4 Must-Have Capabilities of Your Website: The Rest Are Just Fluff

someone browsing a website on a laptop

A website is necessary if you want to compete in today’s business environment. It gets you to the starting line. Without it, you don’t even get to be in the race. 

Without it, you don’t exist.

But another problem with websites is a lot of people tend to focus on fluff — the pretty things. Instead of focusing on the core functionality and the must-haves, they focus on shiny things. 

That’s why in this article, I’ll list down the essential functionalities of a website. This post is not an SEO article. Rather, it’s focused on the needs of your business. 

4 Essential Elements of a Business Website

1. Information About You or Your Business

The first quality a business website needs is basic information about you and your business. It’s important that you communicate your unique value proposition so that your visitors will:

  1. Understand what you offer
  2. Differentiate you from your competitors
  3. Find a reason to trust you (and eventually do business with you)

Your website should also contain the most basic information about the business like the following: 

  1. Your name (especially if it’s different from the “brand” and domain you are using)
  2. Address
  3. Contact information

It’s also recommended that you include details about key people (or everyone) in your organization. This is one of the trends in modern websites that makes the business more human

2. Ability to Generate Leads

As a business, you need leads. Otherwise, you will not have anyone to sell to (customers). And if you don’t have customers who are willing to pay for what you offer, you’ll eventually go out of business.

There are two common ways businesses generate leads from their websites: 

  1. Contact Us Page
  2. Newsletter Subscription

Both have variations of forms that allow visitors to enter their information. This information then goes to whomever is in-charge (usually marketing or sales). Ideally, it should go directly to a CRM or an email marketing software.

The second lead generation source most websites have is a newsletter subscription form. For example, my own website a form like this on every article — which you’d also notice at the side if you’re reading this from a computer.

Sample Newsletter Form

Bottom line: you need to have the ability to generate leads in your website. 

Social fans and followers aren’t leads

In another article, I listed three criteria for what makes up a lead:

  1. Available
  2. Valid
  3. Reachable

Together, these criteria will help you determine what really matters. Take a look at Facebook Page likes or Twitter followers. 

While they may be available and valid, they are not reachable. Meaning, you can’t contact them in a proper way. That’s why you keep hearing that these numbers are vanity metrics. They don’t add value to your business. 

More offers equal more leads

One concept I’d like to highlight is that the more landing pages you have on your website, the more leads you can generate.

The contact us page is an example of a landing page. At its essence, a landing page is a page on your site that allows you to generate leads. In other words, it’s a page on your website with a form that visitors can fill-out. 

According to a survey of more than 7,000 businesses, companies see a 55% increase in leads when their landing pages increase from 10 to 15. The same report also found that those with over 40 landing pages increase conversions by 500%. 

Ask yourself this question, how many landing pages does your website have? 

One contact us form? One newsletter subscription form? 

Quick calculation

Here’s another interesting statistic to consider: the conversion rates for landing pages is between 1-3%. 

If you only have one contact us page as your landing page, how many visits to that page do you need to generate 50 leads? 

The answer is 1,667 visits at a 3% conversion. Or 5,000 visits at 1% conversion rate. 

How many visits does your contact us page get on a monthly basis? Is it even that close? 

The solution is to create more marketing offers.

3. Analytics and Performance Tracking

The next key capability of your business website is performance tracking. After all, if you don’t measure what you do, you can’t improve. 

It’s already 2020 and I still see websites without tracking installed. 

Google Analytics is one of the most well-known analytics software for your website. I’ve written a couple of articles about it already, so I won’t repeat it here again. If your website still doesn’t have Google Analytics, here’s how you can install Google Analytics properly

Oh, and did I mention it’s also free? All you need is a Google account (Gmail). 

4. Communication/Messaging

Another key component your website needs is the ability to communicate or send messages to your leads. Technically, this isn’t part of the website itself. Rather, it’s often another system like an email marketing software.

Nonetheless, it is vital that you have the ability to communicate to your leads and customers. Without it, it’s as if you are a business without humans.

One thing to note, though, is that your communication has to be helpful

And no, your sales and promos and discounts aren’t helpful. They may be helpful for you to increase your revenues, but not for the recipient. 

Lastly, if you send those types of email, please, don’t call them newsletters. I’ve written a lot about email marketing. So, familiarize yourself with the three pillars of effective email marketing first. 

Then, start sending out these 12 different types of email instead of your promos.

5. Revenue Generation (Bonus)

This is a bonus criterion. 

Why? 

Because not all businesses “sell” online. But if you do, having the ability to generate revenues is definitely something you need to have. 

There are tons of ways you can add this functionality. The simplest one is to add a PayPal buy now button, or use some other provider like Stripe. 

If you sell products, you’d more likely have a complete eCommerce website where you can add products, set prices, different SKUs, manage inventory and order fulfilment. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Over to You

Like I said at the beginning, this article isn’t meant for SEO. This shows the basic requirements any business should have on their website. 

If you’re more advanced in this area, you might notice I didn’t talk about chatbots, or videos, or social media. That’s intentional. Because most often, people tend to focus on those shiny, new things instead of the fundamentals. 

Your website is the most basic requirement for any business today. Without it, it’s as if you don’t exist. 

If you’re missing some key capabilities listed here, go talk to your IT guy, or outsourced provider, or shop around. It’s essential that you have all these if you want to compete in the same arena as your competitors. 

What do you think? Did I miss any must-have functionality of websites? Let me know in the comments below.

35+ Email List Segmentation (Plus Sample Use Cases)

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Email marketing doesn’t work.”

“People don’t read their emails anymore.”

Have you ever heard these before? If you’re a digital marketer, you would have most likely said these statements yourself.

“You’ve got to be on TikTok and SnapChat!”

“Email marketing is dead.”

Or not.

Email marketing will not be successful without effective list segmentation. The only reason marketers claim that email marketing is dead is because they don’t know how to segment their list. To them, their entire list is the newsletter list. Nothing else. They don’t create content around different topics. And that’s hte main reason they can’t segment their list. That’s the main reason they see poor results.

Research over the years across industries all over the world have already proven that without segmentation, email marketing will not work.

According to one study, it can increase sales leads and revenues by as much as 24%! And yes, it will increase your open rates and click-through rates as well. But you know those are just the basic email marketing metrics, right? It’s the ones that affect your bottomline are more important.

list segmentation results resized 600

The only way email marketing will be effective without segmentation is when you are in a very niche topic with a very niche audience — which is basically its own form of segmentation 😉

But email marketing is not dead. It still boasts the highest ROI across all marketing channels. One way to quickly differentiate yourself from the rest?

Segmentation.

There are 4 broad categories of segmentation: geographic, demographics, psychographics, and behavioral. Among these, behavioral is the most powerful one.

We’ll go through them all below.

Preparatory Points

All use cases below are using the example of a local pet store with eCommerce shop that only offer its within Metro Manila. Some segmentation listed below doesn’t apply to our pet store so there are no use cases presented.

The data discussed in this list doesn’t have to be asked all in one long-form. What do you think will happen if a single form on your website asks for 25 questions at once? They’d probably not fill-it out.

Some of these can be collected later on using progressing profiling; while some need not be asked — meaning, they are collected automatically.

4 Categories of Segmentation

Geographic Segmentation

1. Address

Address refers to any location you either have customers or want to serve. For example, you may have 3 stores across 3 different cities.

Sample Use Case:

Each of the 3 stores partnered with a veterinary clinic near them. They are offering a free rabies vaccination for the whole month of May.

You might want to send an email to remind your customers to get their free rabies vaccination. So, instead of using generic message in your email, you can make it more personal by using the residents of each city to go to the respective veterinary clinics that were endorsed. This would make it relevant to the recipients. Think about it. Would a resident of BGC travel all the way to QC just to go to the vet? Or would it seem more likely that a Makati resident visit a vet clinic in Makati too?

2. Language

This applies more to international markets, but can be used locally too. If you deliver nationwide, you can show personalization by using local dialects. Or if your customer-base has a distinct community, use that to your advantage.

3. Climate

Climate in the Philippines doesn’t change much as opposed to other countries with four seasons. But you can use the two seasons we have as themes for your campaigns, especially for your email list.

4. Area

Area refers to the bigger geographic location of the address you collected.

Sample Use Case:

When asking in your forms, you break down the 17 cities in metro manila and add an others field. When people choose others, you can set your eCommerce platform to not enable further purchasing and have a text displayed as “Sorry, we only deliver to Metro Manila at this moment.”

Demographics Segmentation

1. Birthdays

Birthdays are a great way to reconnect with your customers and give them something of value.

Sample Use Case:

Show your customers that you appreciate them by sending them a simple thank you email on the day of their birthday. Or if you want to take it a step further, write them a real thank you card saying how much you appreciate them. That’s it. No selling. Just appreciation.

2. Age

Another way to use the date you already have is to calculate age. Age can be used as a way to craft the primary message of your campaign.

Sample Use Case:

Provided that you’re margins can take it — or as an organizational strategy to differentiate yourself — you offer discounts on the day/week/month your birthday according to the age. For example, you chose a day as your period for this offering.

You offer X% off on ALL products / services when customers come in on their birthdays. When a customer comes in on his 30th birthday, they get 30% discount on everything they buy in your store.

You can add conditions here such as any day 7 days before or after the birthday, or within the birth month.

3. Other Dates

Apart from birthdays, there are significant dates that might matter to your organization. Think of anniversaries, first purchase, last purchase, etc.

In the case of our local pet store, we can collect birthdays of their pets!

Sample Use Cases:

You send an email to pet owners during the birth month of their pets. For example, you can offer them a 50% discount on all purchases during this month.

You can also use this data to create lead nurture emails that guide them along the recommended life of a dog. For example, on weeks 5-6 the pet owner should start thinking about their puppies training plan. Then starting week 7 or 8, the actual training starts.

Or another way you can use dates is during the anniversary of their subscription to your list. You can send a simple thank you email, or some sort of personalized message to them for joining your email list.

4. Gender

Knowing the gender of your customer can sometimes work wonders for your organization.

Sample Use Case:

This is an oversimplification, but accessories for pets (clothes, shoes, etc.) are often bought by women. So, you can send a campaign targeting only pet parents who are women. This gives you a higher chance of engagement and ROI instead of sending to everyone on your list.

5. Education

This refers to their educational attainment. Higher education usually mean two things: the person has a high sense of accomplishment and/or a little well-off in life (whether that’s by their own doing or through family).

While this may not be an important information for our pet store example, your organization might be different and need this information (e.g. B2B and coaching businesses).

6. Social Status

Social status refers to whether they are single, married, etc. Looking at changes in this status may give you an idea as to how their behavior may change.

Sample Use Case:

(not for pet store eCommerce shop)

You can use the change in social status as part of your advertisement campaigns. For example, when a person changes their status from single to engaged, they now become an audience for your campaign. Let’s say you sell customized gifts for wedding giveaways. You can create an ad campaign that targets only newly engaged couples for this.

7. Family

Depending on how you look at it, you can either use this field to collect the number of people in the household, ask if they are by themselves or living with relatives, etc.

8. Life Stage

If it’s relevant, you can ask for where they are in their lives, although this can be inferred from their age. The standard life stages are infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.

Of course, most probably can’t ask infants and children. The point here is that for each of these life stages, people have different interests, actions, and behaviors associated with them. Use that to your advantage when crafting your campaigns.

9. Occupation/Job Title

Occupation is usually an open-ended question where people type in their job titles. For a pet store, this doesn’t make sense to collect. But if you’re a SaaS software, it does makes sense to collect this information. You get to learn more about your audience.

This can be by department, e.g. marketing, sales, it, management; or by title, e.g. chief happiness officer, head of business development.

Before choosing which one to use, always apply the most important rule when it comes to asking for information on forms (and therefore segmentation): will it help you know your audience better? If it will not help you understand them better, don’t bother asking it. If you won’t use it, again, don’t ask the question.

10. Role

Role is somewhat related to occupation. The difference is that this usually refers to the rank inside their organization. Depending on how you define these levels, that will determine the options your customers can choose.

For example, the options for these could be: student/intern, individual contributor, manager, director, vice-president, C-suite.

Each of the roles presented above are different because an individual contributor will have different concerns from the CEO.

These roles don’t apply to our pet store example, but definitely for B2B companies.

11. Industry

This is self-explanatory. For our local pet store, it doesn’t make sense to collect this at all. But for B2B, this is especially important. Some B2C might also benefit from this, especially the software companies.

Did you know that the Philippines has its own standard industry classification list?

12. Size

This can refer to company size, or family size, depending on your industry.

In the pet store example, this can be a family size or number of pets. For B2B companies, this will be the number of employees in the company.

Sample Use Case:

Let’s say you ask for the number of dogs in the household. If you combine this with pet birthdates, you would know the ages of the dogs.

Bonus points if you also ask for the names and other information of the pets! So you know each dog’s name, birthday, breed, gender, and a whole lot more.

These will help you really create customized messages for them. For example, you can create a segment then send them a big 15kg dog food campaign:

  • dogs in a single household = 3+ (indicating lots of dogs)
  • all dogs ages between 1+ and 7 (indicating dogs are adults, but not mature)

Psychographics Segmentation

This is the second way you can segment your email list. Here’s a simple way to distinguish demographics from psychographics.

Demographics explain “who” your buyer is, while psychographics explain “why” they buy.

1. Persona

Personas are your ideal customer profiles. They are used to create targeted content and messaging across all your channels.

Sample Use Case:

“If you want to receive free rabies vaccination for your pets…” or “If you want to receive free rabies vaccination for your dogs/cats…”

You can make it more personal by using “dog” for the dog owners and “cat” for cat owners.

2. Lifestyle

Lifestyle refers to how people live their life. You might have heard people use “lifestyle” to describe someone who goes to Starbucks everyday and speaks English all the time.

You might also heard people describe their lifestyle as a minimalist. Regardless of how you use this, the better you understand why they act or buy, the better your marketing results will be.

3. Concerns

Concerns are what keeps your customers up at night. For pet owners, the most common concerns are health of their pets…

  • “are they eating properly?” (nutrition) or
  • “should i be worried about any sickness /death?” (rabies, parvovirus, etc), or
  • “i’m worried because they might bite my neighbor.”

Sample Use Case:

These are all valid concerns of the customers for our pet store. The pet store can then use these information to provide new email (and social) subscribers to ask if these are any of their concerns.

Once they do, they get enrolled in specific email nurturing campaigns to educate them more about these issues.

To learn more about how to create lead nurturing campaigns, check out this step-by-step guide.

4. Personality

It pays to know your market’s default disposition. This will help you guide how you communicate.

For example, you’re an outgoing marketer. But, your customers are mostly reserved. What do you think will happen if you continue using fluffy words, colorful design, and everything just stands out?

Knowing this doesn’t limit you to your campaigns. You can use this knowledge to guide you in crafting your entire website copy (and all your campaigns).

5. Values

What do your customers value the most? Is it money? Is it convenience? Do they appreciate high quality work?

If you’re trying to sell high-end, specialized dog food that costs 800 per kilo, but your customers care about price, you won’t get the results you’re expecting.

Your actions as a business in general has to match what your customers value. Otherwise, you will have a hard time implementing successful marketing campaigns.

6. Attitudes

Attitudes are a way of thinking or feeling towards something. What does your customer feel about a year-long sale? Year after year? Does your customer smile or cringe when they hear your brand name? Or are they wondering what your brand is all about?

Behavioral Segmentation

1. Products/Services Availed

This one is also self-explanatory.

Identify what your customers bought from you so you can send them related info for that product/service later on, or upsell/cross-sell something that is related.

Sample Use Case:

You looked at your database and saw that a lot of dog owners are buying 2kg bags of dog food. You’re assuming they are doing so only because that’s what they see displayed in-store.

You then send out an email to these specific customers to tell them you have 15kg bags of these dog food. You have limited stocks of them. And that they can save 15% compared to buying seven 2kg bags.

2. Intent

Intent is another way most organizations implement campaigns on — whether or not they will buy from you. You can use this to guide product launches, etc. For example, you can create a simple survey asking whether people will be a product with these features. Or given a product, ask how much they will most likely buy it for.

All things being equal, it’s known that past behavior (like previous purchases) is the best predictor of future behavior. Asking for intent is a hypothetical question. People say all kinds of things but rarely follows through.

One way to really execute on this is to use pre-orders. This means they pay you now while you develop and launch your new product/service. If people aren’t buying it, dig deeper to find the reason:

  • Do they not trust you?
  • Do they don’t trust the product/service you’re developing?
  • Is there something you need to change that will make them buy it?
  • Is it the price?

If after analyzing the different angles and people still aren’t pre-ordering, that means there’s probably no need for the product/service you’re thinking.

Take note that if you don’t deliver, you won’t be able to do this again. It will greatly damage your brand.

3. Buyer Stage

Buyer stage, or the stage in the buyer’s journey, allows you to separate what content to send them.

A person who started her research process (awareness) won’t be happy seeing promos about your products. She’ll be happier seeing whether or not this product can help me solve my problems first. Because if not, no amount of promotion and discounting can and will persuade her to buy from you.

As a general rule of thumb, use this breakdown to guide your content creation:

  • 50% in the awareness stage
  • 30% in the consideration stage
  • 20% in the decision stage

Alternatively, you can read more about the 5 stages of awareness.

4. Occasion

It pays to know which occasion your customers are preparing/buying for. This will help you communicate more effectively.

For the pet store, this isn’t much of an issue because there’s typically no cyclical periods in raising a pet (except for birthdays).

But if you’re a new accounting firm and eager to get clients, a campaign to get other people to switch to you won’t do very well if you’re sending this in March and April — tax season. You’d be better off holding this off in May or June after everyone has finished filing their tax returns.

Maybe even run a campaign targeting people who had a negative experience with their accountants. Think about it. You’d have less competition because other firms are done with their tax season campaign. But if your campaign targets people who had negative experiences with their current firm, you can lay the groundwork so you can capture their business.

5. Engagement

Engagement means how engaged your leads are. If your email marketing software is connected to social, you will have the ability to track the interactions your company had with the customer. For some, this can be identified using lead scoring.

Sample Use Case:

You can send freebies to your most engaged customers, ask them to refer you, or a simple thank you. On the other side, you can create a separate win-back campaign to your least engaged subscribers (or worse, people who say something negative about you).

6. Buying Frequency

Buying frequency refers to how often these people buy from you at a certain period. There might be some technical roadblocks, but it is worth combining offline data with online data to get the whole picture.

Sample Use Case:

For example, a customer buys dog food online 4x a year. If you don’t combine this with offline data, you might think this customer won’t go over that limit. But, if you look at offline data, this customer might be buying straight from the store itself after seeing the vet — and that’s every 6 months. So the customer only buys online if they don’t visit the vet.

If you know this, you can send a special campaign for these group of customers and offer them free shipping or maybe even a subscription offer. That way, they don’t have to stop by your store or worry about not having enough dog food.

As a side note, most Philippine companies waste this important data point. A lot of companies offer their loyalty programs. But, 99% of them offer the same thing — buy x times, get 1 free. They don’t go beyond this point.

7. Content Topic

This refers to broader categories of the content you produce. For example, our pet store might have multiple articles on training, first time pet owners, choosing the right food, etc.

Sample Use Case:

Let’s say you create content around different topics related to taking care of your dog:

  • First-time pet owners
  • Training 101
  • Choosing the right dog food

You can ask your list directly for which topics they are interested in, or log in your email marketing software and group people who visited these topics and send only those content.

8. Interest Level

The interest level can be about different stages your list goes through. For example, it can be as simple as beginner, intermediate, and advance.

A first-time pet owner will have different sets of questions/concerns than someone who already has five dogs in the house. Consider that when it comes to segmenting your list.

Or in other industries, let’s say you’re someone who teaches Facebook Marketing. You might use the beginner, intermediate, and advance segmentation. For example, topics in your beginner level include adding the Facebook Pixel, different types of audiences, and the different campaign structures. But for your advanced level, you might cover retargeting, evergreen campaigns, and combining FB ads with Google Ads (and other PPC).

9. Content Format

This refers to the different types of content your audience consumes — i.e. blog articles, eBooks, webinars, PDF downloads, etc.

If your content marketing is on its A-game, you can further improve your ROI when you distinguish which ones your list prefers.

Sample Use Case:

Whenever you send out a new content email, you noticed that your existing leads don’t download your PDF that much.

On the other hand, you noticed that when you share videos about the content offering you just launched, you get a lot of engagement.

In your next email, instead of sending an email asking them to download, you can include the video about it. This might give you a better way of engaging your list.

10. Content Engagement

This refers to the amount of time leads are spending with your content.

This is an indication of their interest in your company, and should be used to either reawaken waning interest, or move leads along through the sales cycle while they’re at their height of engagement with your content.

Again, depending on the marketing software you are using, this can be tracked automatically and give you notifications.

Sample Use Case:

For example, you setup a notification in your subscription pricing page that when people come back to it 3x in 7 days, but didn’t buy yet. This way, you can send a manual email or call them up directly to ask them if they have questions about this subscription.

While this may be an overkill when it comes to our pet store, this is usually how SaaS companies do their marketing and sales. They know that people visiting their pricing page a couple of times in a short amount of time means they are actively looking and looking to buy soon. If they can speak with you, answer your questions and concerns, you’re most likely going to buy from them.

11. Buying Behavior

Change in buying behavior can indicate the person is becoming more or less interested in your organization. This is somewhat similar to buying frequency, or the products/services they availed, so take that into consideration.

If you look at frequency to determine how you can further segment your campaign, you can think of buying behavior as indication of whether they are still going to be a customer or not.

Sample Use Case:

If someone regularly buys dog food every two months, then suddenly they didn’t in two consecutive 2-month periods, what does that mean? If they buy cakes annually for their furry friends’ birthday, then didn’t buy this year, what does that mean?

In both cases, you can create a campaign that reminds them about their purchase, or maybe even offer a small discount. Maybe you can even remind them about your relationship (they bought 16 bags in the last 2 years) or something to that effect.

12. Call-to-action clicks or Clicks with tags

These are a special type of link clicks that allow you to segment your list further. More sophisticated marketing software does this tracking automatically. But for marketers who don’t have the budget, simple UTM tags will do the trick.

This replaces the need to ask them in your forms. And as you know, shorter forms lead to more conversions.

Sample Use Case:

Send an email that asks for the recipient’s input. For example, which statement best describes you:

  • first-time pet parent
  • i have several pets before

Then, when they click on the “first-time pet parent,” they get tagged into that segment already. The same holds true for the other choices.

Then, you can use this segmentation to personalize the content you’re sending. A first-time pet parent needs more hand-holding. You explain more things and provide more resources. But the experienced one will find that annoying. Instead, you can simply sent short reminders. That way, you’re simply reminding them of things they should have known already.

13. Satisfaction Rating

If you’re running feedback surveys or customer satisfaction surveys (which you should), you can segment people in this different groups. For example, the most known feedback survey is the NPS.

You can segment your promoters, detractors, and neutral.

Then, after a few days, you can ask for referrals from your promoters. While you reach out to your detractors to learn more about the reasons behind the low score.

Conclusion

The key to succeeding in digital marketing is segmentation because it allows you to know more about your leads and customers. It also allows you to be hyper-focused and only sends relevant content to them.

These are only some ways you can segment your email list. The sample use cases above might not necessarily apply to your business (unless you’re a pet store with an eCommerce shop), but that should give you an idea of how to use them.

Remember, irrelevant content is the main reason people unsubscribe from your list. If you don’t continuously invest in knowing your customers, you will never know what they want or what they care about.

Start segmenting your email list today.

Have you tried any of these list segmentation before? I’d love to know. Let’s chat in the comments below!

(Last updated [post_modified_date])

What Is Lead Generation

What is lead nurturing

Lead generation is the process of gathering contact information of potential customers. In digital marketing, this is usually done through form submissions.

It is the first pillar of email marketing. Meaning, without an effective lead generation strategy, your email marketing will not succeed.

Lead generation is also one of the most overlooked strategy in digital marketing. Most organizations have poor lead generation execution.

This is especially true for most ecommerce sites. They don’t think it’s important. That’s why the only way for them to generate leads on their website is a newsletter subscription.

And we all know where that leads to right? Spammy and unsolicited messages. So why continue using it?

Other marketers also refer to lead generation as list building because most of the time, an email address is collected. This is called an email list and is the primary data inside your email marketing software.

Want to grow your email list by 225% with just 4 hours of work? Get your copy of my proven 5-step process here.

Lead Generation Analogy

You can think of lead generation as buying anything — food, water, a new iPhone or gadget.

You won’t hand over your money for something so overpriced. You will, however, do it if you feel that there is an equivalent exchange in value — whether real or perceived.

Imagine buying a Mocha Frappucino at Starbucks. If it’s priced at 550 per cup, will you buy one?

Most probably not.

You’d think that the value of a single cup of coffee mixed in with chocolate, syrup and cream doesn’t cost that much.

It’s the same for lead generation.

When you ask for contact information (like email, address, phone number) from your prospects, they will associate that personal information with some value.

If what they are getting is not equal or better than what you are asking for, they will not hand it over.

Using the same Starbucks analogy, they won’t pay for your overpriced Frappe.

Why Your Website Doesn’t Give You Leads

This brings us to the biggest problem most websites have — one newsletter signup form asking for a person’s email address.

For most organizations, this is the single, biggest lead generation form they have on the website.

The form asks for an email address in exchange for promo updates.

Is that an equivalent exchange?

Will you willingly give up your private information to someone who will just send you emails you will not even read?

And i’m not even mentioning that promos and discounts aren’t newsletters.

If you want to generate more leads, stop doing what everyone is doing. Don’t ask for email subscriptions to newsletters that contain promos and discounts.

Newsletter subscriptions are for blog updates. Content. Articles. Nothing else.

Here’s How You Generate Leads

If you want to generate more leads, offer something of value to your prospects and customers.

  1. Create an eBook that solves for their problem.
  2. Design a simple checklist about a process they encounter daily.
  3. Publish an email or video series exclusively for people who opted in.
  4. Give them special behind-the-scenes access to your latest project.

These are just samples of what you can do to generate more leads.

All these take effort and time.

But if you’re willing to do the hard work, you’ll definitely see the payoff in your efforts.

You can read more about how to generate more leads in 7 easy steps!

7 Easy Steps to Generate More Leads Online

7 Easy Steps to Generate Leads Online

Generating leads is undoubtedly the single biggest challenge for every marketing professional. But, it doesn’t have to be so complicated.

If you want to succeed in digital marketing, you need to know how to generate leads effectively.

1. Create Marketing Offers

Marketing offers, or lead magnets, are special pieces of content that people are willing to trade their contact information to gain access to it. They can come in the form of PDFs (like white papers and eBooks), spreadsheets, and email courses.

Marketing offers are the only proven way to generate leads online. The most popular among them is the newsletter signup.

But, that by itself isn’t enough. There is no value added to the user when they signup for your newsletter.

Start thinking about your customers and how you can help them.

If you’re a photographer, you can create a mini email course about the basics of photography. If you’re an accounting firm, you can create a PDF checklist with all the tax returns businesses need. In fact, you can create a checklist for the different types of registration. If you’re an eCommerce site, you can create a First-time Online Buyer’s Guide to educate people about buying stuff online.

Now, for every marketing offer, you follow the succeeding steps.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll assume your chosen marketing offer is a PDF.

2. Create a Thank You Page

Now that you have your marketing offer, it’s time to create a thank you page. This differs depending on what software you use or plan to use.

In my case, I’m using Thrive Themes. It’s a conversion-focused theme that allows me to create and design landing pages/thank you pages with ease.

You can also use standalone landing page builders like Instapage.

Or if your email marketing software already offers it, use the built-in landing page builder. For example, if you are using ConvertKit, you can do it there without the need for any special software.

Keep this simple for now. Add a button to enable download of your PDF. That way, when people click on it, they can download the PDF you just made.

Pro Tip #1: Add a noindex tag to this page so that no one can accidentally stumble upon this page from search engines.

Pro Tip #2: When you have your next offer, add a call-to-action here to keep the user engaged. Think of it as the next logical step in your sales process. So if they downloaded a “checklist on pros and cons of the different dog food diets,” your next offer could be something like “the science behind dry dog food and why it’s the best diet for your dogs.”

3. Create a Thank You Email

A thank you email is a supplement to the thank you page. It is basically a confirmation of the action that your user just took. For example, if it’s to download a checklist, it’s an email that does two things:

  1. Thank them for downloading the checklist; and,
  2. Allowing them to download the checklist

It’s a best practice to either have the download link directly in the email or link to the thank you page where people can download the PDF.

I always go for the latter option, but that’s up to you.

4. Create a Landing Page

You can read more about landing pages here. In that article, I shared the 9 key elements of an effective landing page and why landing pages are a must if you want to start generating more leads.

The most common landing page is the contact us page. Sadly, that’s about the only landing page most organizations make.

But remember this — the average conversion rate for a landing page is between 1-3%. Most of the time, it’s at the lower end of that range.

So if you’re targeting 50 new leads a month and you only have one landing page (the contacts us page), with a 1% conversion rate, you would need at least 5,000 people to visit that page.

And we both know you’re contact us page doesn’t get that much traffic other than your homepage or your blog. So, realistically speaking, you’d need 3x to 4x unique users to reach your goal.

Does your website get that much traffic?

5. Create a Call-to-Action (CTA)

A call-to-action in digital marketing is a way for marketers to link to their marketing offers. Essentially, it’s a link that points to a landing page.

It can be as simple as “subscribe now” or “download this eBook.” This then links to your landing page created specifically foe the marketing offer.

There are best practices for crafting the copy of CTAs and there are multiple variations you can use — from plain-text links to images, or placements like sidebar, homepage, within the blog posts, etc. You can read more about it here.

6. Distribute

Distribution is a step that is often neglected by marketers. After creating an awesome marketing offer, they post it once on their social media accounts. Some even try using paid ads.

But remember, not everyone can and will see what you post today. 10 weeks from now, your offer would still be valuable. But by then, no one has seen/heard about you and your offer. Don’t forget to keep sharing / posting about the offer you worked so hard to create.

The more content you create, the more you can vary this.

Another way to distribute your marketing offer is to put them all over your website. For example, if you browse different pages of my site, I have placed multiple CTAs for the Case Study I made. For example, on the right side of this page (assuming you’re reading this on a desktop), you’ll see a CTA there to download the case study. You can also see this prominently displayed on the homepage.

I also link to the case study in my blog posts like what I did here.

Just keep in mind that it has to be natural. Which brings me to the next step…

7. Add Supplemental Content

This is an important step you need to take if you want people to see (and eventually download) your marketing offer.

The more places you can showcase your marketing offer, the better.

Basically, this step is to create more blog posts related to the topic so you have more chances of linking the landing page of your PDF.

If you noticed, throughout this article, I have tons of links to my other articles. This is called internal linking.

If I don’t write blog posts like this, then I won’t be able to link to my other articles — or in your case, the marketing offer.

Pro Tip #3: At first, it’s ok to use the same marketing offer across all your blog posts. But, as you create more offers, you can group them based on topics and/or buying stage. For example, I have an email course about email marketing and a PDF report on blogging. I can place my email course CTAs on my articles about email marketing and use the PDF CTA on my blogging articles. This will make your marketing offers more relevant to the reader. More on this some other time!

So, what are you going to do next?

Generating new leads is easy if you have something of value to offer. Newsletter signups don’t provide value to the user. Also, if you rely on your contact us page to be your primary source of leads, prepare to be disappointed.

Start creating marketing offers in exchange for your contact’s information.

If you’re stuck or don’t know where to start, feel free to let me know in the comments below.

How to Generate More Leads on Online

Create marketing offers

Marketers offers are lead generation tactics that you put on your website. Other marketers call this a lead magnet. This can come in the form of PDFs like eBooks and white papers and case studies. It can be a special video tutorial or a webinar. Whatever it is, the more offers you have, the more leads you’ll get.

Use thank you pages to guide them to the next step

Thank you pages are specific pages on your site that loads after a person gives you their information. The best use case for this is to add the next logical step in your funnel to keep your visitors engaging with you. For example, they can download an eBook. Then, in your thank you page, you add a…

Write an awesome thank you email

A thank you email gets sent to the person who enters their information on a form. The best practice is to add the link to the offer in the email. It’s also a great idea to add specific steps you want the recipient to do next. Remember, thank you emails (sometimes referred to as a welcome email) is the email that will get opened the most. Use it to your advantage. That said, don’t start selling here.

Use landing pages designed to convert

Landing pages are specific pages on your website that are designed to convert its viewers into leads. Its one and only goal is to get the user to fill-out a form (or take an action). If elements on your landing page do not contribute to that goal, remove it.

Add calls-to-action (CTAs) all over your website

Calls-to-action or CTAs are links that drive people to your landing page. It can be as simple as a “download” button linked to a landing page, or a “click here” text, or an image with a link to a form. Whatever the type of CTA, what matters more is that you use them all over your website—in blog posts, sidebar, above the fold, below the content, in the footer.

Distribute your content everywhere

In order to generate leads, people have to find your landing pages. They can’t do that if the CTAs that link to them can’t be seen. So, make sure you distribute your content everywhere. Social media, email, browser notifications, and ads are a great place to start.

Add supplemental content

Generating leads is a numbers game. Statistics say that the average landing page converts only 1 out of 100 visitors. In order to skew this to your advantage, don’t use generic offers on the page. Make it relevant to the content it is referenced. This is known as content upgrades.

Email Remains the Best Medium for Business Communication

The best medium for business communication is email

When it comes to business communication, email is still the best medium over all other channels, regardless of your industry or location. Email trumped social media, messenger apps, phone, and even face-to-face communications.

What this means is that you should take full advantage of email automation to “move” your leads down the funnel. Unfortunately, a lot of Philippine organizations don’t use email marketing. And for the few organizations who use them, they often employ ineffective email marketing tactics, or worse, implement malpractices causes more harm to their brand.

Why email remains the top choice for business communication

We’re in the Philippines. Despite our reputation for being the texting capital of the world, when it comes to business communication, SMS text and even Viber or Messenger don’t cut it.

Why?

Because most software uses email addresses as the unique identifier in creating leads. Read this article I wrote before about the definition of a lead. I am writing a post about how most business owners operate (which is, sadly, still paper-based).

The point I want to get across with that article is that if there is no way to measure what and how you’re doing, you won’t be able to make informed decisions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) softwares are typically used for tracking leads, opportunities, and revenues.

Bottomline is this: these CRMs rely on email addresses to identify whether a person is unique or not. Also, given the state of technology in our country, there is no commercially available software that allows for tracking based on phone numbers. Yes, we have text blasts services. But they aren’t connected to a system that contains all other information you might have for the lead or customer.

What that means is any information sent back by them won’t be integrated with your existing systems. You have to manually update them. You also won’t be able to create a segment for, say, leads in the last 14 days, then only send a text blast to them.

How email fits in the marketing and sales funnel

Most organizations’ number 2 directive is to generate more leads. The first is to get new customers, but let’s talk about that in some future post.

One thing that we know is this: not all leads are created equal.

This is where lead nurturing comes in.

According to EConsultancy, lead nurturing is only performed by 31% of companies despite being termed as the “holy grail” of marketing automation.

There are numerous ways to implement lead nurturing campaigns. But one thing remains — there is a need to nurture leads; otherwise, you’re wasting your time and money acquiring leads when you already know they aren’t going to buy now.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes

How do most organizations handle their new leads? They hand them over to sales and/or send them sales-y messages immediately.

Imagine this scenario:

You enter a store with the intent to browse. Then, a salesperson started following you around. The person doesn’t strike a conversation and doesn’t ask what you’re looking for. The salesperson just started offering their products at discounted prices.

How would you feel if you were the customer?

That’s the same thing when it comes to digital marketing.

If you don’t create value-adding touchpoints in between, you’ll annoy them and cause them to leave.

Lead nurturing solves that problem.

Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities and make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

So, what are you going to do next?

Having a lead nurturing strategy in place can ease the pressure of getting new leads each month because your existing ones don’t fall through the cracks. Instead of worrying about the quantity, you can start focusing on the quality of your leads. You build a relationship with them over time.

I wrote about 3 lead nurturing examples from companies you’re already familiar with. In that article, I broke down both the good and the bad parts.

Get some inspiration on how they execute their lead nurturing campaigns.

And if you have questions, feel free to reach out in the comments below.

What Is the Difference Between Sales and Marketing

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Businesses have different definitions for sales and marketing. Read one book, go to a certain school, or listen to a guru — you will get different answers each time. Regardless of where you look, by looking at sales’ and marketing’s primary output helps in simplifying the two business functions.

Primary Difference Between Sales and Marketing

I like to keep things simple.

My definition for marketing is the set of activities that create opportunities for the business to sell whatever they are offering (whether that is products or services). Sales, on the other hand, is the set of activities that turns the opportunities into customers.

In other words, marketing generates leads. Sales turn the leads into customers.

Marketing and sales will have different definitions. What will remain, though, are the activities every business needs: generating leads and closing them.

Lead Generation

Using the Inbound Methodology approach, lead generation is the part where you convert the visitors on your website (or any online properties for that matter) into leads. In this case, lead generation is marketing’s primary output.

If you are a follower of Predictable Revenue, you might have noticed the three (3) types of leads that Aaron Ross is walking about. In this case, lead generation is both the output of marketing (nets) and sales (spears).

Going back to my point earlier, it does not matter really about what definitions you use. What matters, and remains as one of the biggest activities every business has to do is to generate leads.

Closing Leads

Closing leads is another important activity every business needs to do. Without it, you will not have any customers. Without customers, you will not have any revenues.

From the Inbound Methodology approach, leads stays with marketing until they go through the proper lifecycle stages — more specifically, leads are not given to the sales team until they become sales qualified. Until that happens, the lead stays with marketing.

Predictable Revenue follows a similar approach. The lead stays with the prospecting team until the leads are qualified. Once they are a fit, they are passed on to the closers (aka account executives, or the group that is in-charge of closing). If they are not, they are removed from the pipeline. Ideally, they are enrolled into a marketing campaign that you continually send them information until they become sales ready (lead nurturing).

Both the Inbound Methodology and Predictable Revenue have different processes and definitions. One can argue that they are both different because of the context they are used (true). What is similar though is the need for both lead generation and closing leads. These are necessary business activities. Develop these specific skills and you will be a very valuable asset to any company.