6 Tips to Slash Your Cost Per Lead (CPL)

It’s always better to get more stuff for  less money - whether you’re buying candy  
for yourself at the grocery store  or stocking up on office supplies. 
The same thing is true for your leads. Over time,  your goal should be to fine tune your marketing  
so your cost per lead (CPL) decreases and the  number of high-quality leads increases. Although  
it’s not as simple as buying your favorite candy. Cost per lead is just what it sounds like — the  
amount of money you spend on each lead  that you earn. You can calculate CPL by  
dividing the total cost of a campaign  by how many leads you earned from it.  
Needless to say, you want your CPL to be as low  as possible - since, again, that means you’re  
spending less money to convert those leads. But how can you reduce cost per lead? Well,  
that’s what we’re here to talk about. Here  are six helpful tips on how to decrease CPL! 
1. Look over your past campaigns Cost per lead is basically a  
ratio between two different things: How much  money you spend and how many leads you earn.  
If you want to lower your CPL, you have to  either spend less money or earn more leads. 
One of the best ways to earn more leads is  to just look at what’s worked for you in the  
past. If you’ve been marketing for a while, odds  are you’ve had some really successful campaigns  
and some less successful ones. Look back at your  performance and figure out which tactics generated  
a lot of leads, and which ones didn’t. It’s okay. Then you’ll want to try to replicate the tactics  
that worked really well, while avoiding the ones  that didn’t. Maybe your content marketing strategy  
was generating a bunch of high-quality leads, but  your paid ad campaigns were not getting you the  
results you wanted. This example is easy - you can  lean more into the organic (or unpaid) content,  
which has a direct impact on your budget and  your CPL. You may also adjust your ads to see  
if any changes you make improve your return. Just make sure you pay attention to your  
analytics as you go. 2. Run some A/B tests 
Another way to improve your campaigns and get  more leads is to use A/B testing. A/B tests  
are where you take two different versions of  something and test out each one to see which  
gets you better results. You could use A/B  tests for ads, webpages, emails, and more. 
So, let’s say you want to lower your CPL  for your email campaigns. The best way to  
do that is to create emails that convince more  people to enter your sales pipeline. So, you can  
create two versions of an email. Then you get  your testing audience and you send one email to  
half your subscribers, and the other email to the  other half, to see which one drives more leads. 
If one version of the email brings in more leads,  you know that’s the version you want to use. Then  
you can keep A/B testing other improvements  later on so your emails keep getting more and  
more optimized to drive lots and lots of leads. Just remember to keep track of what you changed,  
and fend off the desire to change many things  at once. The more changes you make in your  
different versions, the harder it will be  to figure out what led to your success. 
3. Target more specific and relevant keywords If you’re using search engine optimization,  
or SEO, that means a lot of your marketing comes  down to targeting specific keywords in Google.  
Same goes for if you’re using paid search  ads. In both cases, you target particular  
search terms to help you reach the right audience. But if you’re not targeting the right keywords,  
you’re also not going to reach the right  audience. Even if they’re driving leads,  
it may be that some other keywords out  there would drive even more leads for you. 
You want to target keywords that are really  specific to a particular audience, and also  
really relevant to your business. Targeting  relevant and specific keywords helps you reach  
people who are interested in your company, plus  it helps you avoid wasting money on people who  
don’t care about you. Target long-tail keywords,  which are several words long, since they’re more  
specific and have less competition. You also  have a better idea of the user’s search intent. 
Like if you were in the business of selling cars,  it might be better to target specific types of  
cars, like “best midsize sedan for commuters”  instead of just “cars”. You don’t really know what  
someone’s looking for when they search “cars”.  Are they trying to learn how they work? Do they  
just want to look at cool photos? When someone  searches for a specific vehicle with a purpose  
in mind, you know they’re more ready to buy. Oh, and for paid ads, you can also use negative  
keywords. That’s where you tell Google Ads to  specifically avoid targeting certain keywords.  
Like, maybe you sell used pickup trucks, but  your ads keep showing up in searches for new  
pickup trucks. You can tell Google never  to show your ads for “new” truck searches  
since that’s not relevant to you. 4. Hone your audience targeting 
There’s more than one way to target the  right audience. You don’t have to rely  
only on keywords — in some cases, you can  also target your audience more directly. 
For example, when you run paid ads, depending  on the platform, you can choose specific  
demographics, psychographics, or firmographics  that you want to target. Plus, you can gather  
first-party audience data from people who visit  your website and use that data to target people. 
This is great for making sure you’re targeting  the people who are most likely to become leads.  
To help you do that, you’ll want to research your  customers and figure out which sorts of people  
most commonly buy from you. Then you can use that  info to create buyer personas, which are fictional  
profiles that represent your target customer. Then, you’ll want to adjust your audience  
targeting —and your campaign creatives — so  that they align with your buyer personas'  
characteristics. Those characteristics  might relate to their interests, age,  
location, occupation, and more. 5. Segment your audience 
Targeting a specific audience is easiest if  you only sell one thing. But if you’re like  
most businesses, you sell different products  or services. It just could get complicated.  
Just because someone is interested in your  bank’s home loan services doesn’t mean they  
want to know about your business loans. If you try  to market to all your potential customers at once,  
with the same message, it won’t go well. In cases like that, you want to segment  
your audience. That means you divide your audience  into different groups and use separate campaigns  
for each one. When you do that, you’re able  to make your campaigns much more specific  
to those groups, so they’re more effective. You don’t just have to segment based on products  
or services, either. You can segment your audience  based on their interests or their location. 
6. Shift your focus to less expensive strategies Some marketing strategies cost more than others,  
especially if you’re competing against a  lot of people for your audience’s attention.  
A great way to lower your CPL is to use  marketing strategies that cost less money,  
just as long as that cost-cutting doesn’t  affect how many leads you’re earning. 
A great example of this is paid  search advertising and SEO.  
Both of those strategies use search results  to reach users and send them to your website,  
where they can become leads. But generally  speaking, paid ads may cost way more than SEO.  
SEO is organic marketing, which means  you could technically do it for free,  
although you may want to assign a value  to your time investment and the cost of  
any tools you choose. Or the investment  you make when partnering with an agency. 
Once you optimize your website for search engines,  you may see results rolling in for months,  
maybe even years, after you’ve finished your  original batch of work. Paid advertising requires  
a monetary investment for you to reach your  audience, whether you pay for clicks on each ad  
or for every thousand impressions. Once you shut  off your campaign, the results stop coming in. 
Just so we’re clear, it’s a good idea to use both  SEO and PPC. They have their pros and cons, but  
they’re really valuable when used together. But if  your CPL is struggling, it could be because you’re  
investing too much in one of those areas, and  this isn’t just limited to those two strategies. 
Well, that wraps up this video  on how to reduce cost per lead. 
If you’re interested in learning more  about generating leads or managing  
digital marketing campaigns, you can  subscribe to our YouTube channel,  
or to our email newsletter, Revenue Weekly.  Thanks for watching, and we’ll see ya next time!