Those who have been in the lead generation space for any appreciable amount of time will know Jordon’s work even if they don’t know his name. Alongside Luciano Rammairone, Jordon led ClassesUSA from concept to sizable exit to Experian Interactive all while teaching others in the space how to think about the online education lead generation business. Luciano is the Chairman of one of the largest online and offline education lead businesses, CollegeBound Network while Jordon has dedicated the last several years to doing what he does so well – breaking down barriers. Keltz made an early bet on the senior living space at a time when the buyers were just getting comfortable with pay per move-ins not even leads. I’m sure he and the team have some stories about their efforts to facilities happy with local print ads to leads. (“What? They don’t just walk in? We have to call?”)

Similar to senior housing, the market for green lead gen is in its infancy. It’s much smaller than senior housing is today and has some built in limitations. Solar lead generation is the biggest sub-segment.

• Solar panels though are only good for homes that see enough sun to offset the high cost of installation.
• They rely on government subsidies which could go away
• They don’t have a large organic demand, i.e., people aren’t thinking about them
• There is some built in competition from existing home improvement lead gen sites as it’s a similar buyer base (think how mortgage loan officers pivoted into debt when the market changed)

No industry is perfect, and if solar / green lead gen looked so easy, we would already see many competitors. The hardest part for any vertical is building the market – both the user demand and the buyer base. The good news here is that, like senior housing, the long-term fundamentals are there. Given that Jordon has been spot on twice before has me thinking, that in 18 months time or less, we’ll be seeing many more companies paying attention to the green lead gen space. While I don’t necessarily wish more competition, it would be great for the industry as a whole to continue to service new sectors.

LeadTune and Datamark Reach Agreement

Reject Prevention Technology to Help EDU Clients Avoid Dupes in Real Time
SALT LAKE CITY, July 18, 2011 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — LeadTune, a leader in lead conversion technology, has entered into a formal agreement with Datamark to integrate its Rescue product into Datamark’s LeadBin. The integration will allow all current and future Datamark clients to take advantage of LeadTune’s reject prevention technology.

Click Here for the full release.

Editor’s Note: While no release is more newsworthy than another, this one caught my eye as it has been something long discussed but often not pursued. The idea is relatively straightforward. Before sending a lead to a school, see if that lead should get sent to that school. If it shouldn’t, e.g., because it’s a duplicate, then don’t send it. The challenge with this is access. Not all schools will feel comfortable allowing LeadTune to sit in between them and the seller. Two of the larger schools, Apollo Group’s University of Phoenix and the schools run by Education Management Corporation have their own ping system where sellers see if the lead would get bought. Some sellers cynically believe that while helpful, the ping system simply gives the school a chance to not pay for a lead but follow-up with it if it isn’t enrolled.

mediaspike Experiences 150% Increase in Lead Allocation with eBureau’s Education Lead Quality Score

ST. CLOUD, Minn. July 26, 2011, eBureau, a leader in predictive analytics for performance marketers and digital advertisers, today announced that mediaspike, Inc, a lead generator for the education industry, has seen a 150% increase in lead allocations since deploying eBureau’s new Education Lead Quality Score. mediaspike’s philosophy for lead generation is to be on the forefront of lead quality through the use of analytics and technology. eBureau’s Education Lead Quality Score allows mediaspike to focus on quality for their clients by scoring the leads they generate to determine the likelihood of start, resulting in higher enrollment rates for their college clients.

Click Here for the full release

Editor’s Note: eBureau’s Jeff Liebel will be moderating, “What Every EDU Marketer Must Know” at LeadsCon East 2011. EBureau is both sponsoring and exhibiting. (Thank you eBureau for your continued support.)

Marketfish Sets New Industry Standards for Clean Data

Integration With LeadSpend, impressionwise Helps List Marketing Leader Change the Data Hygiene Game
SEATTLE, WA–(Marketwire – Jul 26, 2011) – Marketfish, a self-service lead generation platform for list marketing, today announced two important partnerships that are helping it commit to the best data hygiene practices in the list marketing industry. By combining forces with LeadSpend’s email validation technology and impressionwise’s online messaging analytics, Marketfish will clean data in real time before campaigns are sent out, ensuring maximum inbox delivery and exceptional campaign performance. Advertisers will be able to reach the exact prospects they want without sacrificing email best practices. Specifically, these partnerships will ensure that a larger proportion of advertisers’ target audiences will receive the intended emails, while the percentage of emails that go to the wrong people or to bad addresses will be reduced or eliminated.

Click Here for the full release.

Editor’s Note: Craig Swerdloff, the Founder of LeadSpend, will be at LeadsCon and joining the important discussion, “The Other Part of Compliance – Managing and Preventing Fraud.” He will also be showcasing his technology later during the “Deep Dive” session on the same topic. (The “Deep Dive” takes place in a smaller, more intimate environment that enables more one on one interaction.)

MediaTrust PerformanceExchange Earns Straight A’s In Education Performance Marketing

Los Angeles, CA—(July 27, 2011)—MediaTrust, a leading digital performance-marketing firm based in New York and Los Angeles, has released an online education marketing case study that documents the success of its MediaTrust PerformanceExchange (MTPX)—a real-time CPC bid exchange for performance marketing— within the online education vertical. Working with industry-leading online education advertiser, AcademixDirect, MediaTrust proves performance marketing can still yield profitable results for lead generation and direct response advertisers looking to increase business, even with recent marketing regulations in place. With the success of the PerformanceExchange credited to its quality traffic, compliance, and customer-centric Partner Management team, MTPX is quickly extending its reach into new marketing verticals such as: insurance, finance, and home improvement.  Based upon current business trends, MediaTrust expects these verticals to quickly scale and produce competitive eCPAs (effective Cost Per Action).

Click Here for the full release

Editor’s Note: Watch MediaTrust’s CEO Peter Bordes on stage as he joins the panel, “Is CPC the New CPL.” MediaTrust is also exhibiting at the show.

This is the latest in an amazing round of consolidation within the insurance lead generation category. The reigning champions of insurance lead generation, Quinstreet (QNST), up 60% since its IPO, and Bankrate have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past 12 months combining companies. The former owns SureHits, and added Insurance.com  and CarInsurance.com among others. Bankrate which owned InsureMe added the leading lead generation firm, Netquote to its roster, bolstering its financial services business at the same time with the purchase of CreditCards.com.

Prior to moves by Quinstreet and Bankrate, All Web Leads was in the top three of insurance lead generation firms, and this move helps them counter the moves by their larger rivals. It’s a bold move and took some impressive orchestration to pull off. The company brought in Great Hill Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm, to make the transaction possible.

The natural question on many people’s minds will be, “Really?” The two companies have very different cultures. Yet, a look at their strengths starts to explain the business fit. InsuranceLeads.com has primarily focused on growing its insurance agent base. Until recently, it had not focused as heavily on the traffic acquisition side. All Web Leads was much stronger on the traffic acquisition side but had a smaller agent base. Putting the two together creates a company, according to them, that has among the largest agent bases and generates the most leads. All Web Leads will manage the combined entity out of their Austin headquarters, and the new entity will generate we hear greater than $100mm in revenues this year.

In summary, exciting. Congratulations to both companies and the industry.

Here is a copy of the release.

All Web Leads, Inc. Joins Forces with Great Hill Partners to Acquire InsuranceLeads.com

Combination Creates Industry’s Only “End-to-End” Online Marketing Services Company Focused Exclusively on Insurance

All Web Leads, a leading online sales lead generation company supplying the US insurance industry, announced today that it had acquired InsuranceLeads.com, a leading provider of online leads to insurance agents, brokers and carriers. To finance the acquisition All Web Leads has teamed with Great Hill Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm with over $2.5 billion under management, who have made a majority investment in the combined entity. All Web Leads’ current executive team will lead the combined company, which will continue to be based in Austin, Texas. Morgan Keegan served as an advisor to All Web Leads, Inc for the transaction. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“We are very excited to welcome the InsuranceLeads.com team to the All Web Leads family,” said Bill Daniel, CEO of All Web Leads, Inc. “This acquisition will create tremendous additional value for the insurance agents, brokers and carriers that purchase Internet leads by more closely matching their business needs and those of online consumers.”

“All Web Leads has built an impressive, data-driven online marketing business focused on the insurance sector,” said Michael Kumin of Great Hill Partners. “We are pleased to partner with Bill and the team at All Web Leads in the acquisition of InsuranceLeads.com and are excited to support the All Web Leads franchise in the next phase of its growth.”

The combination creates a technology and data-driven insurance leads powerhouse – the largest direct lead generator in the insurance industry and the second largest active customer base of insurance agents, brokers and carriers. Insurance represents a fast-growing online market, with consumers increasingly using the Internet to research policies and prices prior to contacting an agent. Insurance lead generation companies connect consumers searching for insurance online with agents, brokers and carriers who provide those products and simplify the process of obtaining multiple competitive quotes.

The combined company now operates the largest network of direct consumer marketing web properties devoted to helping consumers more easily obtain multiple insurance quotes. More than 10,000 insurance agents, as well as numerous brokerages and insurance carriers, subscribe to the company’s services.

About All Web Leads, Inc.
Founded in 2005, All Web Leads (http://www.allwebleads.com) is a leading online sales lead provider for the U.S. insurance industry. The company delivers real-time, targeted, high-quality sales leads to top insurance producers. All Web Lead’s technology-driven approach to online marketing helps bring together agents with qualified customers who are actively searching online for insurance products. The company is headquartered in Austin, TX.

About InsuranceLeads.com
InsuranceLeads.com has one of the largest and fastest growing networks of individual insurance agents, small, medium and large insurance sales organizations and major insurance companies. The company’s insurance sites help thousands of consumers a day receive competitive insurance quotes. The company was founded in 2003 by insurance and technology professionals with the goal to become the nation’s leading, real time, internet insurance leads generating company.

About Great Hill Partners
Great Hill Partners is a private equity firm that manages over $2.5 billion in capital to finance the expansion, recapitalization or acquisition of growth companies operating in the business and consumer services, media, communications, healthcare IT, financial technology and software industries. Great Hill Equity Partners IV, L.P. and its affiliates target equity investments of $30 million to $150 million. For more information, please visit http://www.greathillpartners.com.

About Morgan Keegan
Morgan Keegan, a full-service brokerage and investment banking firm, has more than 4,100 employees in 300 offices across the country. The firm’s investment Banking division provides comprehensive merger and acquisition advisory, public equity and private capital services to public and private companies as well as private equity groups.

Morgan Keegan’s Technology Investment Banking Group, formerly Revolution Partners, is among the largest and most active Investment Banking groups serving the technology industry. The technology group is well-regarded for its expertise in particular technology sectors, including software, IT services, communications, digital media/e-commerce, wireless, clean tech, storage and semiconductors.

What’s another business known to run at extremely low margins? The travel industry, especially those offering airline tickets. Now, with most online travel agencies (Orbitz, Expedia, etc.) waiving fees on purchases, they make next to nothing. It’s why their affiliate programs pay out something like 4% of revenue on good day. The airlines themselves, aren’t exactly doing wonderfully themselves. So, it’s no wonder each has various ways of upselling users who convert. If you’ve booked on Expedia, in addition to being asked if you need a hotel or car, you will find yourself scrolling through countless activities available in your destination city. I can’t blame them. Those actually make them money unlike that flight you just bought. Frequent purchasers of tickets and ad junkies, will recall another upsell as well.

Here is the image of my recent booking for LeadsCon Las Vegas being held Tuesday, February 23 and Wednesday, February 24.

Notice something on the far right hand side? It’s a $50 cash back incentive.

For years, I can remember seeing a button like this one after I make a purchase on a variety of sites, especially airline sites. And, it’s this button that has come under fire, with a press release being issued by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The release is below, but title tells enough, “Chairman Rockefeller Requests Information from Web Retailers in ‘Mystery Charges’ Investigation.” Read the list of companies who received a request for information, and those in our space will quickly connect the dots, or in this case,the button. The list reads like a who’s who of Adaptive Marketing and Webloyalty’s biggest customers. The key to their success and the publishers is something that the direct marketing industry refers to as Card on File. You’ve just made a purchase. They now have your credit card details. That makes an upsell easier and more rewarding because a purchase related upsell, generally a subscription service, is more lucrative than a data/form based one.

Here’s how it looks today. Click on the button, which has disclaimer language underneath, and you go here, to Reservation-Rewards. This site is not run by the airline/online travel agent. It is run by Webloyalty, a company that specializes in running subscription services, with their largest acquisition channel being online upsells. This is the same company and type that you would have seen offering these same subscription programs as an insert into your credit card bill. Sending an email telling someone to get $50 their next purchase and hoping they convert doesn’t work nearly as well as someone who just purchased.

Scroll to the bottom of the page, and here is what the conversion process looks like.

Regardless of the outcome, it’s a gray area. The companies doing card on file upsells in the past haven’t been angles. Since then, though, their practices are effective, but they haven’t been scandalous. The unfortunate truth is that I’m sure they do receive a higher than desired (by an outside governing body’s point of view) rate of people signing up who later didn’t recall doing so. Why would they? It’s an impulse purchase from a generic name. That’s the nature of the beast. That’s human nature, and there comes a point where you can only ask the companies to do so much and need to start demanding that the consumers take more responsibility. I’m sure I’d feel differently if the situation were reversed and I was paying $49.99/month+ and having difficulty canceling.

Copy of the release:

While the release reads as a merger, I can only presume it more of an acquisition, couched in merger terms for the non-lead generation community as the Aslanian brand carries weight there.  The release reads:

HOBOKEN, NJ–(Marketwire – July 20, 2009) – EducationDynamics (http://www.educationdynamics.com), higher education’s leading marketing company, today announced a merger with Aslanian Group, an industry mainstay specializing in adult student market analysis. The merger of the two entities will result in the creation of a Market Research and Analysis Division, imposing a formal infrastructure to EducationDynamics’ continuing passion for gleaning leading-edge market analysis that ultimately helps institutions find, enroll and retain students.

“This merger is a logical step that creates substantial value for client partners and stakeholders of both EducationDynamics and Aslanian Group,” explains Steve Isaac, CEO of EducationDynamics. “The newly-formed Market Research and Analysis Division will enable us to provide our client partners with a deeper range of market analysis essential to making highly informed decisions, filling a critical gap that exists in higher education marketing today.”

EducationDynamics is now uniquely positioned to provide institutions with the most comprehensive suite of technology solutions and research associated with student prospecting, enrollment and retention efforts. Client partners will benefit from the following:

– A broader and deeper range of market analysis to help institutions make strategic decisions;
– An extensive compilation of proprietary data regarding specific markets and student categories; and
– Expanded custom market research resources.

Aslanian Group was founded by veteran higher education expert Carol Aslanian, who possesses nearly 30 years of experience in the field and has helped advance the enrollment goals of more than 300 colleges and universities during that time. Under the EducationDynamics corporate umbrella, Aslanian will provide market analysis, consulting and professional development services to help institutions increase their market share of students despite an increasingly competitive landscape.

“While historically Aslanian Group has focused on assisting higher education institutions analyze regional supply and demand among adult learners, joining forces with EducationDynamics will strengthen our ability to address the ever-expanding online learning market, as well as traditional-aged markets that increasingly seek the efficiencies and convenience of instructional settings adults have always sought,” says Aslanian.

Additionally, EducationDynamics will maintain and expand the professional conferences and events currently offered by Aslanian Group, many of which have been hailed as the definitive professional development seminars for individuals involved in higher education marketing.

By most conservative estimates, generating leads for online education encompasses at least a billion dollars per year, not a tiny business, of which Education Dynamics owns a sizable piece. EducationDynamics might make the bulk of their revenues through the selling of leads to schools, but unlike others who have a business focus in online lead generation, they have always focused on building a company focused on something greater. The structure of their company shows that. They have Enrollment Services (where lead gen sits), Retention Services, and now Market Research and Analytics, all combining to create an education focused company as opposed to an online lead generation company that happens to service the education space. It’s a minor distinction in language but a large differentiator in a field where to date no leader has existed.

I have to give the folks at Education Dynamics credit. When I first heard about them trying to become an education company (and thought leader at that), all I could see were the dollars being driven through lead generation. But, they have continued to execute against their vision of being “Higher Education’s Most Comprehensive Marketing Company,” while not making the easy mistake of ignoring their profit centers or sidetracking those already in the business.