Lead generation is a whole science unto itself, and it’s a lot of work to become an expert. If you want to know more about lead generation in email marketing, feel free to read.
Your sources of new permissions to whom you may send emails are one of the keys to a successful email strategy. If you do not succeed in obtaining new permissions, you risk fishing in the same lake again and again, which in the long run, will create worse results for your email efforts.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is basically about obtaining leads. This means getting permission to contact more potential customers. The importance of lead generation cannot be overstated. It is necessary for email marketing. If you have no leads, then your emails have no recipients.
The purpose of lead generation is to come up with ways to attract people to your business. You do this by getting permission to contact potential customers. Leads are the same as permissions to be contacted. In this article, the focus is on email leads, i.e. permissions to be contacted via emails.
What exactly is a lead?
Marketers and other marketing enthusiasts often use words like prospects and leads. Both concepts are important in terms of lead generation. Here you will find a definition of the two terms.
A lead is a person who has taken action that gives consent to receive emails. It could be that the person has downloaded a podcast or participated in a competition and thus signed up for your newsletter.
When the person signs up for one of these examples, they should provide their name, email address and perhaps more information. This gives you consent to send emails to the person. In short, an Email lead is a person who has accepted that you contact them via email.
Email leads are valuable in your marketing as they are individuals who have actively shown interest in your products or services. Therefore, they probably won’t find your emails overbearing. They have actively chosen to receive your emails.
However, finding the right intensity in your email marketing is still a balancing act. You can still annoy your recipients if you send too many emails or if your emails have uninteresting and irrelevant content.
For lead generation, it’s also worth knowing what leads are. A person who matches your customer profile is a prospect. A lead is, therefore, a person who matches your target group.
When collecting email leads, make sure they are of high quality. This means that new email leads must match your customer profile. In other words, an email lead should ideally also be a customer prospect. This will make it easier to convert the person into an active customer.
How to perform lead generation in practice?
First, you must ensure that your lead generation is aimed at your target group. Therefore, you must have defined a defined target group so that you can address the right people. You may think you have a good handle on your customer profile and target group, but try to read along here.
Your target group must be defined.
Many business owners, marketers or managers think they have a specific target group. Still, our experience tells us that companies’ target groups are often too large and unspecific. If you have set your target group to be, for example, women aged 30-50, it is a much too extensive target group. Almost a billion people in the US meet that criterion.
When defining a customer profile, one should consider age, location, income, hobbies, education, employment, buying habits, personality and needs.
If your company is targeting B2B, you should also consider who is the decision maker. It is important that you contact the company’s person with the powers, abilities and leeway to invest in your product. This person could be a production manager, marketing manager, finance manager or owner.
Remember that quality is better than quantity. In lead generation, it is better to get the right leads than many leads. It ensures a high conversion rate and a more profitable yield from your lead generation. One method of getting the right leads has a specific target group.
1. Lead generation on your website
It would be best if you always tried to influence your visitors to sign up on your website. This would be great if you did this, as there is always a reason why the user has visited your page. It may be that the user has found their way to your page via a catchy ad on Instagram that the user found interesting.
It could also be that the user already knows your brand and just wanted to see if there was anything new on your website. In both cases, the user has become acquainted with you, which you must try to use for signup.
There are several ways to influence your user to register on your website.
You should always have a form in the footer of your website – also called an embedded form. Typically the user will sign up through this if they are actively looking for a place to join your email list, but this is typically not the type of form that generates the high volume of new permissions.
On the other hand, this type of permission provides a high quality since the user has most often actively looked for opting out.
Besides an embedded form, a sure winner for collecting permissions is one pop-up or several ways
Freebie
First of all, it is a good idea to make one or more freebies. Freebies are sometimes referred to as lead magnets.; It’s content that arouses the interest of your target audience. A kind of lead magnet. Your prospects must sign up for your newsletter to access this interesting content, a white paper, an e-book, a webinar or a service.
A person should be able to obtain the freebie by simply providing their name and email address and thereby giving consent for you to contact him or her. This is a good method as making these products does not cost money. Read more on “How To Create A Lead Magnet.”
Sleek note
Your website is an obvious platform for lead generation, as it is almost exclusively for potential customers who visit your website. However, there is a problem, namely that 95% of all sessions do not lead to actions.
That is, almost every time there are visitors to a website, the visitors will leave the website without making a single click.
To meet this problem, it is obvious to use a slide-in or a pop-up form, which appears when a person visits your website. This can be done via a program like Sleeknote, which specializes in collecting leads via pop-ups.
At Sleeknote, you have free play to design slide-ins and pop-ups, which can be brand-aligned and adjusted so that they do not disturb the customer.
Sleeknote is a popular pop-up tool for lead generation on your website. These pop-up forms can give visitors access to exclusive content such as white papers, guides, podcasts or webinars. This means that your freebie comes into play here. Your freebie is essential for your pop-up to generate successful leads.
Sleeknote’s pop-ups are an obvious method for lead generation. Your website is excellent for collecting good email leads because visitors must already be interested in your products or services.
Email leads interested in your business are easier to convert into active customers. Of course, you should take advantage of that!
You can create a pop-up window with a permission form on the front of your website and repeat the form in the website’s footer. If you use Sleeknote correctly, you can expect a higher conversion rate and efficient lead generation.
The idea for CTA!
Suppose you run a discount as a CTA or other product-specific benefits. In that case, we see that pop-ups or slides specifically about the individual product work better than if you run the same message on your entire website. Example: Remember that you can save $100 on this particular style!
If you manage to put the above into play in your pop-up and if you have a reasonable amount of traffic on your website, your pop-up will also be able to give you a good volume of new permissions for your list. The quality of these permissions is often also favourable since the user, as mentioned earlier, has a reason to visit your website, which will increase the signup rate on your website. A reasonable signup rate is +5%.
Another and more interactive source of signups is gamification. Through gamification, you can embed a game on your website, which the user can sign up through – in return, the user gives you their information. Gamification is often seen through a spin the wheel, but gamification in 2022 is much more than that and can also consist of flip games, scratch cards, quizzes and more.
Spin the wheel
The quality of the permissions that come through gamification can be more fluctuating than regular pop-ups, as the game can also capture users who are just playing for the sake of playing. Therefore, if you use gamification, it is also your noblest task afterwards to get your new permission introduced to your universe and your values and give the user a feeling that they get value from being on your email list. Signup rates on gamification campaigns can be incredibly high, +30%, making it a source that can increase the volume of your list size.
For example, if you are an e-commerce company, in addition to using various forms on your website, you should always give the user the option to sign up when they add products to the basket.
2. Lead generation outside your website
Acquiring registrations outside your website is a discipline that contains a number of different elements than when you have to sign the user up on your website.
An effective source of generating new signups is through Lead Ads on social media, which offer direct lead generation through the ad manager. Here, lead generation in the Meta universe (i.e. on Facebook and Instagram) has been popular for several years, as you, as an advertiser, have good opportunities to target and segment your specific target group on the basis of both demographics, previous data, behaviour and events on your website, interests and much more.
Other social media, such as TikTok, have also paved the way for Lead Ads, where we see reasonable prices per lead in several cases. The fact that TikTok is still a relatively new advertising platform is certainly a contributing factor to this. This is why the competition for ad dollars is also lower than on other channels, partly to the fact that the video content is innovative and catchy so that the lead ads seem less ‘disruptive’ and more integrated into the organic content.
Paid social
Another method of obtaining email leads is through paid social. This can be done by creating lead ads on social media. You can do Lead Ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.
It’s not free, but it’s often effective. Social media is well-informed about its users; therefore, these platforms can help you target the people who match your customer profile. In your advertising, a freebie is also necessary to attract email leads.
As much as 77% of all humans use social media every day and spend an average of 3.5 hours a day on social media. Therefore, the obvious platforms to use for lead generation.
However, you must remember to consider the quality of the leads you receive. You can easily set up a competition where the premiere is the brand-new iPhone and thus get tens of thousands of leads. But if none of those leads is interested in your services or products, then it’s money out the window.
Therefore, you must have a strong focus on making your lead generation product relevant while at the same time targeting the people who could already be interested.
With paid social lead generation, you can create a good synergy between the lead generation you run on the website and the strategy and lead generation you run on your paid social. Social media can provide traffic to your website, where you convert this traffic into good email leads.
Using various social media as a source of new permissions can also contribute to a substantial volume of new permissions. In contrast, to lead generation on your website, you must instead think about content for the ad, the budget you will use to advertise on the platform and who you are targeting your ad. The targeting is particularly important, as the quality of the permissions that come from social media can be significantly inferior to those you get from your website.
What value should you give the user to sign up?
We have uncovered how, among other things, you can get users to sign up. But why should the user sign up for your email list at all? This is where your CTA comes into the picture.
Your CTA covers the value you give the user for them to sign up – and your CTA is decisive for how many sign up.
If you give your users real value, they are also more likely to sign up.
Four types of value you can give your users
Discount
An obvious way to get your target audience to sign up for your list is to give them a discount on your product/service. At the same time, it is a purchase-oriented way to get your users to sign up, as you give them a value that they can only get by performing a conversion with your company.
But discount as a CTA for signing up must be used with care. First of all, it can ‘hurt’ the bottom line. You would usually sell your product at full price – rather than cut x% of the price.
In addition, discounts can be brand devaluing. You certainly know brands where you always get a discount – yes, you never even buy at full price because you know that you can get a discount on your purchase in one way or another. Your user should not get that perception of your brand, so use it carefully.
Gated content
Gated content is another way to get your target audience to sign up for your email list. The idea here is to give the user content that they can’t get anywhere else. For example, it could be “6 tips for your digital strategy” or “Get seven pages for your colouring book sent to you”.
In contrast to the discount, the advantage of this type of value is that you register the user – without giving them refuse your product/service. At the same time, you can place your brand strongly in front of your user if your gated content is, for example, knowledge-based. The downside to this type of value is that your new permissions are typically not as purchase-oriented as if you give them a discount. Here, it is your noblest task to make them ready for purchase.
The universe behind your business
Another CTA you can use is a deeper story about your brand and what the user gets from being part of your email list. Here you can use bullets as inspirational and personal content as reasons to sign up. However, we often see that there needs to be an underlying CTA for this, as users want some value.
Competitions
Competitions are always good for increasing the flow of permissions to your email list – regardless of whether you run the competition on or off your website. One thing you must consider, however, is whether the competition is appealing to the right target group. For example, a competition for a gift card for a trip track will probably not give you the right permissions if your website sells children’s clothing. On the other hand, a gift card for your webshop will most likely get you more proper permissions.
Another element you need to consider is how you lead your user further in your funnel afterwards. Competitions can generate a high volume of entries but can also generate some waiting users who are not purchase-oriented, as they may be hoping to win the competition they signed up for. Here, your most important task is to lead the user further in your funnel to make them more ready to buy.
What data should you collect about your user?
The short answer: As much as possible.
The more complicated answer: You should collect as much data about your user as possible, which gives you valuable data you can use when you send your users emails – it could be age, shoe size or interests, but at the same time, you shouldn’t let go beyond your sign up form conversion rate.
Evaluating your sources
When working with lead generation, the final point is to remember and evaluate your sources. If you have, for example, four different sources, you can easily get a muddy picture of which sources give you the best leads/permissions.
Therefore, be sure to organize your new permissions when they come in. This can be done with tags, groups or segments (this depends on the email platform) and will ensure that you get a clear overview of which sources create the hottest leads/permissions for your company.
We work in FINANCEBODE through a simple sheet for our customers, where we continuously check how many permissions have come from the individual channels and how many of them have performed a valuable action – for example, a purchase.
Conclusion
We hope you have gained insight into why you should consider lead generation and how you can structure your collection. When you start your lead generation, it is incredibly important to have your marketing automation in place to meet your new permissions with the right messages.
Would you like to hear about how we work with email marketing?
Then read more in our Email marketing guide.
