Congratulations, you just generated ten thousand leads through your marketing campaign. Of those ten thousand leads, a staggering ten percent bought the product you are selling. Congratulations again, you're on a roll. Then it hits you - if only ten percent of the list that you worked so hard to collect through paid search, affiliate marketing or SEO actually bought the product they were initially interested in that means ninety percent did not buy. Hyperventilating yet? Well, don't. Haven't you heard of zero-cost acquisition?

It happens to even the best marketers. It is simply unheard of to generate 100% conversion on offers. Well, it's not impossible but I personally have never seen it done and I've been around, you know? I have said it time and time again. The most valuable part of marketing is not in simply being a core component of the overall sales process (which is important) but also the lead acquisition process. This is because a lead (name, email, postal address, demographics, maybe even psychographics) is valuable. So valuable in fact that many enterprises focus solely on the process of building lists, managing lists and maximizing the additional revenue streams available in that list.

If you can maximize the efficiency of the list you've acquired by providing additional, relevant offers to those that did not act upon your initial offer, you could increase revenue from you overall marketing efforts without any significant outlay of cash - hence "zero-cost acquisition". That means a pat on the back from the CMO.  I had the opportunity to speak with Danielle Hickey and Danay Escanaverino of Global Resources Systems, a performance-based provider of marketing solutions and they both had some interesting perspectives on monetizing data collected.

If you want to learn more about zero-cost acquisition, subscribe to Website Services Magazine where we'll have a case study from Global Resources on this very same topic. My personal advice would be to find and send relevant offers, maintain high quality, clean lists and if it is within your means partner with a network like Global Resources or any performance based marketing provider that can work with you to monetize on the leads you've generated.