There’s a variety of lead generation strategies in digital marketing. A “lead” in this instance is an email lead. That is, someone enters their email address into a form in order to access some information. Once they do this, they become an email subscriber – a lead. On an email list someone is much more likely to become a customer than from a simple website visit.

On a website someone usually only stays around for a few minutes at the most.; then they are gone forever. However, once someone becomes an email lead, you have captured their email address and can follow up with an email marketing campaign for a much longer time period. Subscribers to an email list can purchase a product from you years after signing up. This is why lead generation is so important for businesses.

Lead Generation Strategies In Digital Marketing – The eBook

The simple ebook is a great tool for encouraging your website visitors to opt into your email list. By offering a useful guide, which is free to download, you can capture your website visitor’s email address and give them something useful in return.

An ebook should resonate with your target audience and be a good match for your products or service. Here’s an ebook I wrote which I use as a “lead magnet”.

A “lead magnet” is something which resonates with your website visitors and can be accessed by signing up to the website owners email list. Often businesses offer discount codes, bargain offers or downloadable guides or video courses as a lead magnet. Depending on the business you are running, you’ll want to pick a suitable lead magnet which is a good fit for your website content and the service you are offering in your business.

Lead Generation Strategies In Digital Marketing – Traffic

Of course you need traffic to your website first before anyone can find your free guide; or whatever you use as a lead magnet. There’s many ways to generate traffic to a website including both free marketing strategies and those which are paid for. To get free traffic to your website you can use:

• Blogging – write targeted articles aimed at your target audience – see find long tail keywords with low seo difficulty.
• Google My Business – if you have a locally based business, Google offers a free business listing. Simply set up and verify your address for free traffic. Bing/Microsoft and Yahoo offer similar services.
• Back linking – back linking from other websites, article marketing sites and forums and social media can help with traffic and SEO (search engine optimisation).
• Article Marketing sites such as Ezinearticles.com
• Uploading videos to YouTube can help your SEO and bring traffic directly to your website.
• Social Media channels can be used directly for traffic and for SEO. See unpaid social media marketing.

Paid Marketing Strategies

You can also pay for traffic of course! Paid traffic is faster than organic and free strategies and much more scalable. Here’s a few strategies:

• Adwords – Google’s Adwords platform lets you target specific searches being typed into the search engine. Show your advert when a specific search is typed and relevant to your business. Bing/Microsoft and Yahoo also offer this.
• YouTube advertising can be set up through Adwords. Use video advertising and target a specific section of the population which is relevant to your business
• Facebook – paid ads on Facebook can be shown to a very specific audience using targeting by age, location, interests, connections and a whole host of other information.
• Other social media platforms – Linkedin, Twitter and the many other platforms can also be used for paid marketing campaigns to attract your target audience to your website. See how to know your target market.
• Retargeting – target people who have already seen your content or landing on your website.

Lead Generation Strategies – Landing Pages

To collect a lead most website owners send their traffic to a specific landing page. With a landing page, there’s less for the visitor to do. On a normal website, visitors can browse around, click on the various content and get an idea of what the website offers.

With a landing page, there’s only two options: sign up or leave. This forces the visitor to make a quick decision as to whether they should sign up or not. While many may leave once visiting a landing page, many will sign up. To make your landing pages more effective, you can split test your page to see which one converts a more visitors into subscribers.

While many website owners concentrate on generating more traffic, the wise also know to optimise their opt in rate.

Lead Generation Strategies – Opt In Rate and Cross Testing

The opt in rate is the rate at which visitors sign up on your landing page. Let’s say you send 100 visitors to your landing page where you are offering some kind of giveaway product. Only 40 people actually sign up and join your email list, out of those 100. That’s an opt in rate of 40%! By altering small elements of your landing page, and cross testing the opt in rate against another similar page, you can determine which one is better for your opt in rate.

Landing page elements such as the page title, images and button colours can all effect how your visitors react to the page. By testing many different pages over thousands of visitors, you can optimise your page for the best opt in rate. 40% is a good opt in rate for a landing page. If your opt in rate is much lower than this, you should probably do some split testing to help increase it.

Sending Paid Traffic Directly To Landing Pages

If you’re going to use paid advertising you’re far better off sending people to a landing page rather than a standard website. You have a far greater chance of converting an email subscriber into a customer than a website visitor. Once on your email list, you can build a relationship with your subscribers over a much long time frame. On a website, most of your visitors will leave within a few minutes, many to never return.

Once you start building an email list, you can build a longer term relationship over months, years and even decades.

Pop Ups & Drop Downs

Most websites have a bunch of annoying popups which stop you from freely browsing through a website! But there’s a good reason for this. I have a pop up on this website too. Pop ups are great for generating leads because you can put them on every page of your website. If you’re building an email list, everyone who lands on your website should see your offer. If you have an offer which is hard to find, or is only on one page of your site, you’ll be losing a lot of potential subscribers (and customers).

So make sure you use pop ups or drop down opt in forms which can help you build your email list. You can use an email autoresponder service to generate a pop up for you. I use Aweber for this and they offer a number of different pop up forms to choose from.