What is the best way to capture data?

What about Social Media?

Every platform has its place, but building a massive following on a 3rd party platform is risky because the algorithms could change and leave you without an audience.

The bigger and much more important difference between social media and email, is that you can’t engage with visitors as well as you can with email or text. You want people to take action, trust you, and eventually buy from you, so you need more control of the relationship.

Email campaigns are measurable, strategic, and specific. Use Social to get them on the list, and always be building the list.

Creating a Lead Magnet is a great way to encourage action, engage with prospects and get email addresses, but apart from using Social Media to attract people to your Lead Magnet, what is the best mechanism to entice them when they are on your website?

Pop-ups

Like them or not, they work.

Hey, nobody likes to be interrupted, and lots of pop-ups do that, by showing up at the wrong time or in the wrong place – you wouldn’t interrupt someone in real life would you? So you have to think about the visitor, and the reason for the pop-up is to persuade them to take the next step, which will move them towards something that will help them.

There are many settings for pop-ups – arrive after a certain amount of time, come in from an angle that doesn’t impact on the content, or just pop up when the visitor is about to leave the page.

Pop-ups should never try to make the visitor do something they don’t want to. They definitely don’t want to be sold to at that point. Think about why the visitor is on that page, and what they are thinking. Work out from your Avatar notes what they really want and offer it in the pop-up.

Ideally every page should have its own separate and specific Lead Magnet and CTA form relevant to that page content. If you are consistently relevant, you will create authority, and if you use softer methods to encourage action rather than hard sales tactics, you will build trust without turning people off.

Download our ‘Small Business Guide to Capturing Leads’ guide, as part of our toolkit

This PDF gives you 19 different types of Lead Magnet, and ways to create them.

Website CTA (Call To Action)

Every page should have a CTA to turn the visitor into a prospect.

Give internal links for the visitor who is trying to navigate to a specific area, and make sure all links are relevant, logical and obvious.

Pop-ups can work, but also experiment with other CTAs on your website, and move them around from time to time to see if that makes a difference to the conversion rate.

We are all unique, and some people want to make a decision quickly, while others want to take more time. So offer a CTA which will appeal to the person who is ready, but don’t make it so that it offends the ones who are not ready yet.

Squeeze Page

It’s a ‘landing page’ really, but we call it a ‘squeeze page’ because we are trying to squeeze their email address into the box. This helps to focus on the reason for this exercise.

The squeeze page has one job, and only one job. If you try to do too much with it you just dilute the main message. There have been countless experiments with video, colours, images, and the overriding message is to just focus on getting the visitor to do just one job – add their email address into the box.

Some squeeze pages work with a massive image which doesn’t even have to be relevant, like a beautiful beach, just really enticing, some work better with just boring text – remember, you just want their email address.

It is important to be relevant, so try to make the page a continuation of the visitor journey. Use the same language, hit the same mental triggers, address the same pain points as the advertising, or post which got them to the squeeze page. They need to feel comfortable and to trust you with their prized possession.

Automate Lead Capture and then Lead Generation?

Your marketing skills and hard work are wasted if you let prospects off the hook.

We all put money and resources into raising awareness and interest for our company, so why waste it by missed opportunities? We need to keep people interested and make them intrigued, but how do we get the time to do it well?

Focus on sealing the holes, and when you are done, then you can concentrate on Lead Generation knowing that your work will bear much more fruit.

When you are done, I’ll show you how to automate the whole process.

In conclusion, the key to effective data capture lies in prioritising your email list as the ultimate digital asset. While Social Media plays a role in attracting prospects, the emphasis should be on building and engaging with your email list for a more engaging and fruitful relationship. Utilising pop-ups, strategically placed CTAs, and focused squeeze pages are effective mechanisms to encourage action and capture leads on your website. Remember, relevance, trust, and a seamless visitor journey are paramount. Once your data capture is optimised, automating the lead generation process becomes the next step towards maximizing the fruits of your marketing efforts.