Want to significantly increase your response rate and ROI from your lead generation campaigns?
Use a bait piece.
What’s a “bait piece”, you ask?
A bait piece is any information product you offer for free, as “bait”, to “lure” your prospects into giving you their contact information. It can be a white paper, a special report, a case study, a podcast, a recorded webcast …any informational content that relates to your product or service, and that your prospect will find useful and valuable.
“In today’s marketplace, a bait piece is highly recommended, if not an absolute necessity, for lead generation campaigns,” writes Bob Bly in The White Paper Marketing Handbook. “Without a bait piece, most lead generation campaigns are lucky to generate a 1 percent response rate. With a bait piece offer, your lead generation campaign can realistically generate response rates of 2 percent to 3 percent or even higher. Therefore, adding a bait piece offer can double or triple response to the same letter or e-mail versus not offering a bait piece.”
To effectively generate quality leads for your business, a bait piece must meet two criteria. Your bait piece must:
- Be valuable to your target prospect, and
- Be related to your product or service.
To be valuable to your prospects, your bait piece should show them how to solve a problem they have. Studies show business buyers seek out white papers, case studies and similar content to help them solve problems and make purchasing decisions.
To be related to your product or service, naturally, your bait piece should address a problem that your product or service is good at solving. If your bait piece addresses a problem your target market has, and that your product or service solves, you’re more likely to generate inquiries from qualified prospects.
Bait pieces are effective at selling your product or service, because they let you sell indirectly. Instead of trying to sell your product or service, your advertisement, letter or email “sells” the free information by explaining how it will help your prospect solve his or her problem. The bait piece then convinces the prospect that yours is the best possible solution, and positions your product or service as the ideal method, or a critical component, for obtaining that solution.
A bait piece multiplies responses in a number of ways:
Appeals to more prospects. Advertising your product or service appeals only to those with an immediate need for it. Advertising free information appeals also to those who may need your offering in the future. This greatly expands your pool of likely respondents.
Starts the relationship in a positive way. By offering your prospects information that can help them solve a pressing problem or need that they have, you appeal to them as thinking human beings, rather than talking down to them the way most advertising does. Since you’re not asking anything in return – other than contact data, which doesn’t cost them anything – you appear altruistic, rather than self-serving.
Eliminates buying resistance. Most people today feel bombarded by advertising and are skeptical of advertising claims. By offering free information, with no obligation, you avoid making prospects feel like they’re being sold.
What this means, going back to Bly’s response statistics, is that by offering a bait piece you can:
Double or triple your number of leads generated by each mailing or advertisement,
Reduce by 50% to 67% your advertising or mailing costs to generate the leads you need for a given volume of sales, thus doubling or tripling your ROI,
Add names to your house mailing list two to three times as fast, if you’re promoting your bait piece with ads or mailings to rented lists.
Consider using a bait piece in your next promotion. If you need help creating that bait piece – or the advertising, direct mail piece or email to promote it – give me a call at (+39) 011 569 4951. Or email me at info@CopyEngineer.com.
