

• Messaging and copywriting – your brand’s voice
• Fonts and type styles (headlines, body copy, quotes and call-outs, etc.)
• Colors
• Patterns, textures, photography and graphic design styles
• The rules (templates for spacing, white space, the basics)

The importance of brand consistency

Consistency is the key to a successful brand. Whether you’re an enterprise or startup, have 100 designers or a team of one, brand new or have been around for decades, this affects you. We know creating an intriguing, interesting, and creative brand appearance around tech can be challenging. As Paul Rand once said, “Don’t try to be original; just try to be good.” Here are some examples of brands who are doing it right:

The common element these brands share is their steady appearance across all platforms – their website, social media platforms, emails, apps, trade shows, swag, and even physical products created through print on demand services. They have brand standards and they stick to them 100%. The same principle applies to promotional strategies like offering a gift with choice, when executed consistently within brand guidelines, it reinforces trust instead of creating confusion.

The negative impact of inconsistencies

In the article The Psychological Reason Why Brand Consistency Is So Important, the author states, “having inconsistent visuals makes the process of nurturing trust and becoming remembered a nightmare — you’ll be introducing yourself to them for the first time every single time.”

Recently, Skype went through a rebrand and didn’t dot all their i’s or cross all their t’s. In the above example, you can clearly see four different versions of their logo used simultaneously on four different platforms: their website, online platform, app and “official logo”. The greatest negative impact of inconsistent brand usage is the creation of confusion in the market. This also plainly proves this issue isn’t limited to start-ups or small design teams – it happens across the board.

“The average revenue increase attributed to always presenting the brand consistently is 23%”

So, what’s the real reason you should care? Inconsistencies are costing your company time and money. According to latest Brand Consistency Benchmark report, “The average revenue increase attributed to always presenting the brand consistently is 23%”. The impact affects the communication with existing customers, the ability to quickly close sales or generate and nurture leads, as well as internal communications with employees. Conflicting brand usage accounts for a 56% damage to brand credibility, making it nearly 30% harder to compete in the market.

In a nutshell, designing, developing, and maintaining a brand is certainly a daunting task and public awareness is a process. We at ActiveProspect continually strive every day to be better. Did we miss anything? Reach out and let us know!

The post Branding inconsistency is costing you a pretty penny appeared first on ActiveProspect.

This article was originally published by Tenfold and can be read in its entirety here.

As digital engagement continues to grow, companies are turning to avenues like social selling, and the next “big thing” that will launch them into the monetary stratosphere. While it’s always proactive to be on the lookout for new technologies and strategies that can increase the productivity and success of your business, it’s equally important to stay committed to practices that are still working; namely, email marketing.

The practice began in 1978, “when Gary Thurek, a marketing manager for the now defunct computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, sent out an unsolicited mass email promoting his firm’s computer products.” While Thurek was ultimately scolded for his unauthorized email outreach, it’s hard to argue against his efforts.

As a direct result of his mass email, DEC “sold $13 million or $14 million worth” of their products. Of course, what Thurek really did was create the first spam email; although it was certainly the beginning of what we now affectionately call email marketing.

Since that time, email marketing has become more advanced, and less intrusive. Rather than collect a random sampling of contact information and fire away, companies now target specific users who have already shown an interest in their product, been flagged due to their browsing patterns, or who at the very least have visited their website. Incidentally, this is where the email marketing journey begins; collecting the right data. 

In today’s age, it’s impossible to conduct a successful email marketing campaign without a populated list of users. The best (and most moral) way to accomplish this is to build a permission-based list.

“Permission-based email marketing software is used effectively everyday by hundreds of thousands of organizations to build their brands, increase sales, and strengthen relationships with their client and members. Permission-based email marketing is sending messages to people who have asked to receive them.”

Lists like this can be built by offering something to individuals. Exclusive access to sales, marketing, or technical advice; a download code to an eBook; or invitations to “members only” events. If your business offers a service, you can also offer free-demos in order to attract interested users.

There are other ways to acquire a populated email marketing list; namely through purchasing them. While you can go about email marketing this way, it’s important to note that it’s always a terrible idea to do so.

For starters, a number of “reputable email marketing vendors don’t let you send emails to lists you’ve bought.” A marketing software like Hubspot simply won’t allow it, as they require that you “use opt-in email lists.” Moreover, even if you choose to use a less reputable software vendor, it’s not guaranteed that the list will work. “One customer’s ill-gotten email address list can poison the deliverability of the other customers on that shared IP address.”

Put more simply, you don’t want to take shortcuts when it comes to building an email marketing list. Take the time and effort into building a permissions-based list. Not only will you be targeting a better group of consumers, but there’s also no chance of your campaign being infected by a poisonous email address.

The post Tenfold: How to Build a Successful Email Marketing Campaign appeared first on ActiveProspect.

Anyone who has spent time in the lead generation industry knows that change is constant. Regulations, compliance, and assurances of lead quality continue to evolve and impact the way publishers conduct business. The sooner publishers can adjust to changes in the lead landscape, the more valuable their leads become and the less interruption there will be to the businesses. With that in mind, we have noticed a trend that we wanted to alert publishers to.

TCPA regulations have impacted the industry for many years and advertisers have become a target-rich environment for litigation lawyers. This reality has been exacerbated by the increase in Call Blocking Apps that can guide consumers into a lawsuit process after reporting an unwanted call. For the most part, publishers are up to speed with presenting proper opt-in and disclosure language on lead submission forms. However, even with disclosures in place, TCPA lawsuits remain at record levels and advertisers are getting nervous. Capturing TCPA consent is not the challenge today–proving it is.

As a protection from litigation, advertisers have started to require that their lead suppliers provide independent third party verification to document proof of TCPA consent. Third party services provide a level of protection that far exceeds traditional methods. Some services, like TrustedForm from ActiveProspect, can even offer video replay of the lead being submitted. VideoReplay is the highest standard of proof in the industry, and advertisers are demanding it. In fact, the requests for publishers to implement third party verification is not only becoming more frequent, it’s becoming more urgent. Publishers who are unable to comply in time are at risk of losing valuable buyer relationships.

The good news is that it’s remarkably easy to give advertisers the protection they need without compromising your business. TrustedForm is free to install, can be implemented in minutes, and won’t impact site performance or data privacy. For publishers that rely on third party traffic, you can even protect the identity of your partners. Your data, and your partnerships, will remain protected and private.

There is a reason why industry leaders like LendingTree are adopting TrustedForm and other TCPA solutions. Every industry is subject to TCPA regulations and buyers are increasingly aware of the potential downsides of buying uncertified leads. It is vital for everyone in the lead generation to keep up with the latest FTC rulings and implement the highest standard of legal protection.

If you are generating leads and have not been approached to provide this level of TCPA proof of consent, it’s only a matter of time. ActiveProspect can help you get ahead of the curve.

TrustedForm Resources:

• More information on TrustedForm
• Get the TrustedForm Script
• Implementation Video

Of course, we are always here to help. Please feel free to contact us for assistance or with any questions or comments.

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