Context
A California mortgage business needed a reliable flow of enquiries. The geography wasn’t a market test: they were licensed for California and nowhere else.
We weren’t targeting homebuyers directly. We were after real estate agents working at the top of the market: agents handling $5 million homes at one firm, around $2.5 million at another.
Diagnosis
Volume was easy. Quality wasn’t.
A big share of the enquiries came from people who filled in a form without meaning it. In a category where every lead gets a phone call from an actual person, that lands on the most expensive resource the business has.
At roughly $50 a lead it also wrecks the measurement. Nobody can tell whether the channel is working or the leads are bad, so every conversation about performance turns into an argument about attribution.
The problem sat at intake, not in targeting. The form was too easy to complete without intent, so qualification fell on the sales team after the fact, which is the worst place to do it and the most expensive.
Decisions
- Added a confirmation step so people had to affirm intent before the lead counted, trading raw volume for a better mix
- Optimised for calls and email follow-up, because at this level of the market buyers expect a person, not a form response
- Built routing and notifications into the CRM so a confirmed lead reached the right person without sitting in a queue
- Ran twice-monthly strategy sessions on lead quality and pipeline instead of reporting media metrics at them
Results
Quality leads up roughly 50%. That’s a change in the mix, not the volume: raw count went down, usable count went up, and the team stopped chasing ghosts.
The documented campaign shows 156 leads at $49.74 on $7,759.44 of spend.
We’re currently discussing what comes next.