What is a lead? Before you can think about generating leads for your email marketing campaign you need to consider what a good lead is for your business.
Depending on the type of marketing campaign you intend to run, leads can be existing customers, customers who haven’t purchased anything from your business in a long time or potential customers. According to Marketo a lead is “a qualified prospect that is starting to exhibit buying behaviour”.
If you don’t have any leads/email addresses then your first campaign will be about getting email addresses. Social media is a good way of expanding your reach and generating interest in products or services. You can use your social media platforms to direct potential leads to your website.
There are various ways you can capture email addresses once you have the customer’s attention. Landing pages or squeeze pages are one way to get someone to submit their email address in return for a free downloadable item or discounted product.
A lot of websites write interesting content to entice users. Once a visitor starts reading the content a popup appears asking them to register for more interesting content. You also have websites that only give you a few paragraphs of content and force you to register to read the rest.
Using social login on your website can increase registration conversions. Many people aren’t keen on going through a time-consuming registration process that involves the creation of a unique username and password that they must remember, so allowing them to log in with their Facebook or Twitter user account can be beneficial to both you and them.
Competitions are another way to generate leads. Using social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, you could run a competition with a prize giveaway that is related to your brand. As there are people who enter any and every competition for freebies, you need to make sure you attract the kind of leads who will go on to purchase from you at some point.
Don’t buy email lists
It is always better to curate your own email list as buying email lists can be a dodgy business. Even if your potential list provider claims that the people on the list have opted in to receive emails, this doesn’t mean that they opted in to receive emails from your business. Also, you can’t be 100% sure that the email addresses weren’t’ lazily scraped from websites and that the people on the list would be interested in receiving emails from companies trying to sell them something.
If a list is for sale, you’ll find that the email addresses on it have already been spammed beyond belief by all the other people who have purchased that list. Receiving an unsolicited email from your company could well be the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you don’t want to be reported for spam, don’t buy from email list providers.
How many times have you found yourself on the receiving end of many email marketing campaigns that you would never in a million years sign up to if given the chance?
It is better to take the time to build your own email list as you know first-hand that the people on the list have opted in and are interested in receiving information and promotions from you.
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