Table of Contents
MQL is a term that refers to qualified leads, which are people interested in buying your product or service. They are the best type of customer because they’ve shown interest and want to take action with you. MQLs talk about themselves, their interests, what’s important to them, and how likely they would be open up their wallets for you.
Prospects that fit into your target group and have connected with your website or a marketing campaign are known as marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are prospects that have done more direct activities, such as communicating with a live sales representative, requesting a proposal, or signing up for a free sample version or sales presentation.
Learn how MQLs fit into the sales funnel, how they vary from other lead categories, how to score them, and how to better advertise to them to boost conversions and revenues.
What Methods Are Used To Qualify Marketing Leads?
When opposed to SQLs, the lead qualification procedure for MQLs is substantially simpler.
All a prospect needs to do to be labeled a marketing qualified lead is reply to marketing content in a manner that enables you to collect their contact information or demonstrates they are interested in knowing more about your company’s goods or services.
To be termed a marketing qualified lead, a prospect may perform the following steps:
- Downloads marketing material from your websites, such as an e-book or whitepaper.
- Visits a website that provides information or a blog.
- An email from your email marketing campaign is opened.
- Clicks on a link in an email marketing campaign
- Engages in a conversation on a social media post or ad
- After clicking on a search or display ad, they come to your site.
- Fills out an online form to request an offer.
- Subscribes to your email newsletter
- Attends or registers for a webinar
Let’s imagine you sent out an email marketing campaign that included an e-book on a relevant subject in your company. By acquiring leads and collecting business cards, you established an email list of contacts. Anyone who clicks on the link in the email or downloads the e-book is a marketing qualified lead.
Anyone who opens the link or downloads the e-book is also an MQL if you run an online ad via Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn that drives the audience to a site to download the e-book. Being marketing qualified may vary from just viewing a marketing email to downloading and reading a whole marketing asset, depending on your level of interest.
Companies that segmented their email received a 760 percent boost in income. To maximize your marketing campaigns and outcomes, the top customer relationship management (CRM) systems for email marketing make it simple to segment your contacts based on interests, industry, business size, custom fields, tags, and more.
MQLs vs. Other Lead Types
It’s critical to recognize that marketing qualification is just one step of the qualifying and sales process. Prospects will be classified as “qualified” in various ways depending on how they were developed and their degree of interest. The major differences are shown in the graph below:
To automate your qualifying tasks, utilize marketing-focused customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot. The HubSpot CRM platform allows you to develop email marketing campaigns, deliver them, and automate the life cycle status of lead records based on how deeply they engage with the campaign and how much interest they exhibit.
Qualification automation in HubSpot (Source: HubSpot)
How to Measure & Improve MQL Marketing Effectiveness
Tracking MQLs not only tells you which leads to prioritize, but it also tells you how successful your marketing initiatives are and where you can improve. Let’s imagine you conduct three marketing efforts to encourage your audience to download a newly released whitepaper and two accompanying infographics:
- Campaign 1: A 1,000-recipient email marketing campaign with a call to action (CTA) to visit the homepage and get the whitepaper and infographics.
- Campaign 2: A Google ad with a call to action that directs viewers to a website where they can download the whitepaper and infographics. The advertising was seen by a total of 10,000 people.
- Campaign 3: Three LinkedIn social media postings teasing material from the whitepaper, with a CTA leading to a URL where the whitepaper and infographics may be downloaded. A total of 15,000 individuals saw the posts.
We can compare MQL conversion rates based on clicks on the website link and marketing asset downloads since each campaign uses the same CTA that takes the visitor to the whitepaper webpage. The following are the outcomes of each campaign:
Each campaign’s outcomes convey a few tales. The first is that campaign number three, social media postings, had the greatest MQL conversion rates in terms of click rates, at 8%, and was also the most cost-effective, at just 50 cents per click.
Another important result is that, although having a lower click rate than campaign three, campaign one was more successful at reaching the proper audience, with a 20% higher click-to-action rate. These findings indicate that the messaging of email marketing should be modified in order to increase clicks, but that the same audience should be targeted.
Use a CRM system to manage and track the success of your campaign. For example, Freshsales allows you to implement both sales and marketing activities and then evaluate them using real-time data. This offers you a complete picture of what’s functioning and what needs to be improved.
Metrics for the Freshsales campaign (Source: Freshworks)
Scoring of Leads
For deeper MQL knowledge, use Scoring of Leads to see just how “qualified” a lead is. Scoring of Leads quantitatively measures the strength of a sales opportunity based on the fit, interest level, and purchase capability of the lead. Once you develop your point-scoring criteria, assign points and compare leads to evaluate where you should focus your resources.
You may give greater points to more involved marketing qualifying activities like downloading an e-book or signing up for newsletters in the context of MQLs. In contrast, lesser marks are assigned to more basic marketing qualifying activities such as opening an email or clicking a link.
Pro tip: CRMs offer an easy way to configure and track the Scoring of Leads. Zoho CRM, for example, lets you streamline the scoring process by automatically giving points to leads based on their interactions with marketing campaigns and the criteria you designed. Plus, you can view all of your leads in comparison with one another in a list view based on who has the most points.
Zoho CRM Scoring of Leads list (Source: Zoho)
Conversion Rates of Leads
There are a few conversion indicators you can use to assess your performance in moving leads through the sales funnel. The MQL-to-SQL conversion rate is the first. It’s the proportion of MQLs who become sales qualified over a specific time, as the name implies, and it’s a good indicator of how effective your sales staff is at moving leads into possible purchasing scenarios.
Let’s pretend you produced 3,000 marketing qualified leads over the course of a year. 500 of them became sales qualified within the same time period by inquiring pricing, consenting to a sales presentation, or signing up for a free trial. As a result, your MQL-to-SQL conversion rate is 16.6% (500/3,000).
A deal-closing rate is an even more basic statistic. This is calculated by dividing the total number of transactions concluded or customers added by the total number of leads generated via lead generation activities. Only include sales qualified and marketing qualified leads for the most accurate data, since unqualified leads aren’t actually relevant until they’ve showed interest.
For example, if you created 200 MQLs and 30 SQLs from sales and marketing activity in the previous quarter, your total leads generated are 230. We’ll suppose that 20 of them become paying clients. As a result, your overall closing rate for the quarter is 8.7%. This is not only a good performance statistic, but it also shows you how many leads you need to meet your sales targets.
Assume, for example, if the closure rate remained at 8.7%. You want to complete 40 transactions this quarter, and you already have 210 leads in the pipeline. You’ll need 460 total leads in the pipeline (40/8.7%) to get to 40. You’ll need to produce around 250 additional MQLs or SQLs over the quarter to meet your objective, given that you currently have 210 leads in the pipeline.
CRM software may be used to manage your sales funnel and track success via lead conversions. For example, HubSpot and Bitrix24 use data saved in the system to display the status of each lead in terms of where they are in the organization’s custom-built pipeline. Reporting tools or the system’s dashboard may be used to display totals and conversion percentages.
Dashboard for HubSpot deal conversions (Source: HubSpot)
Conversions in Bitrix24 funnels (Source: Bitrix24)
Conclusion
Because of the huge possibility of good prospects, it gives a sales team, generating marketing qualified leads should be a top focus for people in sales management. Though MQLs are just one sort of qualified lead, they may provide insight into the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Furthermore, all of the MQL generation metrics indicate which precise components of your campaigns need to be improved.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good lead to Mql rate?
The Mql rate is the return that you can expect if your trade went well and there were no slippages. It’s a good metric to use when deciding whether or not it would be worth trading something with another user.
