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Long Term Follow-up - Does it really matter?

Yes, here you are looking at making sense of this request and the customer already engaged another dealership.

That is certainly one possibility and was alluded to in @jakewirth 's response when he indicated that the majority of the eventual engagements with his ghosts occur around the two week mark with the simple reply that the consumer has bought elsewhere.

I can think of several reasons why a lead may choose not to engage - including bought elsewhere - who can name a few more?? Does continued long term follow up make sense for any of the various reasons??
 
So..we looked at our data on engagement and we looked at three campaigns:
1. Re-engage campaign- we go after the last 6 months of leads marked dead or lost in the CRM. This campaign ALWAYS produces car deals.
2. Real time lead handling- The Artificial intelligence agent reaching out to leads as they come in.
3. Rolling re-engage- after attempts are made for several weeks the system quits messaging for a couple of weeks and then starts up again.

As many of you know our system is polite and very persistent, so over the first couple of weeks we find that for real-time lead nurturing about 95-97% of the people who will engage, engage by day 14. Across the board this is about 50% of the overall leads.

For a Reengage campaign, 90% by day 14 and this is roughly 1 to 5% of the ghost leads that didn't engage initially. Rolling Reengage 87% by day 14.

We looked at roughly 250,000 leads. As we were doing this another interesting statistic popped up. We analyzed our last 150 reengage campaigns (list of dead/lost leads out of the CRM) and on an average of 1416 leads we converted to sales 1.2% or about 16 deals on average.

These leads were anywhere between 30 days and 180 days old. I hope this helps.
 
@David Marod - Thank you so very much for contributing!

To clarify and restate to make sure I understand -
  1. If a lead is going to engage it almost always occurs in the first 14 days?
    • My comment - this is in line with my personal experience :yabuddy:
  2. More than 50% of all leads don't engage in the first 14 days?!?!?
    • My comment - this seems abysmally low, so perhaps I have misinterpreted this statement? :banghead:
  3. Ghost leads engage at a 1% to 5% rate and the other leads that ReEngage had originally already engaged but had been marked as lost in CRM?
    • My comment - I don't know about you, but those results are uninspiring at best and demoralizing at worst :egads:
I attempted to reach you by phone and would love to talk at some point to get a better understanding of what you and your team uncovered regarding the 150 reengage campaigns...

Edward
 
So..we looked at our data on engagement and we looked at three campaigns:
1. Re-engage campaign- we go after the last 6 months of leads marked dead or lost in the CRM. This campaign ALWAYS produces car deals.
2. Real time lead handling- The Artificial intelligence agent reaching out to leads as they come in.
3. Rolling re-engage- after attempts are made for several weeks the system quits messaging for a couple of weeks and then starts up again.

As many of you know our system is polite and very persistent, so over the first couple of weeks we find that for real-time lead nurturing about 95-97% of the people who will engage, engage by day 14. Across the board this is about 50% of the overall leads.

David, you have presented some great information here. Thought I believe some may question due to the way you have it presented.

@eddyshaf has broken it down to help clarify it a bit more. It looks as if the 2 of you have maybe shared a phone conversation around this BUT I would love for this conversation to continue and clarify. Maybe we can provide some examples using some broad numbers?

From what I gather thus far: IF a customer lead is going to respond, 95-97% will do so with-in 14 days (with a series of effective follow-up emails). Of the total number of leads received, 50% on average are responding with something (again, with a series of effective follow-up emails).

Dealer receives 100 leads in 1 month.
Off those 100 leads, 50% on average will respond with some type if response.
95-97% of those 50 leads will respond with something within the first 14 days.

*These numbers are averages only and contingent upon effective email follow-up

For a Reengage campaign, 90% by day 14 and this is roughly 1 to 5% of the ghost leads that didn't engage initially. Rolling Reengage 87% by day 14.

These leads were anywhere between 30 days and 180 days old.

What I gather from this is...leads that were between 30 days and 180 days old that NEVER initially responded had a response rate of 5% at best.

@David Marod would you please confirm what I have highlight above? Thanks!!