Awareness Leads

Awareness Leads are prospects who are not necessarily ready to buy right away.  They are merely looking for information and may turn into a buyer somewhere down the road.  They may be interested in downloading an ebook or a whitepaper on resolving tax issues.  But for whatever reason, they are not currently ready to pay someone to tackle their tax issue for them.  They may think they can handle the issue by themselves or maybe they don’t have the money to pay a professional.  In either case, they are generally not ready to currently engage a tax professional.  But tax issues don’t go away by themselves, so many of the prospects will be looking to hire a tax professional at some point in the future.

Purchase Leads

Now Purchase Leads are a little different.  The prospect has a sense of urgency and is interested in discussing the issue with a tax professional and presumably will consider hiring that professional to address the tax problem.  When someone wants to discuss the issue immediately, you would not want to offer them an ebook.  You would want to offer them something that’s more purchase-oriented, like a free consultation.

Which Leads Are Better?

Well it is not too difficult to realize that Purchase Leads have a greater value.  This is obvious.  However, there is great value assigned to Awareness Leads when there is an effective follow-up process in place.  Awareness Leads may not currently be great prospects, but we all know that many people procrastinate (based on fear, money, etc) when it comes to dealing with a tax problem.  As a result, they may not be interested today, but there will likely be an event in future (like an IRS agent showing up at their house!) that will motivate them to hire a professional.  So as long as you keep in contact with them via an autoresponder or the occasional phone call you should be the first person they will call.

The end result is that both lead types are valuable.  Many tax firms don’t like Awareness Leads because of the longer sales cycle.  Unfortunately, they are missing out on many quality prospects.

But whatever lead type you choose, make sure that you extensively test and track the results of the lead campaign.  I have seen tax mitigation firms have success paying top dollar for leads that are relatively easy to close.  But remember – the cost of these leads may be too high for the average lead buyer.  Alternatively, I have seen other firms have success with lower quality leads that have a lower price point.  The issue here is that you need a good quantity of leads and a follow-up system in place so that you can monetize the leads.  These leads will tend to have a longer sales cycle, so make sure that your sales reps or tax professionals can stay in contact with the prospects over this lengthy sale cycle.  This lower quality tax lead can lead to favorable results if you have an adequate price point.

Most lead generation firms will want a retainer up front.  These retainers may start at $500 or so and remember that tax leads are more expensive than your average leads.  So make sure you do your own due diligence.

Tax leads come in all shapes and sizes, so do your homework.  Start with a campaign that won’t break the bank.  This will give you a chance to generate some income before you go broke.  The best quality leads won’t do you much good if you are out of business.

One of the most critical questions is how many times a lead has been sold.  This is an important issue especially when buying aged tax leads.  For aged leads, obviously a lead that was initially only sold once as a real-time internet lead through a contact form is the best option.  However, you may find certain lead generation companies who will sell these leads time and time again thus diluting their effectiveness.  So before you buy aged leads this should be the first question you ask.

The more they have been resold, the higher the competition and the lower the close rate.  In some instances, aged leads have been sold so many times and become so watered down that it defeats the sales cycle.  Be wary of leads that appear too cheap in price.  Why is this the case?  They may have been sold so many times that they almost become worthless.  Remember the old saying – you get what you pay for.  This is often the case with aged leads.  Cheaper does not always mean better.

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Another important issue is what information comes with the lead.  Does each lead come with an email address, phone number, and date stamp?  Do the leads have an IP address stamp that will demonstrate authenticity?  When it comes to IP stamps, people often forget that they filled out a form and having their IP address provides verification.  If your leads are omitting important information or information that you believe is important to your marketing strategy, then you will need to improve your lead quality.

There is always a possibility that data is being changed just so that the leads are available for resale.  Unscrupulous sellers of tax debt leads may change the dates in order to ensure that the lead file meets the client’s specification.  This can and does happen, so beware.  These issues often explain price discrepancies between lead sellers.

The quality of a tax debt lead can suffer, depending on how it was acquired.  Not only will these negatively impact your ROI, but it can also damage the moral of the sales staff and waste your resources.  Your staffing mix will affect how you follow up on your leads.  You should ideally have an adequate mix of real time leads and aged leads.  Contact ratios can initially range from 45% to 60%.   This being the case, purchasing leads that are 30 days old can be a good approach considering many may have not had initial contact. 

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Organic search is often the highest quality aged lead because the prospect was searching and presumably interested in solving a tax problem.  PPC leads are also high quality IRS tax leads because prospects located the site based on specific search criteria and presumably have a high degree of interest.  Of course both search and PPC are generated based the same keyword criteria, with the main difference being the targeting of the campaign.  Internet leads based on organic or PPC tend to be more expensive than other lead generation methods.

Email and co-registration leads tend to be less expensive, but quality is often lacking.  Email tax leads tend to have a broad reach and are not targeted based on specific end user requirements.  With an email lead, a special offer is distributed via an email blast.  So even though they may have responded to the request, they did not initiate the request so they may not have as much of an immediate need.

When it comes to lead quality, co-registration tends to be the weakest in terms of quality.  This is often the case as the contact form is often incentivized (a free ebook for example) or has resulted as an upsell or secondary request (possibly a newsletter) once the prospect has shown interest in another service. 

The end result is that different lead generation platforms will have different results.  These differences create pricing discrepancies that if not properly analyzed upfront can result in leads with lower than anticipated closing rates.  With lower closing percentages, a higher quantity of leads will need to be purchased to accomplish your required results. 

Call us today at 1-877-TAX-1505 or use our contact form.

But individuals with tax problems can often be a difficult group. I have seen many situations in which a person had not filed tax returns in several years, had numerous IRS problems and claimed that they needed to get these issues resolved immediately. Shortly thereafter, they lose interest in the process and continue to procrastinate. There is often an event that will lead individuals to get their tax problems resolved. This could be marriage, needing to qualify for a mortgage, or a variety of issues. So just because a lead is very old does not mean that it is not worth following up on.

So what is the optimum lead age? The answer can vary depending on your marketing strategy. Most lead providers will release aged tax leads after 60-90 days. So in reality there will be some prospects who have not been contacted. You must realize that reaching a person live on the phone is a lot more valuable than leaving a voicemail and very often it just becomes a numbers game trying to get a live person on the phone.

Sometimes when 60-90 day batches of leads are released you can have some immediate competition from predictive dialers and other telemarketers. Once the lead hits the 120 day mark there will be less competition and often the prospects can be more receptive resulting in higher close rates.

There are aged tax leads for every buyer. I would always recommend that you test the various lead ages to determine which age group and price point works best for you. For example, you may find that 90 days aged leads may work just as well as 30 day aged leads, but have a much lower price point. So as always…test, test, test.

Tax Lead is a leading provider of tax debt leads and tax relief leads.  Contact us today so that we can discuss our solutions with you.

Call us today at 1-877-TAX-1505 or use our contact form.

We also see that the IRS is continually trying to reduce the tax gap. The IRS collects 96 percent of the government’s total receipts, approximately $2.7 trillion. These numbers are from 2008 (the most recently released). The vast majority of those revenues come from taxpayers who voluntarily report and pay the taxes that they owe. The IRS has estimated the overall voluntary compliance rate to be approximately 84 percent.

Despite IRS efforts, a significant amount of revenue remains unreported and unpaid. The IRS estimated this gross tax gap to be approximately $345 billion. After subtracting revenue obtained through enforcement actions and other late payments, the IRS estimated the net tax gap to be approximately $290 billion. These estimates, which remain the most recent estimates available, were conducted using data collected in tax year 2001 and before. At the end of the day, the IRS is getting more and more tough with taxpayers.

Tax Lead is the leading online provider of tax debt leads and tax resolution leads. Call us today at 1-877-TAX-1505 or use our contact form.

Recently we have seen success with tax relief mailings that are is focused on aged internet leads. The contact ratio is somewhere around 50%, but is represents a great opportunity because of the fact that the aged leads are so much cheaper than real time leads. If you have an address, why not use it?

It’s a great question and a wonderful strategy that few firms will take advantage of. Buy aged internet leads (possibly 30-90 days) and mail them a creative and special offer that reminds them of their original online inquiry. This will increase the response rate as the prospect is more inclined to respond to a company that indicates they are responding to their request for information.

Realize that historical direct mail response rates are around 1/2 of a percent. But using this strategy, your response rate can increase to upwards of 10%. If you have a staff that has a reasonable closing rate this can mean big money to you.

Each and every tax mitigation firm should consider this approach. We in no way can promise results, because each campaign is unique and local demographics play a large part in overall results. But the results should not be discounted. It might just be worth a try.

Every marketing plan for tax resolution leads should entail quality keyword selection. The basics of keyword optimization are relatively straightforward. Try to uncover the search words that your potential clients are using to locate tax relief services and then optimize your website and other media properties utilizing these keywords. The only problem is that other firms are trying to do just the same thing.

As a general rule, the more popular the search word is the more websites there are competing to rank high for the search word. Certainly, ranking high for competitive and popular keywords is the ultimate goal. But if money and time are an issue (and if you choose not to hire a firm to do the work), a reasonable alternative is to target search words that you believe you have a realistic shot at attaining a high ranking. In some situations, this just makes the most sense.

Quality tax resolution leads rely on locating less competitive keywords. One of the best ways to find these keywords is to calculate the ratio of the number of web pages a search word has to the keyword popularity. This is completed by taking a list of keywords and keyword phrases and then determining how often potential clients search for these terms. This can be done by utilizing one of the many keyword tools on the market. The keyword tools can also help you determine other potential keywords that you may have missed.

Determining quality keywords is a difficult process. The CPA or accountant may not have the best background for keyword research and analysis. Marketing for tax leads is difficult, but with a plan and some perseverance a quality keyword plan can be accomplished.

Through our online marketing solutions, we provide tax resolution leads for the tax relief and tax mitigation industries. For additional information, please contact us at 1-877-TAX-1505.