Tag Archives: how to capture leads on a website

The Art of Using Coupons and Discounts to Boost Your Email List

The Art of Using Coupons and Discounts to Boost Your Email List

Like a love letter sent to a special someone, you really want your subscribers to open your email. If it gets trashed or just floats to the bottom of their inbox, you haven’t reached them with your message and the value of your brand fades. An increasingly popular way to drive engagement with your email marketing is to include a coupon or discount.

Consider the following two headlines:

  • “It’s Springtime, so order our services and enjoy this great weather in style.”
  • “This Spring, take advantage of our 25% off deal and be prepared for Summer.”

The second one has more appeal doesn’t it? The first one is telling your customer what to do and asking for a sale. The second option is more suggestive and demonstrates a willingness on the part of your brand to offer value.

If you can put yourself in your customer’s shoes, you have to admit that you’re far more likely to open an email that is offering you something for nothing, rather than one that is asking you for something. If you’re ready to try coupons as part of your email marketing, get creative on different ways to incorporate the offer.

Clever ways to use coupons as part of your regular email marketing

  • Take advantage of seasons and holidays. Add seasonally relevant coupons to your regular email marketing schedule. Think of how your customers can use your services in the context of Springtime, Valentine’s Day and other relevant cultural events.
  • Get repeat business. Once you’ve sold a customer, offer a special “thank you” coupon 30, 60 or 90 days after the conclusion of their first purchase encouraging them to return by sweetening the pot with a special discount.
  • Tie-in coupons with social media. You can offer a progressive discount for using a coupon while also taking some action regarding your brand’s social media platforms. For example, 10% off for simply using the coupon alone but 15% off if the customer is a Facebook fan and 20% off if they are a fan and share one or more of your Facebook posts in the week prior to redeeming the coupon.

Email marketing has a long-standing track record of driving value for brands by creating a captured audience of individuals who have expressed loyalty or affiliation with your brand. If you fail to deliver value to your list, you’ll see a decline in subscribers. You want to make sure that your subscribers stick around, and you attract more subscribers.

You can use coupons or email list exclusive discounts as a means of driving signups.

In the call-to-action on your site or social channels, encourage your audience to sign-up for your list in exchange for an immediate discount. Make sure to continuously seed your list with new coupons and discounts, so they don’t lose track of the value in their original choice to sign up.

Coupons are an excellent way to provide value to email subscribers, but they shouldn’t be the only method you employ. Ultimately, selling is about conveying value, not discounting price. While everyone loves to save a buck, you should also always be looking for new and creative ways to provide value to your audience by the way of engaging and informative content creation relevant to your brand’s value proposition.

It’s easy to offer coupons with Waftio!

Simply create a simple form web visitors must complete to get the discount and be added to your list, and then either offer the coupon as a discount code or link to a printable coupon. Integrate your Waftio form with Mailchimp, Aweber, and more to have them added to your lists automatically!

Are you using coupons in your email marketing?

How to Create an Effective Free Opt-in Offer

How to Create an Effective Free Opt-in Offer

Getting traffic to your site is great, but what do you do when half of the traffic leaves without purchasing or leaving any trace they were there? Here’s where an opt-in offer comes into play. An opt-in offer will grow your email list and continuously generate profits. The tricky part is convincing someone to give you their email.

The most important things to keep in mind when designing your opt-in offer are:

  • What’s in it for them?
  • What message will resonate with my audience?
  • What plan do I have to ultimately convert them into a customer?

When you ask for someone’s email, offer them something valuable for their information. It’s a must! Offer a resource that has significant enough value to be a good “trade” for their email address.  As well, be upfront about what your subscriber can expect once they give you their email address. How many time will they get an email each week?  Tell them what they will receive and it’ll greatly improve your chances of getting their information.

There is a multitude of different offers to use for the opt-in offer incentive including:

  • Coupon Code
  • Webinar Content
  • Educational information i.e.- video tutorial
  • E-Book Download
  • Contest Entry
  • Exclusive offers

Another method to consider is to get an email address and other information with a loyalty points program.

Starbucks is a perfect example of great customer retention through a loyalty program that allows people to earn stars every time they make a purchase. Customers redeem their stars for free drinks, food, and products.If you offer people incentives to create an account and recurring incentives for goal completions, they’ll be 10 times more likely to return.

Once you’ve established your offer, the next step is deciding what to do once you get the email address.

This is the time to make your company’s message stand out from the emails that fill people’s inbox daily. Choose your message and how you want to deliver it, then design your email to display your message engagingly.

We hate to break it to you, but not all emails get read!  If you can get a 35% open rate on your emails you are doing well.  That’s why you need an offer that helps you gain a volume of new subscribers.

Your main message must pop off your email right away.  The subject line often makes or breaks whether the email is read.

So now that you have your email list and message, you need to think about how to get them back to your site.

Your emails should have easy to read call to actions that will bring people back to your website. Offer a promo, show a new product offering, or include an excerpt from a blog that requires people to go back to your site to continue reading. Offer your subscribers solutions to their problems or something entertaining. Make your contact list look forward to your emails and you will see your conversions rise.

There is proven growth in email marketing you just need to be creative to stand out among the millions of opt-in offers.

Your best bet in creating a successful opt-in offer is to get into the minds of your ideal customers. What do they want to know? What would make them give you their information? Answer that and your opt-in offer will do the lead generation for you.

The Waftio GoToWebinar Integration

The Waftio GoToWebinar Integration

Webinars, a cross between offline seminars and the online classrooms, allow people to interact with experts they normally will never meet. In return, marketers get a captive audience, interested in their specific industry topic, that has already self-identified when they signed up for the webinar. This makes webinars one of the best tools in the marketer’s toolkit for lead generation. While many other Internet marketing strategies can drive traffic to your website, webinars have an additional advantage of identifying who it is that has visited and gathering their contact information.
Here’s a few ways to craft a webinar that will draw plenty of potential customers straight to your doors.

Pick a Killer Topic

Have you noticed how many people are asking you to reveal some of your secrets online? Do your customers all seem to have one unique problem that reoccurs that you happen to excel at solving? Explore topics with large appeal. Check trending topics in social networks or search engines. You’ll get massive interest that way. Announce your topic on social media channels and send them back to your website to sign up for the webinar.

Make It Exciting

You can limit the attendance to give it a more intimate feel or make it a massive two-hour event with multiple speakers. It’s your choice. To set a webinar up with multiple presenters, offer to cross-promote their products and services. Add video and slides to your solo presentation to make it juicier. Include some Q&A. Many people sign up for seminars in the hopes of getting their questions addressed, instead of buying personal consultation time. In this way, you can serve these people in a public venue while creating more lead generation opportunities for yourself.

Do Double Duty with Seminars

You can create marketing material from a seminar, as long as you have permission to use the materials this way from your attendees and presenters. Just take a short clip of a speaker panel, answering one question, or the demo of a specific product or service and publish it to video on Facebook or YouTube. Use snapshots for Instagram. Create transcripts from the webinar and include it in ebooks or as promotional material. Create a survey to find out what types of future topics your participants want to hear more on. Don’t let the end of the seminar be the end of your interaction with attendees!

Keep Them Wanting More

To make sure they stay in their seats for the whole seminar, add a drawing at the end for a big prize for attending the seminar to be given to someone who is present at the end of the random drawing. This can give people more reason to participate and stick around, leading to more opportunities to market other products and services while in the seminar.

Why Waftio Is Ideal for Webinars

Waftio can let you customize your registration and signup form with your design and style. You can collect as much or as little information as you want upon signup. With its integration with your GoToWebinar account, you won’t waste time duplicating effort across multiple systems. It’s all very seamless to the user and you, the business owner. Watfio also has a survey app that you can use after the webinar to help you get some ideas of what worked and what didn’t and how to improve future webinars.

Next time you are thinking of setting up a webinar, use Waftio and watch your marketing leads skyrocket.

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

For those relatively new to SEO and online marketing, one of the most important tools for structuring your marketing is the digital marketing funnel.  This six-stage process describes every step on the journey of finding leads, turning them into sales, and retaining them as customers.

This process is visualized as a funnel or an inverted triangle.  You start with a great many potential leads at the top, but at each step, only some will choose to move further on in the buying journey.  Many leads enter at the top, but only a relative few exit at the bottom as steady customers.

The Digital Marketing Funnel Explained

A Quick Guide To The Six Stages Of The Marketing Funnel

I. Attract

This is the heart of content marketing.  You should have a wide variety of materials, such as blogs, videos, and infographics, designed to bring people to your website in the first place.  Good SEO helps ensure these are near the top of Google searches, where they can be easily seen.

II. Engage

Getting visitors to your website isn’t enough.  The materials there must actively engage them, both by being interesting enough for them to view, and compelling enough they want to share them with friends.  Understanding your market, their needs, and the searches they’re likely running on Google is the key to engaging them.

III. Capture

To move further down the funnel, leads must take the next step and engage with your website in a more active way.  This could be contacting support with questions, or signing up for a newsletter, free ebooks, webinars, or other giveaways that require trading their email address or other customer data.  Once a lead has given away some personal information, they’re far closer to becoming buyers.

IV. Nurture

Once you have means of direct contact with leads who haven’t yet become buyers, it’s important to keep reminding them of your existence.  Emails with special offers, coupons, newsletters, and even social media outreach can all be effective ways to do this.

If they aren’t ready to buy right now, they need to have this drip-feed of content to ensure your business will be the first they think of when they are ready to buy.

V. Convert

This is the actual moment they become customers and is generally handled like any other sales conversion.  They’ll reach out directly to sales staff, and be guided through the final stages of the purchase process.

This also illustrates one way digital marketing is different from offline marketing:  This may be the first time they actually have contact with a live human being at your company, with all other business contact being via website materials and automated emails.

VI.  Measure

Digital sales conversions is a cyclical process which should be continually refined.  Keep track of the results of each stage of the process, and see which methods produce the most conversions. 100% conversions are a practical impossibility, but keep trying to push the percentage higher!

Understanding the marketing funnel will help you gather better leads at the top, and ensure that more of them complete the journey to full-fledged customers.  With this tool, you’ll be on your way to far greater conversions and ROI on your online marketing investments.

5 Ways to Use Waftio Lead Capture Features

5 Ways to Use Waftio Lead Capture Features

Your company website is probably the most powerful marketing tool you have. Unfortunately, too many business owners are underutilizing this power by not capturing leads on their site. This crucial mistake means that you’re not expanding your client base by collecting valuable customer data. The good news is that Waftio offers 5 fun and engaging ways to add lead capture features to your website.

1. Quick Contact Form

One of the simplest ways to use the Waftio lead capture feature is by adding a quick contact form to your website. This form should encourage your online visitors to provide you with vital contact information, such as first and last name, their email address and question or comment.

2. Contests

Contests have become extremely popular among online users. Businesses are using this enthusiasm not just to drive traffic to their website, but also as an effective lead generation tool. Every customer, or prospective customer, that enters your contest with hopes of winning the prize, also provides you with valuable contact information. You can use this data later for marketing purposes.
Create a quick “enter to win” sweepstakes contest and use the Waftio features to make it live, allow only 1 entry per email address, and even end the contest automatically at a set time!

3. eBooks

EBooks provide a great way to provide your customers or potential customers with valuable information, and portray your company as an industry leader. More importantly, eBooks are a great marketing tool for growing leads. As customers sign up to receive your eBook, gather their contact information for future use and email nurture marketing.

Waftio is integrated with Mailchimp, AWeber, and Infusionsoft for easy integration of emails captured into lists in those systems.

4. Webinar Sign-ups

Do you have something you want to teach your customers? Consider hosting a webinar.

This will give you a chance to engage directly with your clients and to promote your business. When hosting a webinar, be sure to use a registration form to collect names and emails. Not only will this allow you to send out email reminders about the webinar, but future emails, as well.

Waftio has direct integration with GotoWebinar, the leading webinar software tool.

5. Event Registration

Need a quick way to capture event registrations across your website?

Whether you are planning a special online event or an in-store special event, be sure to provide an online registration option. This will allow you to track the number of guests that plan to attend your event and gather vital customer information. Use this information to send out event reminders, event follow-up material, and future marketing emails.

With Waftio, these lead capture features can be added to your current website in a variety of ways, such as installing it as a widget pop-up or pop-up box, embedding it on your web page, or adding it directly on your landing page. Waftio’s features can be integrated with MailChimp, InfusionSoft, Aweber, and GoToWebinar. Start using your website to its fullest potential today, with the help of Waftio’s effective and engaging lead capture features.