Email Marketing – How Not To Lose Leads
This post will be brief – It’s about an experience I just had online
An email came through from a B2B marketing company. It was quite timely as my focus today was working on my newsletter and email marketing. It said…
‘Whitepaper: Building the B2B lead machine - The use of email marketing for lead nurturing is a hot topic at the moment, but building a great strategy that makes the best use of the channel can be daunting.’
I clicked through to find a form that asked me for too much information (I’ve talked about this before). It asked me for that one field too much that I wasn’t prepared to give them, my phone numer! I don’t want them ringing me! So I have a conundrem, I was interested in reading the whitepaper but not prepared to hand that much personal information to get it.. what did I do?
I did this…
Guess what? It worked! And just to prove it…
Why am I telling you this?
Well, it’s a whitepaper that I was interested in, I was a potential lead to them, but they made 3 vital mistakes that I don’t want to you make.
’3 Things you need to do to avoid losing leads’ – TWEET THIS
Here are the 3 things you need to do to avoid losing email sign-ups..
1) Ensure your optin forms don’t ask for too much information, name and email address is as much as you need, and the name part is really only so you can customise the emails you send, it’s not mandatory. For every extra field you add you will lose leads.
2) Use double opt-in forms, I use Aweber to do this. What that means is the reader fills in their details to join your email list and receive their paper. They then receive an email to confirm that it was actually them that filled it in, not some bot, or spammer or the bloke they pissed off yesterday at work signing them up to everything he can find. By doing this you are strengthening your email list, only confirmed subscribers will be on your list.
3) Send the requested information, in this instance the whitepaper, via email once the user has confirmed their email address (this is all very easy to do and automate using Aweber).
You see the mistakes made here mean that they did not get any of my information at all, even when I was willing to give them everything they actually needed! So presuming I came across that page in some other way, via Facebook or Twitter for example, they wouldn’t have captured my email address and I wouldn’t be a lead. At least He-Man is a lead now, sorry He-Man!
The fact that they are offering lead generation and email marketing advice is for another day! I just wanted to point out the correct steps to make so you don’t make the same mistakes made here and lose leads.
If you want to share any of your own email marketing tips please use the comment box below… and I’d really appreciate a tweet or two! :0)
