How to Build an Email Lead Funnel
Emailing qualified prospects (who know your company) can be a very effective marketing tool. Flooding a stranger's inbox is not. If email is vital to your business, you’ve probably explored ways of building your email list, and you may have found that increasing your email list size isn’t easy. After all, renting a list is expensive and ultimately unreliable. And you can’t send emails without permission, or you may get flagged as spam.
But don't lose hope. With a bit of planning, clever marketing, and inexpensive social media ads, you can attract qualified leads to a landing page AND persuade them to hand over their email address for remarketing.
In this article, we will tell you all about Lead Funnel Campaigns and the secrets to building a robust email list.
Define Your Target
Before you start building your Lead Funnel Campaign, make sure you know which kind of people are your best customers. Do you want to reach people early in the purchase cycle, or ready to buy? Do they even know they need your product? How long is the purchase cycle? How long is the repurchase cycle?
Your products or services will provide the answer. For example, suppose you are promoting a four-year university. Parents and students start thinking about their college options two to three years ahead of their final decision. So, these marketers will want to capture names years before they make a choice. To make things more complicated, early-stage considerations are very different than later-stage considerations, so the message may need to change based on where they are in the evaluation process.
Conversely, if you're marketing coffee, you know people often make spur-of-the-moment decisions and repurchase frequently. So, there's no benefit to trying to get in front of them too early. And people who want to buy coffee in a month look and act very similar to people who need to purchase coffee tomorrow. In other words, there's little benefit to changing messages based on where they are in the purchase cycle.
Once you’ve identified your audience and timeline, consider the qualities and features that flag people as your best customers. Qualifying attributes may include needs and behaviors. For example, people who just got a new job may be a good prospect for a new home. People who join gyms might be good candidates for weight management programs. Correctly identifying your target audiences' qualifying attributes is foundational to the success of your Lead Funnel Campaign.
It pays to take time to think about what your best customer really needs. For example, if you are a dog trainer, you might think your customer's qualifying behavior is a need to stop an undesirable behavior and to get dogs to listen consistently. However, if you are a dog trainer specializing in agility competitions, you might add agility training and competitions as a qualifying attribute.
Next, Create Bait
Now that you’ve decided on who your audience is and what type of qualifying attributes they possess, you are set to start creating irresistible content. This content might be a tip sheet, a report, or even an e-book. The information in your bait should be specific, actionable, and not readily available. This information should be so valuable to them that they will give you an email in exchange for that information.
For example, if you want more people to sign up for your dog training classes, you might create a free report that appeals to people thinking about getting a hunting dog. That content might include a list of qualities or traits to look for. Tell them how to find and evaluate breeders. Tell them about breeds that are usually chosen as hunting dogs. You might even include a lesson for three basic commands that every hunting dog must know.
The goal is to create information that only appeals to the people you want to attract. After all, you want a powerful and productive email list, so this is your chance to qualify your lead. Only offer the type of information that your best prospects want.
Your job is to create the right bait for your customers. The content you create should appeal only to your best customers. It should be specific and deep enough that they see real value and will give you an email to get it.
Set up Emails
Not so long ago, creating an automated email system was a lot of work. Today's options are a lot easier to work with. If you haven’t tried these programs in a few years, you should try them again. They have become much easier to use, more flexible, and less expensive.
These cloud-based email programs will allow you to build and manage email lists, build landing pages, and create emails that automatically deliver your reports or e-books. You can create A/B tests against various factors, including the subject line, content, images, or attachments. You can even schedule follow-up emails at intervals that you time to meet your needs.
Almost every email program on the market has a relatively sophisticated reporting system, usually with colorful graphics and easy-to-understand comparisons, so that you can quickly analyze the performance of your Leads Funnel Campaign.
Promote Your Bait
Whether you choose to use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, or another platform, finding ways to reach your best leads and most qualified audience is easy. Start by scheduling an effective ad to attract people to opt in so they can give you their email in exchange for the “Bait” report or e-book you’ve created. You can target people by interests, profession, geography, age, website usage habits, and more.
It’s wise to test different messages to see which is most effective for your audience. And remember that messages work differently on different platforms, so a home run on Pinterest may fall flat on Instagram. Testing is key.
Connect your ads to your email program via a URL link, and you’ve got everything you need to start building powerful email lists that you can use to grow your business and generate even more profits.
Test and Learn
Maybe you set up everything perfectly, and your campaign produced lots of leads for a few weeks, and then it slowed down. Perhaps your campaign just isn’t gaining steam, and your results are lackluster. Maybe your campaign is working on LinkedIn but not on YouTube.
In social media marketing, optimization and change are the names of the game. So get comfortable with the Test and Learn approach. There is no such thing as “set it and forget it” in social media. That means that you need to check ads regularly and be willing to tweak and test them throughout your campaign.
The complexity of algorithms in social media means that adding other ads or audiences (or removing them) can alter the algorithms and throw your momentum off. So be patient and keep working at improving your audience and your results.
Ask for Help
Companies like Cup O Content are here to help you create and operate Lead Funnel Campaigns. Contact us today. Let’s find out if we can help you create an email list that will change how you do business.
Want to learn more about the power of email marketing? We recommend these articles.
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