Before we begin, let’s cover some basics on lead generation for those in the dark. A lead is essentially a person who’s shown interest in your products or services, and lead generation is the process of generating leads — you attract people with the intent of converting them into leads.
A while back I bumped into an old friend of mine who owns a pet shop. After a bit of small talk, she started to talk about how her business is doing. She had a webshop for a while, but just recently started off with free content offers for lead generation.
Email marketing is long past the days when marketers blasted their whole list with the same weekly newsletter.
In fact, the Digital Marketing Association found that over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns, rather than regular email blasts.
One of the biggest challenges I see people face when they implement email marketing automation is not collecting relevant meta information.
Offer your lead magnets to your visitors and turn them into highly engaged subscribers. But how? In this article, I’m sharing with you a step-by-step guide that helps you set up your lead magnet funnels easily!
Real lead magnet examples are great if you are new to the content marketing world or want to extend your lead generation efforts. Therefore, I collected 18 types of lead magnet examples for you and each of them are different types of hooks. Get inspired for your next lead generation campaign and grow your email list!
Free content that you offer to your visitors and ask for their contact information if they are interested in it. There are lots of types of hooks, such as ebooks, infographics or even free trials. This collection shows you 18 different types of lead magnet examples.
An email course can be a very good lead magnet. Teaching people highly specific and valuable knowledge is always a thing that makes people opt-in.
One of the best things about these courses is that it doesn’t need as much resource as you would need for a video course for example.
The Automizy email course, for example, teaches subscribers how to manage their email list in order to save money and always be able to send highly relevant messages.
Creating a good email course as a lead magnet works only if you truly can provide valuable information – a badly constructed course can easily ruin your company’s reputation!
There are courses with different length, we wrote about it in our email course guide.
Downloadable checklists are great because these are actionable, teaches something that is highly specific and easily consumable.
What can you write a checklist about? About almost everything:
Think about your own industry, find 5-6 topics, write them down and create PDFs from these. Always think about lists that can be done step-by-step.
E-books are great because you can relatively easily create them based on your blog articles for example.
Choose a topic, collect your best-performing articles, connect them, add additional value, and done!
For example, Unbounce offers “The Conversion Marketer’s Guide to Landing Page Copywriting” ebook in order to collect emails.
Or Zapier offers a lead magnet on project management.
Or you can download an ebook on Product Management from Accompa too.
Believe it or not but your newsletter can be a good lead generation tool for you. But you have to pay attention to send relevant, interesting, truly valuable content.
For example, The Hustle is a newsletter for entrepreneurs about the most recent tech news. Every June they organize an event around “Startup tactics for non-techies” and this is why they have their newsletter as their most important lead generation tools.
Best newsletters are great lead magnets because their value proposition is unique, entertaining and does not say that boring “subscribe to our newsletter” message.
Educational videos can be used easily as lead magnets. Companies usually give the first lesson for “free” so you can watch without giving your email address. But in order to be able to watch the next ones, you have to provide your contact information.
Video is a good medium as it is quite engaging and also have higher possibility to go viral. On the other hand, it can be difficult to create one: you have to be prepared to create good quality videos.
But you can save time if you can repurpose your existing content. Just pick a topic you already wrote about and tell more about it, dig deeper.
Videos can work as a lead magnet even if they are not educational. It can be your opinion, something funny or interesting – it only depends on your industry.
For example, Brain Dean, the founder of Backlinko does it very well:
Live, limited time webinars can work very well too for your business. As you restrict the number of people who can attend your online event, you create the VIP feeling that is one of the most catchy things.
A good webinar does not only help you generate more leads but it can easily help you get actual subscribers for your business’ email list.
For example, Content Marketing Institute regularly offers free webinars.
Good infographics require a lot of work from you:
For example, Antavo created an astonishing infographic about loyalty programs that was republished by Hubspot.
What would you tell if somebody would ask what do you do? You would tell a story of your customer and how he used your product and what results he/she got.
These case studies give your prospects ideas on how to use your product and assure them that it truly works.
But not only successes are important. You can also tell stories about failures. This way you can teach others what not to do in different situations.
For example, Hootsuite created an amazing case study with their client’s achievements.
The Kissmetrics blog created a good guide on how to write a great case study.
Slideshare is a great place to upload your presentations. If you speak somewhere (on a conference or a meetup) you can easily use that as a lead magnet as well.
For example, my colleague, Viktor created this awesome presentation below that teaches a lead generation method for online businesses.
If your business provides membership permission levels, you can easily hide different sections of your blog content from visitors.
In order to read the rest of your blog content, ask for an email address!
This is one of the best strategies to generate more leads – using your own blog as a lead magnet will insanely increase the sign-up rate.
The only drawback of it that it can easily ruin the experience for your visitors – I don’t really recommend it until you have a big audience.
Get a good quality mic and record your thoughts on a topic. Be entertaining and professional, chat with experts in your field and promote it on your channels.
Podcasting is a great community-building tool and you can target these people with other lead magnets easily to grow your subscriber list.
For example, Duct Tape Marketing has an amazing podcast.
Research the professional your audience would love to listen to. It can be an industry expert, an opinion leader or even a celebrity.
Interviews are great because it can be a good incentive, it builds your trustworthiness and very easy to advertise it on social media.
The reason I listed this as a lead magnet example because it is a great opportunity to collect high quality leads for your business.
For example, Crazyegg asks for your website URL and then gives you heat map analytics.
Or we offer a free email editor. You can craft your emails but in order to be able to send it… well, start a free trial!
Calculators are great tools: show the problem in an interactive way you solve!
IonInteractive does this well with its ROI calculator. You choose your interest, tell something about your business and then it shows you what you lose.
It explicitly shows you the pain you face and offer you a solution via its service.
Offer consultation to your prospects and provide customized, personalized value and experience.
Don’t be too salesy though’, it can easily frighten your prospects away.
The marketing of the new era is more about solving difficulties by introducing an approach instead of hard selling. Keep it in mind!
For example, the Holini team does it quite well:
If you would like to know more about the concept of buyer converter product, you can read about it in our post about the buyer converter product.
These are low-ticket offers that convert leads or visitors into customers. They only pay a few dollars… but it fundamentally changes the relationship between you and your prospect.
If you are about to launch a new product, a newsletter or something that deserves a standalone campaign, it is usually good to create a separate landing page for it.
On this web page, you can tell your value proposition and allow people to subscribe – so you can build an audience way before you launch it. And there will be a list of people you can tell about your offer when it released.
Waitlists can create a VIP membership feeling, therefore it can be a powerful lead magnet for your business.
Another way to use it is to test a market with a value proposition.
Just build a landing page around an assumption. Promote it and check whether there is a need for it – validating your products even before creating it can be a good way to find product/market fit sooner.
You can create a wait list with any type of web page builder such as Unbounce. In addition, this waitlist builder tool below helps you get started and provides enhanced gamification opportunities to help your landing be viral:
Free trials are usually offered by SaaS solutions and gives an opportunity for people to give the tool a try.
It also means that you get their contact information so it can be a good lead generation strategy.
Trials vary company-by-company: they can be 1 or 2 weeks, 1 month or even longer.
The length of your trial should fit your sales cycle length – but it usually requires a long learning curve for you to truly understand it.
In the example below, you can see Dropbox’s 30-day free trial for the business plan.
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Talking about free trials, why don’t you give Automizy a try? Get started for free now!
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In last week’s article, we discussed the benefits and drawbacks of split testing and the advantages of using AI-powered workflow optimization to achieve higher conversion. And to make it relevant I included an example email course, to show you how you can increase the open rate of your emails in drip campaigns. This article continues with one more use case where you can take a look at how to increase the click rates of your onboarding emails with machine learning. So let’s move along the buyer journey from the consideration to the decision stage.
Like in the case of the email course the purpose of an onboarding email sequence is education. But in this example, it’s more of a “software-based” education. So the function of user onboarding is to make it easier for people to get started with your product.
By the end of the onboarding, they should be able to achieve their desired outcome.
Your onboarding will have a big effect on your customer acquisition. If you screw this up you will lose lots of valuable customers.
Although I said it’s more of a “software-based education”, it’s not just a technical onboarding. It’s not just about you showing your prospects the product. It’s more than that! You have to provide value to them as fast as you can!
First of all, you should ask yourself: how can I give my leads “initial success”? Not from your point of view, but from the prospects’.
So the purpose of onboarding is to make them reach their initial success, which means you won because the next logical step will be paying for your service!
Let’s take a look at some tips you should follow to have a successful user onboarding process. You can even look at these tips as a checklist. As you build your onboarding you need to take all of these into consideration, so just tick the points you completed.
According to Lincoln Murphy, the king of user onboarding, there are 5 types of email you can send to your trial users:
A successful user onboarding email sequence should contain a combination of these types of emails.
Now let’s have a look at a couple of onboarding emails and how AI-powered optimization can help you convert more trial users.
In this example, there are 3 emails each with an A and a B variation.
These are the most important onboarding emails in my opinion: the welcome email, a sales email midway through the trial, and another sales email at the end of the trial. The goal is to increase the overall click-through rate of these emails.
A variation B variation
A variation:
This is a short, two sentence transactional email. It’s sent right after the prospect signs up, and it’s gibberish free. Just a little gratitude and an offer for a free consultation.
B variation:
This is a longer transactional email, and it has the same basic elements as the A version. In addition, there’s some social proof (2nd sentence), and an offer (3rd sentence) to reach out to us via email or in-app message. This offer is crucial because it is sort of a call for engagement. It shows that you care about your customers, and if you can provide solutions to their problem they are more likely to stick with you. Another additional feature of this email is the P.S., which provides more valuable educational content for the prospect, and that is just great during onboarding!
As I previously mentioned it’s extremely important to send out the first email immediately because the users will expect it. And because of its importance, you need to nail this one.
This is the message that will set the tone for your future communication with the user.
Both of the examples could work because variation A is a straightforward, no bs email so the recipient might read it. Variation B however, can establish trust in the service and gives more value.
A variation B variation
A variation:
This one is a short email with a discount offer. If this email pops up in the inbox of an engaged trial user the offer should motivate the prospect to pay for the service much sooner. Voilá, conversion achieved!
B variation:
This version lacks the offer presented in variation A, but it is benefit-focused. So the less-engaged users can learn what advantages the software provide. However, even the more engaged users might not be aware of these advantages, and for them, this can be enough to make a purchase.
When the user receives this email he or she has been using our software for 8 days. So depending on the depth of use, they are more or less familiar with the product and hopefully figured out if this is the right one for them or not.
A variation B variation
A variation:
Once again this is a short email notifying the user that the trial is over. It reminds the prospect of the benefit and points to the payment page. If the user is satisfied, this email can be enough to result in a conversion.
B variation:
This is a longer version of the previous email but in a personal tone. It shows compassion and highlights the main benefits of the product in a more detail. The other difference is that the text doesn’t point directly to the CTA as in variation A. It’s more of a subtle approach, but still, it feels like a click is the next logical step after reading the last sentence.
So we looked at the example emails, now let’s see how to select the better-performing ones with traditional split testing and AI-powered workflow optimization.
As we discussed in the previous article split testing automated emails manually is too technical and nearly impossible. So if you decide to do it brace yourself!
The main problem with split testing emails in a drip campaign is that the exploration and exploitation parts are two distinct stages, which in this case will result in a very long test. Because to have significant results you have to wait a lot until enough prospects receive the emails. And the length of the exploration period will result in the use of outdated information in the exploitation stage.
So if you want to test the emails in the example with manual split testing you should start out by setting up sending weights for each email like this: 50% for variation A, 50% for variation B.
After the significance level is sufficient for each email, you should adjust the sending weights accordingly.
You have to select a winner that received a higher click rate and continue by sending out that version out to everyone from now on. Not to mention you already lost people who received the low performing versions until you decide the winner variation.
It might not seem too long or hard, but if you try it out you might hit some speedbumps. In addition, because of the nature of split testing even if your results are significant there’s a chance that the results are accidental which means sending out emails that perform worse.
But there’s a way to avoid all of these struggles: testing with a multi-armed bandit and machine learning algorithm that optimizes your whole workflow for you.
With AI-powered workflow optimization, all you have to do is set up the email variations and let the machine learning algorithm do its job. It is determining which email variation chain results in higher click-through (and consequently high conversion) rate.
The algorithm starts out just like you would do it manually: 50% sending weight for variation A, and variation B for each email, but then the magic happens:
As your prospects are flowing through your drip campaign it is continuously learning and fine-tuning simultaneously the sending weights based on the click rates.
As a result, it will send out more and more of the better performing emails, and less of the poorly performing ones. This cycle goes on and on, so the algorithm makes sure to always send the best possible email sequence based on the goals you’ve set up.
Whether you’re just starting to develop your user onboarding, or you think you need to improve the process you should start by testing out variations of the most crucial emails in your workflow: testing is a tool that will help you have more engaged users. Higher engagement drives more sales, so it is an opportunity you should never miss!
Next week we’ll publish the upcoming article, that explains how to build a loyal customer base and increase upsells by using and optimizing lifecycle emails.
If you have any question feel free to share it in the comments, and if you want to give AI-powered optimization a shot it’s now in public beta!
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I think we can all agree on the fact that split testing is an effective method to find out what works best and get more out of your existing traffic. It’s extremely useful since it can be applied to a number of different things: subject lines and content of emails, landing pages, home pages, creatives for ads and the list goes on. Also, you can find articles, case studies on split testing for almost anything, except drip campaigns. It’s because experimenting with automated emails takes a lot of time and preparation. It is nearly impossible and too technical with most marketing automation tools. In this article, you can find an easy to understand explanation of AI-powered optimization with an example email course where the subject lines are tested and optimized. Increase your open rate with machine learning in your drip campaigns!
When you split test something you have an A, a B, and a C version of a website, a landing page, an email or ad.
You send 33% of your traffic to A, 33% to the B, and 33% to the C variation. You run this test until you reach a significant result: when the sample size is big enough to prove that the result is not accidental. For example, 97% significance means that we can be 97% sure that our results are valid. So there’s just a 3% chance that our results are accidental. This is the exploration or learning period.
In split testing, you run the experiment long enough to have a winner of the variations that is significant.
After you have a winner, the exploitation (earning) part starts: you send 100% of your contacts to the variation that won.
So you have a significant sample, you learn from it. Then you implement the things you learned – this is the process of split testing.
The problem with this is that the whole process has two distinct stages. Generally, the exploration period is so long that makes it hard and time-consuming to adapt to possible changes in campaigns. Also, the changes made might not be relevant because it’s based on data collected over a long time.
While split testing uses the pure exploration and exploitation phases that are distinct, the multi-armed bandit algorithm mixes these phases. It results in adaptive changes because it is continuously mixing exploration and exploitation.
The two main advantages that multi-armed bandit testing has over split testing is that:
You will earn and learn. As Matt Gershoff said, during the exploration phase, you learn but it has a cost: you lose opportunities. But if you can decrease the cost of exploration by immediate implementation of your learnings into exploitation, you’ll have higher ROI.
So the purpose of multi-armed bandit algorithms, in this case, can be summed up in one goal: to reduce the possibility of sending traffic to lower performing variations as fast as possible. This way the cost of experimentation will decrease.
The multi-armed bandit algorithm mixed with machine learning opens up a world of new possibilities: automated drip campaign optimization that saves times and helps marketers have higher open, click and goal conversion rates.
This type of testing can’t be performed using traditional split testing. Because humans simply can’t conduct multi-armed bandit tests as it requires countless repetitive phases of learning and exploiting.
In a nutshell: the AI-powered optimization in drip campaigns means that the machine learning algorithm is continuously testing and optimizing your drip campaigns to achieve a higher conversion rate based on the goal you previously picked So all you have to do is:
From this point on the system will test your drip campaign as more and more leads go through it. Without any the need for any manual intervention. Conversion goals can be:
Now that we covered what you need to know about how the AI works let’s have a look at the email course to have higher open rate with machine learning:
Email courses are one of the best ways to generate quality leads. You provide educational content, therefore the leads will be more qualified and higher engaged after they finish your course. Not to mention that it is quite easy to set up an email course.
For a successful course, you’ll need a well-constructed landing page with proper wording and a value proposition. The order of the emails must be well thought out, and each email should have a clear structure.
Start with a summary of the course. Then continue with the actual lessons, and the last lesson should include either a special offer for the participants or just your sales pitch.
It’s crucial that the email course should be related to your product. Therefore, it should be able to solve the challenges your subscribers seeking answers to.
With a well-designed, problem-focused strategy it’s easier to convert a course subscriber to a trial user and a trial user to a paying customer at the end of the day.
But as nothing in life, it can’t always be applicable: a longer sales cycle, for example, might require some additional lead nurturing process too.
Let’s look at the example: a 6-day email course consisting of 6 emails. For each email, 3 different subject lines are tested. The topic of the course is digital marketing fundamentals, and it contains the following lessons:
People can sign up for the course on a landing page where they have to fill out a form with their name and email address. After opting in they receive a welcome email. In this email, you thank them for signing up and give them an outline of the course so they know what to expect. The next day they receive the first lesson, the following day the second, and so on.
However, the problem with email courses is that the open rates of the emails almost always decrease as the course goes on. But since you provide valuable educational content in all of these emails you want your recipients to open them. Otherwise, you wasted time and effort putting together the course, if barely anyone opens the last emails in the campaign which usually include your sales pitch.
So, in this case, the goal is to increase the overall open rate throughout your drip campaign. You’ve set up a killer drip campaign for your email course where the trigger is a form subscription. If you want to have a higher open rate, you have to conduct split tests for the email subject lines in your drip campaign.
First, let’s have a look how to conduct split tests for all these subject lines manually.
The first problem is that it takes a lot of time until enough people go through a certain drip campaign for the results of split testing to be significant. So the exploration period is very long.
The second challenge is executing split testing on 6 emails with 3 subject line variations for each. Can you imagine how long would it take? Theoretically, it’s possible to do it, but it consumes way too much time. And even if you end up with results, the amount of time and resources you put into testing just isn’t worth it. Especially, because there’s an easier way.
That easier way is through testing with a multi-armed bandit solution that is supercharged with machine learning algorithm.
All you have to do is write the emails, set up the subject line variations. After that, it’s time to let the algorithm do its job. In this case that is to determine which combination of subject lines and sending times result in the highest possible open rate. The algorithm starts out with a sending weight of 33.3% percent for each subject line per email. But as the subscribers move through the drip campaign it adjusts the sending weights based on the open rates. This process continues to ensure the best possible message sequence. Here’s a short tutorial video on how to set this up:
So there you go, with this algorithm multiple days of work can be done in about an hour. In addition, it will continue to optimize your campaign based on an endless cycle of testing. So increase your email open rate with machine learning and scale your business!
This article is the first of a three-part series where you can learn about the potential use cases of the AI-powered workflow optimization. In the next one, you can take a look at how the multi-armed bandit can increase your conversions during user onboarding. After that we show you how to build a more loyal customer base and increase upsells by testing the body copies of your lifecycle emails.
Stay tuned!
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Buyer journey is your prospects way to pay for your solution. If you can map it, you will be able to acquire much more new customers. Therefore I share this guide that explains each stage of the buyer journey and also give you real life examples how other companies do it.
The definition of buyer journey is “the chain of touchpoints your prospects have with your brand before they pay you for your solution”.
It tells you how many times, where, when and how your clients met with your brand before they became your clients.
The buyer journey, therefore, can be planned but you shouldn’t design it strictly: because your prospects will individually, freely act in it. So you always have to analyze it and replan your lead generation, user acquisition, and content strategy.
But there are the different type of models that try to structure or at least help you find the right strategies and map your business’ own buyer journey:
But let’s take a well-known model: the inbound buyer journey because it’s easier for everybody to use it for their own industry.
The inbound buyer journey consists of 3 main stages:
Usually, your prospects start with awareness stage, then they change into the consideration stage and at the end of the day they buy. But you can find people that are already in the consideration or decision stage: those are the low-hanging fruits you should consider to target!
Now let’s go stage by stage, explain their meanings and list what you can do in order to increase the efficiency.
What does it mean:This stage is the first stage when we talk about buyer journey and it aims at the people that are far away from buying your product.
There are 2 main types of people in this stage:
The importance of the awareness stage varies industry by industry.
If you are on a market that doesn’t exist yet (for example you are a startup with a disruptive solution that changes the way we think about a specific thing) your main task is to educate people on even the problem you solve!
On the other hand, if you enter a well-known, matured market, it is possible that you don’t need a lot of education for the people to make them understand the challenge (for instance, if you offer a project management tool).
So your focus on this stage truly needs to be decided based on the type of problem you solve and on the market you are in.
It is important to know that the people at this stage, usually use search engines to find answers, go to Quora to ask questions from the more experienced ones.
They usually try to search for the symptoms and find the root problem: they are educating themselves on the problem and challenges they are facing or will face.
When prospects start their buyer journeys, the importance of search engines is very high. You have to know that these people will look for short tail keywords: keywords with 1-2 words only. These are usually umbrella terms that help them find the components of their challenge. This is why SEO experts say that the shorter the keyword the lower the buying intention.
As a result, the contents you share for them shouldn’t sell your tool. These are contents that show the way for your prospects how to learn more about the problem and the solution itself.
If you are in a very new market, it means that you have to put a lot of effort: to make them understand that they have a problem and they need a solution. There are not many competitors on the market yet who could educate them… so now they question if it is a must.
In case you are on a more matured market, the probability that your competitors do this before you is high. In this case, you can choose a strategy:
These contents are a great place to try to grow your subscriber list. Offering educative email series can be great to catch them and nurture them down the buyer journey – even until you can sell them.
Mindbody is a software that helps businesses in the wellness industry get more customers and schedule classes easily.
This short article tells you that warming up is important but still lots of people skipping it (the problem) and explains why it is so important.
This funny sales video tries to explain us the problems we face as a social media marketer and offers a free education to us (that aims to nurture us down the buyer journey). The video is funny, touches the main pain points and also visualizes it with a comedic touch. I personally love this one.
Free Social Media Training with Hootsuite Academy
I want to sell more. So I type in “selling more”. Title: Sell more this year but not selling at all”. Hm, what? Click.
Kissmetrics Blog: Sell More This Year by Not “Selling” at All
One of the most efficient ways to gather subscribers is to offer a free email course!
Send a 5-10 emails series that educates and prepares them to go to the next stage or even sell (later on).
This email course not only good to give contents but also good for segmenting your prospects. Use lead score in order to decide who is higher engaged and who’s not. Higher engaged subscribers are most likely will go faster down your marketing funnel so they don’t need a very long nurturing process. These people are the low-hanging fruits.
What does it mean:Consideration is the stage where your prospects know the problem, they are already educated. They managed to clearly define the root causes so the time has come to look for a solution that is able to satisfy it.
On matured markets, you will find lots of people (regardless it’s B2B or B2C) that are at this stage. They know exactly that they need a tool to kill the pain they actually have.
So they tend to search for the solutions. They probably won’t go with 1 solution right away, they collect them, checking their features and offers.
People will continuously choose between the features: this is why your feature set is positioning your product. But your communication also affects it: the brand you build up in prospects’ minds will affect much this stage.
This is the place where you compete with other solutions directly. But the strategy you choose to compete with others is up to you: you can offer cheaper, better, faster, more modern, very reliable service (and more). Associating these types of values to your brand not only differentiates you from your competitors but also positions your offer in your prospects’ minds.
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Consideration stage will define the keyword types too: the 3-4 words are usually the search terms that specifically target a well-defined problem. So ranking for these specific keywords will help you be taken into account.
But as you might know, solving this specific problem can be achieved many ways! If a company has a problem with productivity that doesn’t mean they will go with a task management tool because they can ease their pain with other solutions: for example hiring more people. (At least they think hiring is a solution.) Or you can grow your subscribers list many ways: using landing pages, pop-ups, using sales outreach, and so on.
So you need to argue that your type of solution has the highest potential to satisfy their needs.
In order to do that, you should create in-depth guides, podcasts, and video content to explain the advantages of your type of solution.
But keep in mind that you still don’t have to be too pushy with your sales pitches. People are looking for answers to their questions: what is the solution type that solves their problem the best?
This tool helps marketers generate a high volume of UTM tags and also provides an easy-to-track dashboard. The video explains that there are lots of solutions out there that can help you but they don’t solve the problem entirely that is the data-driven decision making. It emphasizes the benefit they can have with the tool and tells people that their next logical step should be to go to the tools’ webpage. Amazing.
CampaignTrackly: Automated URL Builder Tool Helps Marketers Get Better Campaign Insights & Save Time
Optimonk uses a case study to emphasize how a company increased its web page traffic with a solution. As you know, traffic generation can be done millions of ways. They explained the context, the challenge and the way how this company managed to grow its referral traffic with on-site retargeting.
This company offers analytics solutions for SaaS companies and created the Ramp, a podcast. They talk about data-driven approaches and analytics mainly and lots of things that truly help companies understand why it is so awesome to use a type of solution they provide.
InsightSquared: Ramp SaaS Business Analytics Podcast
Send emails that offer case studies, overall knowledge about your type of solution when a person is surfing on your web page at the relevant sections. If you have youtube videos on the topic, it is a great thing if you insert a picture of it in the relevant email and make the picture linked to the video – lots of people will think that the video will be played in the email. It is effective and not disturbing just attention grabbing. Also, behavior-based therefore highly personalized.
You can also offer webinars. Designing a great email follow-up series after somebody attended your webinar can have a big effect on the effectiveness of your nurturing process.
What does it mean:This is the last step in the buyer journey before your prospect pays for your actual solution, service. They know that your type of solution is good for them they want to pick one.
This is the place where you face the direct competition: actual features, prices are strain against each other.
If your pricing, the features, and everything fit, you successfully acquire a new customer. But as Lincoln Murphy said, today’s prospects don’t want solutions. They want to find their “desired outcome”: you have to help them get to their desired outcome in an appropriate way.
This is where the overall feeling of your company (not your product) will affect whether you can acquire a new customer in the end of buyer journey.
So take it into consideration: bigger brands (like Slack) will now easier acquire clients than a new solution if they would choose the same strategy.
Newer, not well-known brands have more difficult time when it comes to sales – it is just how things work, sorry. But no worries: a good USP (unique selling proposition) can change that!
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The well-known sales pitches, product videos, comparison pages, testimonials, tools specific case studies, trials are your instruments.
If you choose to offer your free trial, the first in-app experience will be one of the most important things: create astonishing user onboarding that truly helps your prospects achieve their success milestones. The faster they reach it the higher the possibility that they will pay.
Also, it is important that you “activate” your trial users and keep them engaged.
Activation mainly helps them taking action and feel the power of your tool. Keeping them engaged relies on your product and whether you are able to surprise and delight them. If you make your prospect smile just for a sec, you will be closer to your goal.
You can also offer consultations and educative contents to help them get started as fast as it is possible.
Ultipro is an HR tool. They are on Capterra which is an app review and comparison site. There are lots of opinions from their customers that could help a company decide. On their webpage, they offer a product demo as their prospects need personal attention.
Hotjar gives you a “getting started” guide where they show you the steps you should make. But they don’t stop here, they offer you opportunities to expand the usage of their tool further and keep you engaged.
Along with getting started education, it is also good if you show little tricks that help your users integrate with their existing apps. The more integration is created the more likely they will stick with your solution as they invested a huge amount of effort.
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For onboarding, it is important that don’t rely only on an autoresponder but implement behavior-based emails. For example in Bufferapp, if one of your tweets is performing good, you receives an email that tells you how good you are. Positive reinforcement is very important if your users take the right step.
But it may easily happen that you did not manage to convert a trial user. Set up a win-back campaign for them and offer a new trial opportunity or give them an incentive: for example a coupon. A small percentage of these people will go with you!
In addition to the three stages mentioned above, if you want to keep your customers there are two extra stages that are important: the Retention, and the Evangelist stage. The Retention stage focuses on the customer’s impression of your product and what type of messages you are sending to them. While the Evangelist stage is about the advocates of your brand and your communication towards them. You can find some content ideas for these stages in this piece by Inturact.
Your prospects will engage with your contents and meet them but one of the most important challenges is to shorten your companies’ sales cycle. So you need to softly urge these people by guiding them through your marketing funnel and giving them the right contents.
This is why lead generation is so important. If you can catch your prospects’ email addresses, you will be able to send them emails, segment them according to the stages of their buyer journey and according to their buyer persona.
You don’t want them to just accidentally meet your contents – you send them yourself! But it is very important that you give them an awesome experience.
For example, if you see that a subscriber read one (or more) content that is relevant to the consideration stage you can offer him a decision stage content (for example offering your trial) by sending automated, personalized emails. It is a very effective way of nurturing your leads and helping them get to the bottom of your funnel faster.
Personalized messaging mean personalized content too. It means that you shouldn’t send a person a content that is not relevant for her/his stage.
So yes, there is a way to accelerate your user acquisition process: simply by collecting emails and sending timely, personalized, relevant emails to them!
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Landing pages have multiple functions: lead generation and nurturing, cross and upsells, and building loyalty. However, if you want results you need more landing pages: at least one for each buyer persona and their position in the Marketing and Sales Funnel. In addition, according to data collected from 7000 businesses, there’s a 55% boost in the number of leads when the number of landing pages is increased from 10 to 15.
Generally, when people talk about a Marketing Funnel, they talk about three main sections with three distinct objectives:
You want to reach out to as many of your target segment as possible.
So in terms of digital marketing, you will want to create a content marketing assembly line which creates lead magnets and owned assets that attract your potential customers.
Alternatively, you can pay for online ads which will help build a pipeline of visitors.
Once you have a stream of visitors who have clicked on your content trigger or your advertisement, you want to convert those visitors to leads.
This is achieved by a top-notch landing page. You can get a great landing page using a landing page builder which offers ready-made templates for mobile-responsive, fast-loading and conversion-focused landing pages.
So now the question is – once you have your landing page, what’s next?
For most products and services, visitors need several days for research and consideration. They need several interactions and they need convincing in order to make a ‘buy’ decision.
So in that in sense, a landing page in isolation is not enough to complete the marketing funnel or the sales life-cycle. This is where we look into strategies for the bottom of the funnel.
The main objective of this stage is to convert those leads into paying customers. So here’s what you should do once your landing page is ready –
On the digital medium, you should be able to educate, train and convince your users of the value you bring without having to do in-person meetings or telephone calls.
Make it super-simple for the users to understand the features, the best practices and the route to success.
You can achieve this through a variety of tools such as help-tours, in-app surveys, a series of emails, webinars etc.
Remember, only successfully on-boarded users will ever consider becoming a paying customer.
Persona building and lead intelligence are powerful concepts. By understanding more and more about each prospect, you can provide a more granular approach to your messaging.
You might have a product range or a product set with multiple types of users. If you don’t differentiate your message according to the segment, you’ll only be able to make a weak and generic proposition.
Segmentation of your audience and creation of email list segments will let you deliver a much stronger and personalized approach.
While every product category is different, we see that businesses see a large benefit by creating a set schedule of messages to assist the visitor in their research, consideration and buying decisions.
Drip campaigns assist people in their buying journey by providing consistent, educational and an emotional connect without being overbearing.
Email marketing is one of the highest ROI activities and drip campaigns are an integral part of any email strategy.
Every landing page has a conversion rate. On average, over 99% of visitors will leave a landing page without converting to leads.
Remarketing is a clever way to recover some of those visitors. Re-marketing providers will get into the visitor’s social media feeds and publisher content to be able to remind the visitor about your proposition.
Now remember, your campaign is only as good as the metrics. Make sure you invest time in your web analytics and continuously optimize the journeys with micro-experiments.
It’s not about getting it perfect the very first time but getting it better and better through iterations.
So, you see, there’s a bunch of stuff for you to do once you’ve published your landing page. Don’t choke the bottom of your Marketing Funnel!
You will need to start by integrating your landing page with your marketing automation platform. This is needed for two main reasons.
First, manual interventions are prone to human errors. E.g. downloading and uploading spreadsheets, comparing and refining multiple databases, manually replying to prospective customers are all recipes for disaster. There are bound to be data handoff errors and you are bound to miss out on opportunities
Second, the true results of automation are realized through a series of actions which can only be done through programmatic scale. I’ll talk about these features in detail.
Now, the easiest way to integrate a landing page with your marketing automation provider is through Embed Forms. Once you embed your sign-up form or contact form on your landing page, the lead data will automatically get updated in your CRM/marketing automation database.
Alternatively, you can use Zapier. Automizy has also integrated Zapier making it super simple for you to connect your marketing apps.
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