Tips for getting leads and expanding your list of emails

Surely you’ve heard a lot about the advantages of email marketing as a means to increase your sales and your online reputation, but don’t forget that creating a successful digital strategy is not easy.

At first, we all have many conceptual doubts about the most technical marketing terms, such as “lead magnet,” “conversion rate,” inbound marketing, ETC.

In addition, and just to start talking about strategy, you’ll need to create a list of emails correctly. But how to create an opt-in database?

Creating a database of subscribers interested in your products is not something easy, as you will need to create mechanisms to attract and store these leads.

Think that each user will be at a specific stage of the conversion funnel, which means that knowing how to assess the situation and act accordingly is fundamental.

You may think that today’s article is very basic, but most Mailrelay users have this problem and don’t know how to solve it. If you want to create a successful email marketing strategy, you certainly would like to learn how to legally get new leads and increase your list of emails.

So today we will see how to create a list of emails, how to understand the steps of the conversion funnel and as an extra tip, I’ll give you Seven tricks for you to get leads and improve the quality of your database.

What is a lead in inbound marketing and what is the importance of creating a database?

There are many definitions for the term “lead.” Without copying an explanation from a dictionary, we can say that a lead is a contact potentially interested in something, we can offer.

A lead is a registered user in a database, created to filter contacts based on their interest in a product or service.

In email marketing, we need to get the email address of people possibly interested in our products or services. Whenever possible, it is vital to collect more information about these people, to see if they are our ideal customers by tracing their profile.

However, getting quality leads doesn’t just mean storing the email address and the name of users who visited your site. You need to make sure that they are really interested in your business. That is users who could purchase your product or service, or that already work with similar solutions.

So it can be deduced that these leads are visitors who signed up and were added to a database that would later be used to send effective email marketing campaigns.

Did you know that to get leads you need to create a strategy with several phases? Do you know at what stage we can start using email marketing campaigns for these leads?

Let’s look at these steps in the next few paragraphs so you can understand the importance of getting quality leads. Are you ready?

Email marketing and sales funnel

The first thing to clarify is that not all leads can be considered equal for marketing purposes, since they may be of diferente types, and therefore you need to be able to identify them to treat them in consonance throughout the well-known process of the inbound marketing funnel.

► Inbound marketing process

As you can see, after applying some strategies to attract visitors and get leads through SEO and content marketing using different channels, the inbound marketing process is completed with the automation and analysis of actions that thanks to email marketing (among other things) can help you convert leads into customers.

In other words, we can summarize these steps as: Visitor. It is a person who accesses a website in search of information about something.

-Lead. When the visitor shows interest in your website and registers to receive additional information or to contact you to ask questions.

-Visitante. É uma pessoa que acessa um website em busca de informações sobre algo.

-Lead. Quando o visitante demonstra interesse no seu website e se registra para receber informações adicionais ou entrar em contato com você para fazer perguntas ou tirar dúvidas.

-Customer. After receiving information for a while, the lead may decide to take the next step and buy your products or contract your services. When this person goes through all phases of the sales funnel and becomes your customer, you achieved your goal.

This path that the user traverses is called a “funnel” because the number of people who will go through all the steps defined by the marketing department is much smaller than the number of people who will access the site.

At the beginning of the process, we have a high number of visitors, but this number goes down until only the users who will become customers are left.

Only a small number of people who visit your site will become your customers, which leads to the need to rank leads according to their type and behavior within the sales funnel or conversion funnel.

► Types of leads

It is necessary to understand and classify the users according to their current needs. That is, you will need to determine at what stage the lead is to send him the correct messages at the best moment, working, for example, with email marketing.

In this sense, the leads can be classified into three main types:

1. Basic Lead: These are users who are still searching for a solution to a problem. They accessed your website coming from a search engine or attracted by a marketing action. They may become customers in the future, but they still have a long way to go in your sales funnel. These users aren’t sure about what kind of products or services they should buy, so maybe what you are offering is not for them.
2. Marketing qualified lead (MQL): At this stage, the user already knows his needs and is comparing different brands, products or services. He is already more sure about what he will buy and so he will be more receptive to all the information sent by the companies of the sector.
3. Sales qualified lead (SQL): Is the lead of a user who already knows all the information of certain brands and discarded the options that don’t interest him. For the selected brands, it’s time to act and encourage short-term conversion.

So what kind of leads do you consider the best quality? In fact, they are all relevant, since any of them can end up being a customer, albeit with greater or lesser marketing effort. The question here, is knowing how to identify when a user is really interested in the brand and can end up being a good customer.

Seven tips to get quality leads and start your email marketing campaigns

Now that you know what kind of leads you can find, it’s time to take the next step and ask yourself: Where can I get these contacts to create a successful campaign?

Although it can always be easier to attract subscribers when you already are working with a recognized brand with some experience in email marketing, the tricks that I will explain today are not only useful for the first stages of leads as it is never too late to expand your database (and sometimes even for cleaning it and remove inactive contacts).

1) Keep fixed banners to attract leads on your site

Creating attractive banners is essential in any inbound marketing strategy that is in the initial stages, as you need to tell visitors that they should pay attention to your opt-in forms. Banners have two fundamental functions:

1. You can offer them another communication channel. You will not be able to get quality leads if your visitors are not aware that they can subscribe to your newsletter.
2. Also, users will be redirected to the landing page, where they can subscribe to your newsletter. In this way, visitors who are interested in your content will find the steps for subscribing more easily.

Although it is one of the first steps, it works well for long-term strategies. You should keep this banner fixed on the site. After all, users who visit your site are already interested in your business, so it is likely that they will want to receive more information.

2) Launch paid campaigns on social networks with a clear goal

If you’re already working on your social networking strategy, don’t miss this opportunity. For example, one of the most interesting options at your disposal is to combine ads on Facebook with your email marketing campaigns.

Regardless of the advertising channel you choose, notify your users about the existence of your newsletter, explaining where and how they can sign up. And Don’t forget to tell them what kind of content they will receive (if you will send exclusive content or promotions, and what are the benefits of this new service).

If you already have a community of regular followers on social networks, certainly many of these people would like to know more about your business and would be interested in subscribing to your newsletter.

3) Requesting data in exchange for a gift

Promoting yourself on social networks and your site through colorful banners is a strategy that you can apply in many different ways. One of the most common options, but that works very well, especially in the beginning, is to offer something in return to convince the visitor to subscribe to your newsletter.

To convince visitors who are reluctant to sign up, you couldgive them an incentive. For example, you could offer them na an e-book related to your business, a customized discount or any other gift. To get the gift, they would have to provide their data and accept expressly that this data will be added to a database and that you will send them your newsletters.

Of course, you should always be careful about this type of action. Ideally, the gift you are offering should be closely related to your business. This way, you will know that those who are interested in getting this incentive, will also be interested in your products or services, which means that you will be getting quality leads.

If you offer something that has nothing to do with your brand, you probably will manage to attract users, but most of them will not be interested in what you are sending by email.

4) Offer “Premium” products

Another option, similar to the previous one, is to offer a promise that will be fulfilled later. In this sense, it is not about giving something in exchange for the subscription, but rather to promote something that the user can get in the future, but only if he signs up now.

If you are willing to give special treatment to users who subscribed to receive your emails, you should use this as a tool to promote your subscription form. Will you offer exclusive discounts? Will you give them access to products that they can’t get otherwise? Your visitors should know about that.

5) Launch a “invite a friend” promotion

These types of actions work very well for promoting services, better than for product-focused businesses.

If a user invites a friend to sign up for the service, he can get something in exchange for the lead (a custom discount, na exclusive product.). The problem is that, again, you need to be careful about the type of users you are getting, since even if the first user is interested, you can’t be sure that his friend would be interested in your brand as well.

So the ideal solution, in this case, is to create a questionnaire for new visitors, or to add any other filter that helps you identify the leads that really are relevant for your business.

6) Create customer surveys

If your user community is active and your users participate in the day-to-day life of your business, they can help you. Listen to their ideas and take them into account. They are the ones who use the products or services you are selling, and therefore they may have suggestions for improvements.

A good idea would be to create surveys or forms to measure their level of satisfaction. To do that, invite them to take part in the study and tell them that they will be included in the newsletters service if they participate.

If they are willing to fill out surveys about your company or about their relationship with the brand, you know these are quality leads.

7) Create thematic contests

This is a strategy that more and more brands are using. You can create contests with different objectives. You can try to get new followers on social networks, create a promotion to promote your brand or to attract new customers.

Of course, the idea here is to encourage users to register, creating subsequent email marketing actions with broad reach and repercussion.

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen, in general terms, the importance of focusing on each of the marketing actions in function of the stages of the conversion funnel in which a user is to attract new leads or request contact information.

Whether you want to start creating email marketing campaigns now or to optimize your strategy and get better results, it is necessary to capture new quality leads, identify those who are not your buyer persona and clean your database periodically.

Anyway, my goal here is to share with you seven tips and best practices for getting leads that will later be a key part of your email marketing strategy. My favorite? Working with the existing community on social networks, with users who are Always consuming your content.

How about you? What other strategies do you know for increasing your mailing list and attract quality leads?