Sometimes the Lead is the Sale.
I work for a business which provides 2 year career college degree educations. For the high school student choosing his or her future academic institution, further research is certainly required to prior to making a commitment. Closing this web traffic to an actual "sale" requires a campus tour, interactions with an admissions representative, a financial aid application, the submission of transcripts, and other detailed exchanges as a relationship is built with the the potential student. In this case the information request, qualified by the customer giving verifiable contact information at the point of website interaction, is as good as gold. The information request is the sale from my perspective. The website has not taken a single credit card order for this business. I've helped them write over 20 million dollars in sales.

Other products are hybrids, combing a percentage of realtime sales and information requests. We service a number of clients in the hotel and tourism industry. Out data shows that, while many customers are willing to respond with a realtime reservation, others request information and book their hotel stay days or weeks later after some measure of relationship building. If we limited our perception of successful selling to realtime conversions our client would miss a third of the sales.

Information Request Marketing means building lead-harvesting and tracking mechanisms within websites designed to strategically maximize the conversion ratio of site traffic to leads whenever a realtime sale is not realistic including the use of content specific landing pages.

Content Specific Responses
When a potential customer requests information it is important to track and take into consideration the content area of the website which generated the lead. Try rolling your mouse over any of the 5 "Request Information" links on this page you will see that each tagged with the following meta-data:

* The page which generated the lead
* The location of the link on the page

request_information.asp?location=InfoRequestMarketingTextinArticle2 informs us that the lead was generated from the information_request_marketing.asp (page) from the second text link in the article (page location).

Understanding the origin of every lead gives you detailed insight along with an ability to respond to each inquiry with content tailored to an understanding of the context from which the information request was generated. If you request information from this page we will know it and will respond with language similar in topic and tone to what you are reading now.

Track, Track, and Then Track Some More
The nearly biblical e-commerce adage of always associating specific paid advertising keyword placements with specific sales generated fully applies to information request marketing. If you found this page by way of paid placement or an affiliate link, a cookie was set based on an appendage to the incoming URL. When we receive your inquiry we will know the exact keyword-ad you clicked on, the search engine or affiliate site you found our ad on, and your history of clicking on any other ads we have placed. This information is valuable in assessing how to pursue you as a potential customer and calculating ROI.

In Conclusion, it is unquestionably desirable to convert web traffic to cash-sales realtime. When possible it is always the objective to take a customer's money at the earliest point of contact, without expending any further human or technical capital. However as SEM professionals we need to keep in mind the undeniable reality that some products take more time and a deeper relationship with the customer prior to consummating a sale. Recognizing and respecting that a well qualified information request can be a critical component to a successful sales process is critical.