Strategic Fundamentals on Lead Generation

More often than not, business owners fail in generating leads because they use the wrong strategy. They also tend to produce insufficient content and subpar landing pages. They also do not exert any efforts in making follow-ups.

Emails are ideal to be sent to individuals who are already aware of your business or brand. Since they have subscribed to your mailing list, it is easier to communicate with them as well as ask them to take action. Then again, see to it that they do not get overwhelmed with too many e-mails or long messages.

Emails are also an ideal choice for business owners because they are free to send and they are received instantaneously. This makes it faster and more convenient to disseminate and transmit vital information. It also allows you to give real time updates on your products and/or services. This continuous stream of information makes people more productive and responsive.

Having records is another reason why you should use e-mails. These messages remain in the inbox. You can move them to folders to organize them. Whenever you need to find a specific email, you can simply search for it using keywords or key phrases. This lets you save time and energy. Printed documents are much harder to sort.

Moreover, e-mails are easy to share. You can encourage your subscribers to share your emails about promotions, discounts, and other exciting offers. This way, more people will know about your products and/or services. You will have more prospective customers or clients. You can also directly contact other businesses that are relevant to yours. There are good reasons why businesses still use email for communicating their contacts. 

‘How do businesses collect emails?’ Whether it is online or physical shopping, trade fares, visits, meetups. It’s always the common practice of genuinely asking for and be given relevant email addresses and, yet leave the person quite comfortable to have given their address to you.

The importance of organizing email collection has everything to do about a process where you get email contact details and then afterwards turn the contact into a lead and then afterwards into a happy customer.

There are many ‘not-so-good’ ways to collect email addresses. Challenge will be to practice the right ways of email collection to build your lists so that you avoid unproductive trends in your company due to the fact that a contact has been wrongly added to the mailing list. It is imperative that the person gives consent before you can start to understand and learn to know him or her.

Collection methods you will most often see online are opt-in forms and sign-up forms. You need them to obtain the contact information of your prospects. This way, you can have a chance to turn them into customers or clients.

Email signup forms are embedded on web pages wherein visitors can input their email addresses so that they can receive your newsletters. Most prospects agree to give out their email addresses because they are interested in knowing more about your business or they want to be updated whenever you have sales and promotional offers.

It is easy to create email signup forms with form builders and you have different options However, you still have to exert an effort to make them stand out from your competitors. For starters, you have to make your value exchange apparent. Your emails should be useful to your prospects. They should be convinced that they will get something good out of your newsletters.
You may also want to use a double opt-in. It is a type of email subscription that results in double confirmation. Visitors are asked to input their information using the form. Then, they are asked to confirm their action, usually by clicking on something.

This lets you have better quality sign ups instead of more signups. Take note that quality is more important than quantity when it comes to email marketing and lead generation.
At times, less is actually more. So, instead of producing long emails, you should send short yet descriptive ones. Your messages should be brief yet informative. They should contain everything your prospects need to know. Otherwise, they might simply toss your e-mail to their spam folders.

Keep your forms simple and straightforward. Your prospects should already have an idea of what to expect from you simply by looking at your forms. Remember that complicated forms generally turn off prospects.

Also, you should consider the location of your signup forms. Most business websites have pop-ups and landing pages. You can have your visitors find your signup forms by clicking on a pop-up, scrolling down to the bottom of the homepage, or landing on a certain web page. There are different proven display modes.

Finally, make sure that you welcome and thank your subscribers for submitting their contact information. You should send kickback emails and offer links to valuable content. Make your prospects feel that you appreciate their trust and efforts. 

At first, managing your emails can be easy. Sorting out a handful of emails every now and then may not seem like a burden. However, as time goes on, the amount of emails you have may increase. Soon enough, you will realize that managing your e-mails can be stressful and overwhelming.

In order to keep everything in place as well as prevent you from experiencing burnout, you should use an email marketing or bulk email service. Such a service guarantees safe storage of emails and the combined recorded data. Ideally emails and data are stored so that you can easily and quickly access them whenever necessary.

It is with an email service solution that your opt-in or sign-up contact generation forms need to be linked for storing your collected emails and data. How to link your form with your email storage solution? In general it comes down to the use of an enabler. There is a portion of magic involved called the Application Programming Interface.

The email addresses that you have collected from your website should be stored in a secure database. This is especially important if you have to send newsletters or updates to your subscribers.

In general, e-mail addresses consist of numbers, texts, and special characters. You need to understand how email contacts addresses are stored. Get insights in how storage systems map field data, process and store collected contacts' email address details in tables, your guarantee to better address them later

So, you have to consider these factors when you set up a database for your email collection. For instance, you may use Notepad, spreadsheet or a PHP editor to manage these email addresses. You may also use a software program or application.

If you know how to use HTML, you can easily create a simple editor. For example, you can set up an HTML form in which your visitors can input their contact information. Use the post method when you submit this form. This way, the entered value can be transferred to your PHP program. However this is not a long term solution. When your online business grows you will need a more appropriate solution. Question is then how do you want your information stored? How do you want to work? In what ways do you want to make the connection so that you can access your contacts data.

You can also use landing pages to attract new prospects. They are web pages that visitors get redirected to each time they click on a hyperlink. They usually contain product overviews, sales pitches and/or demos. Landing pages primary purpose is to engage visitors in a certain way so that they would take specific actions.

A landing page is a specific standalone web page disconnected from your usual website menu system, rather like a full-page advertisement for a specific product or event.

There are different solutions available to create landing pages and different email service solutions available to connect them. Before you start with landing page creation you should find out which solution is most suitable for creating landing pages your business and define what is their optimal link with an email service provider.

You may use a lead capture page to gather prospects and make them give you their contact information in exchange for a freebie. You may also use a squeeze page if you prefer something more aggressive. This landing page will not allow visitors to further navigate the website without giving their contact information.

If you want to focus on sales, you can use sales-focused landing pages such as click-through, pitch, and sales pages. A click-through page encourages visitors to click on a button so that they can avail of products and/or services.

A pitch page typically promotes products instead of generating leads. It tells visitors what they can expect from these products as well as how such products can improve the quality of their lives. A sales page is generally very persuasive. It prompts visitors to make an immediate purchase.

Remember that the power of landing pages is very strong. So, if you want your business to grow and succeed, you have to take the potential of landing pages seriously. Make sure that you take into consideration the essential elements of landing pages like include captivating headlines, lead generation forms, call-to-action, vivid descriptions, visual aids, ... on your landing pages so that you can convert visitors.

E-mail segmentation refers to the strategy that email marketers use to divide their email lists into smaller segments or groups and then send them targeted emails.

Segmentation is important for any business to better understand the different kinds of customers. They all have different properties, interests and are in a different stage in their buying journey. You will also apply tags to assign temporary conditions to your customers and add data that is unlikely to change often. (in eg. age, gender,...)

In general you start your segmentation way down as from your lists through your tags and data that is unlikely to change often.

How to segment contacts, depends on the way your email service management solution handles, lists and segmentation, tags and custom field information. Good segmentation allows you to understand specific groups and customize the content of your email marketing campaigns.

So it is in fact ‘personalisation’ the process where you learn to ‘know’ your customer and what he really wants?

By segmenting your emails, you can significantly improve your email marketing campaign. You can have higher email open and click rates as well as lower unsubscribe rates. More importantly, you can have a higher conversion rate.

Finally, you need to select the best email service provider that is a right fit for your business. Because yes choosing the right email service provider is vital for your business. You need an application that will basically accept and store your email addresses, and allow you to follow through with offers and information.

If you take into consideration your budget. You might even start with no budget or perhaps limited budget solutions. Go for solutions where you don’t need any coding skills, drag and drop and perhaps with a myriad of widgets you can integrate with. Look for one that has features you want and need.

Mid-budget email service providers have their form builders integrated. For these solutions, check how contact details are stored. Whether they have templates or not. Choose also providers that offer a wide range of layouts and designs.

Is building contact profiles and deliverability important? There are Medium Level email service providers that offer great segmentation and can help you strengthen relationships through email sequence builders.

Enterprise level email service providers offer marketing automation that help execute business processes. So you really need to make your homework and look for one that has all the features you want and need.

Now that you have reached the end of this blog post, you should have already learned the fundamentals of using emails for lead generation. Effective email marketing is critical to the success of your business. Hence, you should plan your moves wisely and calculate your risks. Hopefully, this post has given you ideas on how you can improve your lead generation and email marketing strategies. Out of lead generation ideas?  Let's get the conversions in place that ignite your email autoresponder sequences that challenge your email list.