Securing Quality Leads: How Adding Friction to Forms Improved Lead Quality From Social by 400%

TESTIMONIAL

“Wolfgang took a declining channel we were close to dropping, to one that now drives quality leads into our Sales Team to play a meaningful part in our growth. Wolfgang’s Paid Social team understood getting lead volumes up was only the first step and remained equally focused on enhancing our lead quality. By introducing ‘friction’ we not only saw the quality of leads increase, but were able to optimise towards these leads’ sources and greatly improve the campaign ROI.“

- Hugh Ryan, Managing Director, HomeSecure

WOLFGANG DIGEST

A social media lead gen strategy built to gather key first-party data for HomeSecure’s sales team. By adding ‘friction’ to lead gen forms, we improved lead quality by 400%, directly leading to higher conversion rates and more customers.

CHANNELS

Meta, TikTok

BUSINESS GROWTH

Sales Qualified Leads: +400%

THE CHALLENGE

HomeSecure approached us in May 2022 with a very clear objective - drive sales.

After 3 months, we saw that while our campaigns were driving high lead volume, their conversion rate to sales was in decline, falling 50% on average. While our ad targeting had not changed, HomeSecure’s sales team were reporting drops in the quality of the leads captured via social. Overall, lead quality was becoming a point of concern.

We needed to devise a strategy that would enable us to keep lead volumes high, while also improving lead quality so that our sales team had better First-Party Data to work with.

OUR STRATEGY

What we knew:

Our ad creative and offers were strong ✔️

We were hitting good CPCs and CTRs ✔️

Lead Volume was increasing Rapidly ✔️

Lead to Sale Volume Conversion Rate was suffering ❌

We were driving lead volume, but not from users who were the right fit and were ready to be sold to. We needed to develop a strategy that would filter out low intent users.

What we did:

Traditional lead generation best practices will tell you to ‘make it as easy as possible for a user to become a lead’. Many of the social channels themselves exemplify this fact, allowing users to prefill their data, and actively encourage marketers to limit the steps needed to get a conversion quicker. While this benefits lead volume and cost per lead metrics, we were concerned about lead quality and conversion rates further down the funnel. So we decided to challenge the norm and go against the rulebook. We decided to make it MORE difficult to submit user data. We flipped the script and added ‘friction’ to our forms, implementing more steps and more barriers so that only the highest-intent users made it to submission stage.

INNOVATION USED

To implement this strategy, we took a closer look at our lead forms to identify opportunities to add friction.

We tested multiple variations of social lead forms with different levels of pre-qualifying questions. Some forms simply asked if users were interested in a quote vs additional information. Other forms asked multiple questions, such as if their home was rented or owned, would they want a police response as soon as a break-in occurred etc. Each question forced users to stop and engage.

We tested forms optimised for higher intent, allowing us to add an additional ‘review stage’ for users to make sure they were providing their most up-to-date information. We know much of the user data Meta has stored can be out of date. This forced users to stop and correct any bad data supplied.

We primed users to expect a phone call from our Sales Team and disclosed the phone number they would be contacted from. Many, especially younger audiences, prefer not to take phone calls where possible, so we gave users a heads up that we’d be doing just that.

The changes we made to our forms, while subtle, made an immense impact.

BUSINESS GROWTH

By introducing a ‘Friction-First’ Strategy, our social conversion rates soared to record-high levels, jumping a massive 1,100% from their lowest point. This enabled us to deliver significant lead volume via paid social, but more importantly, to drive leads that converted!

Lead quality was no longer a point of concern, with HomeSecure reporting a 400% uplift in the number of qualified leads. Not only were leads better, but the FPD our forms were sending allowed sales reps to gather better first-hand information prior to making calls, helping their overall sales process.

This campaign demonstrated an ability to ‘challenge-the-norm’ for Social Lead Generation. Where most strive to reduce the steps between prospect and pipeline, we took the opposite approach. With ‘Social x Email Integration’ & First Party Data Building taking centre stage in 2023, we believe friction is the future of lead gen.

+1,100%

Increase in Social Lead Conversion Rates

+400%

Increase in SQLs

Securing Quality Leads: The Future Is Friction

How Adding Friction to Forms Improved Lead Quality From Social by 400%

TESTIMONIAL

WOLFGANG DIGEST

CHANNELS

BUSINESS GROWTH

THE CHALLENGE

OUR STRATEGY

INNOVATION USED

BUSINESS GROWTH