Hi, as many of you will know I have a background in business psychology and as such I am fascinated with the measuring of success. No other aspect of internet marketing is more exciting than lead capture – but we all must be careful not to become compulsive checkers of email accounts or autoresponders to see how many views your web forms have got – as its not very productive work.
My view is that lead capture should be a long term process rather than having an absolute end point or date to it. Your data should drive your work and adjustments need to be made as the data reveals trends. Having said that what I want to make clear in this post is what lead capture is, why you need to do it and how you can build your contact list.
What is Lead Capture?
I’m often surprised by the amount of clever people that I work with that don’t have an effective lead capture strategy in place for their business. It’s like they believe that people will find their website and then keep on coming back. Whilst I’d love that to be true for them (and for me) the reality is a different story. If you consider blogs alone, some time has passed since the 100 millionth blog with created. So a blogger is competing against over 100 million other people.
Ok a blogger isn’t competing against everyone as not all blogs deal with the same stuff. However, if you do just a bit of research you’ll find that almost everything that you can think of has a search result in Google – if not then you’ve found a niche (a rare thing these days) so setup a blog of your own in that area!
As you’ll probable be aware lead capture refers to the capture of a prospective consumers contact details. Online the details that are usually collected are first name (possibly last name) and email address. But if you ask for this information on its own how likely do you think that you’ll get it? Likely to have little success with this lead capture strategy – I know because I’ve tried it. So what you need is an incentive for people who come onto your website or blog to give their contact details to you. So consider how you could incentivize your prospects?
Why start capturing leads?
The ultimate aim of capturing leads is so that you can better build a relationship with the individuals who interact with your web pages and blog posts. I’m a strong believer in quality speaking for itself and as soon as people realise that you are genuine and can produce a product or service that they want they will be more likely in the longer term to pay for your premium products and services.
So by not capturing leads you are literally throwing money down the drain. People will come view your site, take a look at your offer and that could be the last that you ever see of them and not because your product wasn’t right for them or even that they wouldn’t buy from you at some time – but just because it wasn’t the right timing for them now. So make sure that you capture people’s details as you never know when they may want to buy from you.
How do you build a contact list?
There are many different online programs that will help you to build a contact list. These are mainly either autoresponder companies or shopping cart companies. I’ll leave you to decide which is best for you, but I can highly recommend Aweber or AutomateYourList.com.
When you build your contact list the key is in the design of an effective capture form that you place on your web page or blog post. At a high level you can tell how good your capture form is by how many people have given you their details and how quickly you build your contact list.
However, the success in goal completion (people giving you their details) is part to do with the position of your capture form, part to do with copy, part to do with giving your prospects something that they want as an incentive and part luck!
It is important that you test, test and test again and only introduce one change at a time with your lead capture system. If you introduce toomuch chage at one time you won’y know which change has had an impact and one change coyuld cance out the impact of another. Introduce your changes in a systematic way and over time you can develop an awesome lead capture system that seriously helps you build your contact list.
Remember to have fun when you build your contact list.
Wishing you the best,
Howard P. Clemence
Professional Internet Marketing Coach
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