Sam HopsCompanies need to generate leads to grow their business. Leads are people who express interest in the product you’re selling. Generating leads is expensive. Costs include paying for ads, writing, and promoting content.
Email marketing is a tried-and-true way to generate and nurture leads. It’s a great way to find customers and build relationships.
10 Lead Generation Best Practices for 2024
Lead generation is finding and attracting new customers for your products. The main lead generation channels companies use is content marketing, SEO, and ads. The aim is to turn the interest of potential customers into action.
There are many different ways to generate email leads. Here are some practical tips to generate leads for email marketing campaigns:
Get Your Customer Profiles/Buyer Personas Straight
You must understand your target audience before launching your lead generation campaign. This will help you reach the right leads without wasting resources on people who aren’t interested in your products. Buyer personas are a great way to organize information about your ideal buyers.
Someone looking to buy a new house will likely be more receptive to marketing messages from realtors.
A buyer persona helps you better understand your customer and their needs. These personas help you understand what your customers want. And what guides a client’s decision-making process and how you can reach them.
Turning leads into customers is easier if you know them better. Research their:
- Demographic data
- Purchasing history
- Educational level
- Interests & hobbies
- Media habits, and more.
Having this information makes it easier to create targeted ads. Ads that speak to the persona’s wants and needs.
Use analytics to track behavior, trends, and buying patterns. It also helps you isolate a specific audience according to its demographic data. And its buying habits.
Here’s an example of a buyer persona:
Optimize Your Website for Lead Gen Strategies
The core of lead generation strategies is your website. Getting your audience’s attention, so they visit your website or landing page.
That’s where they enter your lead-generation funnel. They want to learn more about your company and product when they get there.
You must have opt-in forms on your website and landing pages to generate leads. And you’ll have to place and time them right. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitors with too many popups, slide-in, and other moving elements. Make sure the lead gen forms don’t distract from the content of the page. But instead…
Create high-quality and valuable content for your target audience. Content such as:
- How-to videos
- Case studies
- Podcasts
- Blog articles
- eBooks
- Infographics
This content is ideal for building relationships with your target audience. Once you gave value, show what else they can gain by signing up on your lead gen forms. Give them incentives.
Optimize Your Content for Search Engines
SEO is among the best channels to get visitors to your site without paying for ads. SEO and content marketing help your company with building trust, generating leads and sales. It works well to get people into the top of your funnel to discover your brand. But only you create content that is engaging and informative, so it follows the Google-EEAT-optimization principle.
Retarget Your Website Visitors
Most of the people who land on your website won’t by from you right away. That’s a hard truth you have to accept. There are ways to get some of those visitors back. One of these is retargeting. Based on what page someone visited on your website you can refine their customer profile. And you can retarget them with ads relevant to the content they read. These ads are often cheaper. And they convert better because the audience is already familiar with your brand.
Place a tag on each page to gather data about visitor actions, like:
- Pages viewed
- Time spent on the site
- Number of pages viewed
- Sign-ups
- Purchases
This helps to convert them into leads and possibly clients.
Run PPC and Social Ads
PPC and social ads are 2 popular lead-generation techniques in digital marketing. Pay-per-click (PPC) is an online ad model for driving traffic to websites. The advertiser pays the ad publisher when the ad is clicked. You can target your audience well with PPC based on the buyer persona you’ve put together. But depending on the industry, it can be pretty expensive. PPC is a great way to generate targeted leads, but managing campaigns in-house can be resource-intensive. Many companies are starting to recognize the advantages of white-label PPC outsourcing, which allows them to scale their efforts without the overhead of building an internal team. Target prospects with PPC ads based on their:
- Interests
- Demographics
- Company data
- Browsing activity
A keyword in your ad related to your product will drive qualified leads to your website.
Social media platforms can drive targeted traffic to your site. Social ads appear on popular social media sites like Instagram and Facebook. You can even consider to craft specific Facebook funnels. Make sure your ads reach the people most interested in your product. The reach of social media helps generate relevant sales leads and new customers if you target correctly.
A/B Test Your Call-To-Actions (CTA)
A CTA tells your potential customers what to do next. It makes it clear to them the steps you want them to take. Good CTAs increase your sign-ups, email click-through rates, and conversion rates. But not all CTAs are winners.
To find out which CTA works best for you, you can A/B test them. Send out 2 identical emails with different CTAs. Make sure that everything’s the same. Only the CTAs are different. So you’ll know what made the difference. Then check the data and see which CTA had higher click rates.
Partner With Complementary Products
Working with complementary products helps you spread the word about your business. A product that complements yours adds extra functionality to your product. This helps both partners generate more leads.
Consider partnering with companies to promote their product on your site. Offer discounts for buying both of the products.
Link to your partners’ websites and promote the offer on social media. Partnering with products in related niches expands your reach. A good example is an email marketing tool, like ActiveCampaign, partnering with a landing page builder, like Unbounce.
Host a Webinar
A webinar is a live or recorded online seminar. Hosting a webinar is one of the best ways to generate and nurture leads. These give leads free and easy-to-access information. Useful if they are interested in your products and services.
The number of attendees depends on the topic and promotion. Offer an incentive to increase attendees.
Channels like PPC, social media ads, and email marketing work well to promote your webinars. Email marketing and webinars together are great for lead nurturing.
Webinars effectively:
- Promote your products
- Quality leads
- Allow you to show off your brand personality
- Build your brand’s credibility
Try Interactive Content
Creating user-friendly, relevant, and engaging content is vital to stand out. Interactive content is more memorable compared to articles and videos. And they are great to generate leads. You can add a lead generation form to the end of the quiz. People who want to get the results will have to submit their email. You are not only getting their emails, but more data to refine your buyer personas based on the quiz answers.
And interactivity isn’t limited to your website. You can create interactive emails with AMP.
Nurture Leads With Email Marketing
Email marketing is among the best channels to nurture leads. Create personalized and automated email workflows with content that converts leads to customers.
It’s a trusted channel because leads have to opt in to receive marketing emails from you. Based on the leads’ interaction with the right email format of your emails you can further qualify them as low or high quality leads. This way you’ll know which leads to focus on.
Use Pop-ups
Pop-ups are small windows that appear over a page. They are an effective lead gen tool. They allow visitors to opt-in to receive emails from you. Popups can appear:
- after scrolling,
- after the visitor spent some time on the page,
- and when the visitor wants to close the tab.
Pop-ups have a negative reputation. Users and marketers think they ruin the user experience and drive away potential buyers. But popups can be effective for lead generation.
A/B test different pop up versions. Test timing, frequency, and pages to display them on. Compare conversions for popups and embedded forms inside the content and in sidebars. See which converts better and continue improving them.
Capping off Lead Generation Best Practices
Try these lead gen best practices to help you get more leads. The best part is that you use some or all of them. With enough resources you can experiment with more lead-generation tactics and see what works.
Rukham Khan
Yauhen Zaremba
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