You need to make sales if you want to stay in business.
And you can’t make sales consistently if you don’t have a system for bringing in high-quality leads.
Here’s what we are going to discuss today:
- What is a lead?
- What is lead generation?
- What is the difference between high-quality leads and low-quality leads?
- How to create an effective lead generation campaign?
- How to convert leads into paying customers?
So are you ready to start generating leads?
Continue reading…
What is a Lead?
A lead is a potential customer who has:
- Expressed an interest in your product or service
- Given you their contact details (e.g. an email address)
Note that a person has to meet both of these criteria to be considered a lead.
For Example:
Someone who has visited your website isn’t a lead but someone who has both visited your website and subscribed to your email list is.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is the process of converting potential customers into leads by getting them to share their contact details with you.
The Most Popular Lead Generation Strategy
The most common approach to lead generation is offering the potential customer a freebie in exchange for their email address.
For Example:
One of the freebies that we offer in exchange for a potential customer’s email address is a book called “Marketing Secrets Blackbook”.
In it, our co-founder Russell Brunson shares 99 marketing secrets that helped him take ClickFunnels from zero to $100,000,000 in sales in just 3 years.
You can get a free digital copy of the book by entering your email address and clicking the “Get Access Now!” button.
It’s worth noting that some businesses ask for more information. They might want to know the potential customer’s name, company name, job title, phone number, etc.
This is usually reserved for high-touch products and services that require a salesperson to close the deal.
All that extra information helps to qualify leads so that the sales team could focus on the ones that are most likely to convert to paying customers.
However, if you are selling a low-touch product that can be sold via email without requiring an involvement of a salesperson, it’s best to only ask for the name and email address or just the email address of the potential customer.
Keep in mind that the more information you request, the less likely the potential customer is to provide it, so it’s best to only ask for what is absolutely necessary.
Other Lead Generation Strategies
There are also other leads generation strategies such as:
- Cold calling where you reach out to potential customers via phone.
- Cold email where you reach out to potential customers via email.
- Newspaper, magazine, and TV ads that encourage potential customers to visit your website and subscribe to your email list.
- Podcast ads that encourage potential customers to visit your website and subscribe to your email list.
- Loyalty programs where potential customers can register for a membership card that offers discounts.
…etc.
All these strategies are worth experimenting with. You never know what might work!
High-Quality Leads vs Low-Quality Leads
Leads can be divided into two categories:
- High-quality leads that are likely to convert to paying customers
- Low-quality leads that are unlikely to convert to paying customers
When you are just starting out, you don’t have any sales data, so identifying high-quality leads might be difficult. In that case, it’s best to simply focus on generating as many leads as possible.
However, once you start making some sales, you can analyze your sales data to see who is buying your products or services.
Ask yourself:
What do the people who have already purchased something from you have in common?
Once you figure that out, you can adjust your lead generation strategy in a way that would allow you to:
- Bring in more high-quality leads
- Eliminate low-quality leads
For Example:
When Noah Kagan, the founder of AppSumo and Sumo, realized that female email subscribers rarely converted to paying customers, he decided to exclude women from his Facebook ads campaigns.
Here’s how he explains his reasoning:
“It’s not that I don’t like women. I love them!
But the point is that they are not actually as interested in my content.
There’s probably someone who can better share that type of content with them.
So I target my audience which is males, 25-44.”
You need to continuously optimize your lead generation strategy for lead quality if you want to make the most out of your marketing budget.
There’s not much point in collecting the email addresses of people who are never going to buy anything from you, right?
How to Create an Effective Lead Generation Campaign
So how can you consistently generate high-quality leads?
Here’s a simple three-step process for creating an effective lead generation campaign:
Step #1: Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is the aforementioned freebie that you offer in exchange for the potential customer’s email address.
It can be anything that the potential customer can either download to their device or access online:
- A report
- An eBook
- A cheat sheet
- An email course
- A video course
- An app
…etc.
What matters is that:
- Your lead magnet provides a solution to a problem that your potential customers are struggling with.
- That problem is either the same or related to the one that you address with your products and services.
That way, your lead magnet not only serves as an incentive to subscribe to your email list but also becomes the first rung in your Value Ladder sales funnel.
However, as we explained on Instagram:
People ARE NOT going to give you their contact information unless you give them something super valuable in return.
That’s why if you want your lead magnet to be effective you need to make sure that it’s super valuable.
It should be something that people would happily pay money for should you ever decide to charge for it.
Example: Nick Stephenson’s “$0 to $1k per Month” Video Course
Nick Stephenson is a best-selling author and marketing coach who teaches writers how to promote their books.
His lead magnet is a free 7-day video course in which he shows fellow authors how to get their book sales to the point where they are consistently making $1,000/month from book royalties.
“$0 to $1k Per Month” is a comprehensive introduction to book marketing that covers everything from copywriting to generating traffic to email marketing to paid ads to book launches.
Can you believe that Nick is giving away this video course for free? He could easily charge for it if he wanted to!
But that’s the thing:
This free course gets people excited about Nick’s premium products.
Think about it: if the guy packs so much value into a freebie, then you will surely get your money’s worth if you buy one of his products, right?
That’s the effect you want your lead magnet to have. It should make people confident that if they buy something from you, you will deliver what you have promised.
Note that this works the other way too: if your lead magnet is a letdown, people will be less likely to give your premium products a shot.
That’s why using a low-quality lead magnet can have disastrous consequences for your business. Don’t ever make that mistake.
Step #2: Create a Landing Page for Your Lead Magnet
A landing page is a web page that is designed to get the visitor to take a specific action.
In this case, you want to create a lead magnet landing page, meaning a web page that is designed to get the visitor to download your lead magnet.
You can think of it as a sales page for your lead magnet where your aim is to persuade the potential customer to give you their email address in exchange for the freebie.
Here are the key elements that you want to include in your lead magnet landing page:
- A headline that conveys the main benefit of your lead magnet.
- Copy that reiterates that main benefit and expands on it + introduces additional benefits.
- Description of what exactly the potential customer will get.
- Social proof that reinforces the value of your lead magnet.
- An opt-in form that asks either the potential customer’s name and email address or just their email address.
- A prominent call-to-action button.
Remember, no matter how great your lead magnet is, you still have to put effort into selling it!
Let’s take a look at Nick Stephenson’s “$0 to $1k Per Month” video course landing page.
Above the fold you see a headline that immediately makes it clear what it’s all about, a description of the course, and a call-to-action button.
Right below that there’s a promotional video:
Then you see the first piece of social proof: a testimonial from a New York Times best-selling author.
Below that testimonial there’s another description of the course that explains how it works:
Then there’s Nick’s bio where he uses his status as a USA Today bestselling author and the fact that he has helped over 75k authors grow their sales as social proof.
Below the bio there’s more social proof: a testimonial from another New York Times bestselling author.
Then there’s a detailed course breakdown:
Below that you see information about the bonus course + a call to action:
Then there’s the final piece of social proof: a testimonial from a well-known book marketing expert.
Below that testimonial there’s more information about what you will get:
And then there’s a final call to action:
As you can see, not only does Nick offer a super valuable lead magnet but he also goes to great lengths to persuade potential customers to sign up for it.
In other words: he’s treating his lead magnet like a product, not like some throwaway freebie.
We recommend you to do the same if you are serious about generating leads.
Step #3: Start Driving Traffic to the Lead Magnet Landing Page
Once you have your lead magnet landing page, it’s time to start driving traffic to it.
You can do so by:
- Mentioning your lead magnet in your blog posts.
- Promoting it on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Using paid ads to get your lead magnet in front of your ideal customers.
For Example:
As you might remember, we have mentioned our “Marketing Secrets Blackbook” in the beginning of this article. There’s also something waiting for you at the end of it!
We also promote our lead magnets on our Instagram page, YouTube channel, and through paid ads.
Check out our YouTube channel!
Lead Nurturing: Convert Leads Into Customers
Okay, so you got a potential customer’s email address, now what?
You should view this as the beginning of your relationship with that person. Your job now is to strengthen it. How can you do that?
Simple:
Provide value in each and every email that you send them.
You can do so by:
- Offering solutions to the problems that the potential customer is struggling with.
- Providing free resources that they might benefit from such as formulas, templates, apps, etc.
- Sharing links to interesting content such as articles, research papers, YouTube videos, etc.
Of course, you are running a business, not a charity organization, so you need to pitch your products and services as well.
However, it’s important to make sure that even your sales emails provide value.
That way, people who read the email but decided not to buy will still walk away having benefited from it in some way.
For Example:
In one of his sales emails, our co-founder Russell Brunson shared a story of how he got people interested in paying $750k for his iPhone.
Yes, you read that right.
$750k. For his iPhone.
Russell used that story to illustrate the Hook, Story, Offer framework, which he then tied to sales funnels, making it easy for him to transition into the sales pitch:
It’s probably safe to say that the people who decided not to sign up for the ClickFunnels free 14-day trial still got value out of this email.
And that makes them more likely to open the next email from Russell!
Conclusion
Implementing what you have learned in this article will help you consistently bring in high-quality leads.
But generating leads is not enough. You need to convert them into paying customers and then into repeat customers. That’s what sales funnels are all about.
Want to learn how to create your first sales funnel?
Check out our 5 Day Challenge.
You will learn how to:
- Generate unlimited leads
- Create your first lead magnet
- Build your first sales funnel
- Create a simple 6-email follow-up sequence
- And launch your funnel
…in just five days!
So don’t hesitate.