How To Triple Your Leads Within A Week By Using Only One Marketing Philosophy

Lead generation is one of the primary goals that most online marketers have. Everything they do is in an attempt to generate more high quality leads, which they can then nurture into customers over time. While there are a huge amount of ways to generate leads, there are two main ways to go about doing it – interrupt marketing and permission marketing. As you’ll soon see, permission marketing is a hugely superior strategy, one that is incredibly effective for lead generation.

The Difference Between Interrupt Marketing and Permission marketing

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Interrupt marketing is a way to promote a product or service in which you force consumers to pay attention to what you have to say. Basically, you are “interrupting” them in order to pitch a product or service. Interruption marketing is typically associated with outbound marketing. For example, TV commercials that interrupt a show, direct mail campaigns and telemarketing calls are all forms of interruption marketing.

Permission marketing focuses on delivering a message to a consumer that actually wants the message. For example, if you request the email of a consumer and state exactly what you will be using that email for, you are using a form of permission marketing – if they agree to the terms, they’ll opt-in, if they don’t, they won’t. It’s as simple as that.

How Email Can Be Your Best Channel

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Even on the surface level, it should be obvious why permission marketing is a better strategy. Just think of some of the telemarketing calls you’ve received over the years. Your cable company may be offering you a deal that you may actually be interested in, but since you did not ask for the phone call, you’ll probably say “no thanks” and hang up.

Permission marketing focuses on generating leads by first allowing consumers to explore their brand on their own time. You provide them with an opportunity to learn more by asking them permission to obtain personal data, such as an email address. As part of the request, you must also state exactly what you will be doing with that personal data.

How Permission Marketing Can Improve Your Opt-In Rate

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Simply asking a person for their email address does not give you permission to market to them. For example, say you offer a free coupon on your Facebook page if followers fill out a form that requires their email address. This is not permission marketing because you do not have permission to send them emails. If you do send newsletters out to individuals who have provided you with their email addresses but not the consent to send them anything, then you are practicing interrupt marketing.

Many consumers will not fill out a form if you aren’t using permission marketing. They are afraid that you might spam their email account or even worse, sell their email address to other companies. By explicitly asking permission to send them emails, telling them what those emails will contain and promising not to share their personal information, you are using permission marketing, which will make consumers much more at ease with opting in.

Once someone has opted in due to your permission marketing efforts, they now expect you to do exactly what you said you were going to do. If you stated that their email would be used to send them monthly newsletters, you are obliged to send them a newsletter every month. Your leads are going to upset if you don’t and you’ll have lost the trust that you created through the use of permission marketing.

How Badly Executed Pop-Ups Can Destroy Your User Experience

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A badly executed pop up is a pop-up that appears without the request of the visitor. In fact, when a pop-up isn’t requested, it’s basically a form of interrupt marketing. Think of it this way – if you’re in an electronics store comparing the features of different TVs, how are you going to feel if the owner walks up to you and tries to convince you to sign up to their rewards program? You’re probably going to feel like the owner has interrupted what you were doing. Using badly executed pop-ups will make visitors feel like you’re trying to force them to opt-in.

Permission Marketing Tactics

The email opt-in example is only one of the many permission marketing tactics that can be used in order to increase lead generation. The following are a few of the lead generation tactics that many websites are missing from their permission marketing strategy:

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  • Facebook and Google+ login – Instead of requiring visitors to fill out yet another form in order to opt-in or in order to shop on your e-commerce page, you can use a Facebook or Google+ login. This allows visitors to sign in using their Facebook and Google+ profiles. This is beneficial because first of all, visitors don’t have to waste time filling out forms. Secondly, your website appears more trustworthy when its connected to these social media giants, thereby helping improve lead generation. Last but not least, it’s more convenient for visitors. There’s nothing worse than having to remember dozens of different passwords for all of the websites that you opt in to. Recent data has even suggested that the use of social logins can increase your registration conversion rates by upwards of 50 percent. Houzz is an example of a large website that uses Facebook login. Visitors are much more at ease shopping on Houzz knowing that they have a Facebook presence.
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  • Quality content – We cannot emphasize how important content is to lead generation. If you have poor content, why would readers want to opt-in to receive what will probably be more poor content? High quality content that is informative and helpful will help you build trust in your readers, making them more likely to opt-in. Not to mention that good content is more likely to be shared, thereby exposing your brand to more potential leads.
  • Huffington Post is a good example of how they use quality content. Their entire website is based on content and it’s available for free. However, they offer readers the opportunity to sign up to receive the top blog posts and stories on a daily basis. This permission marketing tactic only works if there content is of high quality, which they are banking on it being. Readers that enjoy their content will be much more likely to opt in.

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  • Consistent A/B testing – A/B testing is a way to measure the results of your lead generation. It involves comparing the conversion rates of two different assets, such as your website pages, emails or landing pages, by splitting the traffic (or the email send) between them and comparing the results. A/B testing should be done consistently so that you can see what parts of your strategy are working and which parts are not.
  • Social media – Social media has become an incredibly effective method for lead generation. For example, Twitter’s lead generation cards. These are ads that appear as promoted tweets. When followers click on it, it will expand into a sign-up form or an offer. Facebook has a similar objective based advertising tool. Both of these tools have been proven effective for lead generation. Click here to know how to do it
  • Contests and sweepstakes – One of the ways in which you implement permission marketing is by holding a contest or sweepstakes in which participants must agree to sign up to a mailing list in order to enter. A contest or sweepstakes can be very enticing, especially if signing up to your mail list isn’t just a trade off but an integral part of the contest or sweepstakes.
  • H&R-block-contest

    Take H&R Block for example. They had a new service that they were looking to introduce to customers in the higher income bracket. They used banner ads in order to promote a sweepstakes in which they offered to pay the taxes of the winner. The only people that clicked on the banner were people that payed taxes and that were familiar with H&R Block. Over 50,000 people gave H&R Block permission to teach them about their service. They received around three emails a week containing trivia questions for about ten weeks. How effective was this permission marketing tactic? Emails had an average response rate of 40 percent and a total of 97 percent of those that signed up continued to play the game.

    A huge part of your inbound marketing strategy is most likely focused on lead generation. The last thing you want to do is waste your efforts because you can’t capture any of your leads. Permission marketing will go a long way towards helping to establish trust and thereby helping you to capture more of your leads.

    Updated: 29/5/15

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