Assuming your website has been online for a while and has been generating a decent volume of business, the most effective technique to generate online leads is - Data Mining!
For the uninitiated, data mining begins with identifying general sales patterns and then “drilling to the core” by identifying individual customer purchase patterns. An increase in sales of flash-lights, batteries, emergency lanterns, tinned food during the hurricane season is a general sales pattern. These are relatively and easily identified by just looking at the overall product sales.
The real gold nuggets and Lead Generation Marketing that provide business through out the year occurs deeper and at an individual customer level. These leads are generated by identifying individual patterns. For example, if the bulk of a certain customer's purchase is Pepe Jeans then it would be fair to conclude that this customer is a Pepe jean fan and would be a good lead for new collection and designs in Pepe Jeans. Based on the customer's gender, we could also include appropriate accessories that go well with the jeans attire. Now imagine this against all your customers and you could have a huge list of potential leads for all your products. Further, these would be 100% real leads garnered from your own website and not some list you purchase from some dubious source.
If a real human were to analyse the buying pattern, the Lead Generation Campaign at the individual customer level are very easy to identify for each and every customer. However, this is neither practical nor feasible. What you therefore need is a software with a large degree of artificial intelligence capable of identifying buying patterns and trends and generating leads from that.
The backend system also needs to be able to identify and club products according to a custom criteria. This is how you can bundle products (in our example above, Pepe Jeans bundled with appropriate gender sensitive accessories).
Now, given that website do not have standardised backend engines, off-the-shelf lead generation software will usually fail to impress. What you need is a custom software that not only access your database but is tweaked to your line of business. After all purchase trends in a consumer market are different from trends in a B2B environment.
While there are lots of service providers out there who can deliver the goods for a handsome fee, if you are on a tight budget, you might want to check out a little known India based service provider by the name of EPHP Solutions. These are the guys the larger service providers sub-contract their work to. You can cut the middlemen out and directly work with EPHP Solutions. Check them out here: http://ephpsolutions.com
