You Just Collected a Bunch of Leads from Social Media. Now What?
If you’ve listened to any Facebook marketing guru out there, then you’ll know that one of the best ways to build your email list is to run social media ads that direct to a conversion page. Of course you need to provide something of value in order for someone to be willing enough to give out a few lead details about themselves.
But let’s say this social media guru’s advice was solid. Let’s say you ran their plan and you got tons of qualified people to fill out a form after they landed on a good landing page.
Now what?
You may have dozens or hundreds of emails but may not have made a sale yet.
Keep in mind, you percentage rates for leads will be far higher than actual sales. If your landing page is designed to sell a product right away versus provide free information for a customer by giving you a few contact details, the list you will get will be far lower than if you provided FREE value.
So before we move on, this post will be based on lead information collected from an optimized landing page from a social media ad that gave something of value to a prospect for FREE. That could be a free webinar, an ebook, some kind of PDF or calculator, etc.
With this in mind, you’ve now collected a bunch of lead information. Now what?
Follow Through and Follow Up
Any sales person will tell you that follow-up is key, and even I can understand that. I often times click on ads, download the ebook, and then store it away for a time that I can get a chance to read it. But I never do.
This would be a great opportunity to reach out to your prospect and ask if they had a chance to read the ebook or download the PDF. And depending on what webinar software you’re running, you could probably already tell if they watched it. But if they didn’t, it’s a great way to reach out and send them a link to a recorded version of it.
Yeah we know your secret. The thing was recorded the whole time. You never did that live, but we won’t tell.
It’s often best to follow up with a quick email. But make it personal and use their first name, like, “Hey Sarah, I saw you were interested in some business coaching. Did your ebook download okay? Let me know what you thought of the naked guy parachuting onto the cruise ship part.”
Maybe that last part wasn’t in your ebook. But make it about a fact or case study that is eye opening or engaging. Something that Sarah will read and think, “Oh! That sounds interesting, I should stop procrastinating and read that ebook!”
If she hasn’t read it, then perhaps you have persuaded her to read it. If she has, the perhaps you’re in for some meaning customer engagement and have opened the doors for dialog and for her to be a potential client!
To this point though, let’s not forget about “Follow Through”. Follow through isn’t necessarily the same thing as a follow-up. Following up is what I just described. A follow through is when you say you’re going to do something, you make sure you do it.
So if your landing page says, “Fill out the form and we’ll email you your free ebook!” Then email. them. the. ebook.
Your follow-ups will be pointless if you can’t even make good on your follow throughs.
I know what you’re thinking, “We just covered emailing…” And you’d be right. We did. But that emailing was meant to be more of a personal/sales follow-up. Now we’re talking about email marketing.
You now have a list. This is the point of the post where we get into exactly what you do with that valuable list these gurus keep talking about.
Email marketing is simply deploying emails on a mass scale typically automatically. These emails generally have a call-to-action that gets people to open them and visit your site to either read your latest blog post or purchase an item or service from your site.
I realize it’s 2018, but email marketing is still one of the top marketing sources today. In fact, it’s projected that over 2.9 billion people will have email by 2019. And if that isn’t enough, 59% of B2B marketers say email marketing is the most effective channel in generating revenue.
Segment Email List
However you collect your email leads, you want to make sure you’ll be able to segment your list, whether that’s creating your lists based on the campaign you collected those leads from or based on the information you asked your leads to fill out.
For example, you might want to know if your customers are male or female to send emails with tailored messages or products based on gender. In this case, you would want to make sure you collect that information from your landing page form.
By why segment your list?
Well because open rates for segmented lists are over 14% higher and click-throughs are over 100% higher than non-segmented lists.
The reasoning when you think about it is simple, people want respond to tailored messages versus generic ones. Marketing is becoming more and more personal.
Deploy Emails Based on Action
One of the best things about email marketing is the ability to automate them. But not just automating different emails, automating different emails based on the interaction a user takes with your emails.
Think about it, if a user doesn’t open your first email, you can have a second email automatically deploy with a more enticing subject line to try and get that open.
If a user does open but doesn’t click through, then you have have an automation strategy that deploys a follow-up email to sweeten the pot on the deal to get them to click through.
All of this is possible with email automation, which 51% of companies are currently using.
Imagine all the time you could save be pre-creating your emails and then having them deploy automatically and sell for you?
If you’re looking for a great resource for learning how to create effective email marketing campaigns, HubSpot has a pretty awesome course on it that’s worth checking out.
Some great programs to help automate your email systems are:
Related: “7 Tools to Automate Your Digital Marketing”
Remarket
If you’re not familiar with the concept of remarketing, it’s simply when you market to someone who’s already interacted with your band in some way.
For instance, if you were to implement remarketing with the Google Display Network, anyone who has visited your site could be set up to receive custom remarketing ads based on the pages they’ve visited or the interactions they’ve taken on your site.
Just like that, you can take your email list you’ve collected names and emails from and set up a Custom Audience list in Facebook Ads Manager and deliver ads to those leads through Facebook.
So yes, your list you’ve gathered isn’t only good for email marketing. It’s also fantastic for remarketing through Facebook and other social media platforms.
Summary
Finally, you have your email marketing list and you now know what to do with it. But don’t forget to keep track of your prospects down the purchasing funnel. Your leads are going to take different actions, so make sure you keep those automation campaigns running, lists segmented, and remarketing in use to help personalize each buyers journey
Marketing automation programs aren’t free, but you know what is? Things we send you by clicking the link below!