Marsden Marketing’s email tips recently were featured in a Huffington Post article, “The Secret to Building an Email List of Over 100k.” Check it out here. And if you don’t feel like scrolling through the article, here’s what we had to say.
Using forms and offering content in exchange for a prospect’s information is a great marketing practice to build a database and generate new leads. Here are some dos and don’ts:
- Consider the value of your offer. What type of content are you providing? Meatier content allows you to ask for more information on your form.
- Decide what kind of leads you want. Shorter forms usually result in more leads, but they may be less qualified, and vice-versa.
- Know your buyer personas. If you know which leads turn into customers, you can use that demographic information to determine what you collect about new contacts.
- Don’t ask the same thing over and over. Use smart fields to eliminate the need for people to re-enter information.
- Place your form above the fold. Don’t make people scroll or search for it.
- Put a clear, customized call-to-action on the form. Customize the text on your submission button to make it more relevant to what people are getting.
- Make required fields obvious. Few things are more irritating than an error message saying a field is blank.
- Make your privacy standards clear. People want to know that their information is protected and not shared in any way they haven’t approved.
As you build or refine your database, forms are a must-have tool to learn about your site’s visitors so you can attract more of them and create a mutually beneficial system that helps your business grow and leads get the content they want.
