Any growing business wants autopilot leads which convert into customers. With an email autoresponder, website owners can collect email addresses of their visitors and build a long term relationship with them through email marketing campaigns. This is usually done through an email capture page, or signup form which can be placed on a website page.
Once setup, a lead capture form can collect hundreds or even thousands of emails every day. Over time, many of these leads can be converted into customers by following up with useful emails, building trust and explaining how your products can be of value.
On a website, someone only has a few minutes to decide to buy from you. But once you get them on your email list, this time period is dramatically extended. A lead can even become a customer years after they sign up to your email list.
How To Autopilot Leads
Setting up the form on a landing page or website is the easy part. Once you have your email capture form set up, you need to send targeted visitors to it where you can offer them some value in order to encourage them to join your list. This can be done in a number of ways:
- Using a paid marketing platform like Google’s Adwords, Facebook or YouTube
- Building content which attracts your target audience.
- Connecting with people directly through social media
- Linking to your content from other websites, social media platforms and forums etc.
With any of the above marketing strategies, your audience targeting is pretty important. With the wrong kinds of people landing on your page, you’ll waste time and/or money because they either won’t sign up or they won’t become a customer.
Your landing page offer should be congruent with the product/service which you are offering too. Your lead magnet should be valuable and congruent with what your target audience wants and also your product. When everything is lined up your customer will naturally choose to opt in to your list because they want what you’re offering.
Autopilot Leads – Free Strategies
To get leads to come to your landing page for free is much more difficult than paying for it. It takes more time to do because you’ll need to either find people on social media or build content or both. Blogging is a simple free lead generation strategy anyone can use to get leads for free. When you start out blogging, it’s important to choose blog post topics which match your target audience.
If you get this wrong, your audience won’t want to sign up to your offer because it’s not relevant for them. So, choose to write about something which closely relates to your products and your lead magnet. Here’s an example of a lead magnet. It’s an ebook which you can get by signing up to my email list.
YouTube Marketing
YouTube is another platform you can use to generate leads for free. In order to generate free traffic using YouTube, you’ll need to create a lot of videos and upload them to the site. Again, your videos should attract the kind of people who would value the products you are promoting. So it’s a good idea to create videos which would appeal to your target audience.
Facebook is another platform you can use to generate leads for free. One strategy is to use your personal profile and set it up with your lead magnet clearly visible. Then join groups and find people who fit the targeting criteria for your target audience. Add them as friends and interact with them, building relationships. You can then direct them to your giveaway product to encourage them to join your list. See also free traffic sources for Clickbank for more on this strategy.
If you have a local business, you can also use Google Places For Business (Google My Business). With this service you can create a free listing and get free traffic, but only if you have a physical address to base your business.
Autopilot Leads – Paid Strategies
Free marketing strategies are notoriously slow. It can take months or years before you even build up enough traffic to get 10 leads a day using free marketing strategies. But paid marketing is different. With paid marketing, you can start getting hundreds of leads the same day if you spend enough. Again, it’s important to be careful in the early days of using paid marketing. You can easily spend a lot of money if you don’t carefully set your budget and targeting requirements.
As an example, Google Adwords offers a great marketing platform to send people to a landing page and collect their emails. With Adwords, you can set a daily budget and target your advert towards specific search queries.
You can also target location too which is useful for locally based businesses. If your business is located in a certain city, it doesn’t make sense to advertise it in another country for example. This is less the case with global businesses or affiliate marketing businesses.
Once a paid marketing strategy is working and you’re seeing sales coming from your marketing, you can increase your marketing budget and scale up. Make sure your numbers are right before doing this obviously. Marketing platforms will take your money, even if your sales funnel isn’t working properly or you’re running at a loss.
Autopilot Leads – Why Use A Landing Page?
A landing page is different from a website. On a website, you can browse around and look at the different pages. With a landing page, you don’t have as many options. On a landing page you can opt-in to the list, or leave the page; that’s all! A landing page is designed specifically for the purpose of collecting leads. If you’re running paid marketing, it’s much more effective to use a landing page because it is much more efficient.
If you send people to a website with paid advertising, much of your marketing budget will be wasted. People will be able to click around and browse your site. On a landing page they can only opt in or click away. You only have two choices on a landing page.
Autopilot Leads – Why Targeting Is Important
I’ve mentioned targeting in your marketing a few times already but it deserves another mention for clarity. If your content doesn’t attract the right audience you’ll see fewer people signing up to your list and becoming customers. With paid marketing this is pretty important too. When your targeting is on-point, people will be more likely to sign up to your offer; therefore costing you less.
If you pay to send the wrong kinds of people to your landing page, they won’t sign up or they won’t really want or need your products. You can pay out a fortune collecting cheap leads, but unless they turn into buying customers you won’t be making any profit.
A cheap lead cost doesn’t always equate to sales. So you need to make sure you’re finding the right people by looking at your sales funnel holistically. See autopilot customer journey for more on this. The more you can define your customer “avatar” the closer you’ll be to finding the right people to send to your landing page. The avatar is defined by many characteristics such as age, location, interests and connections.
Scaling Up Your Marketing
When you use paid marketing to autopilot leads into your sales funnel, it’s much quicker than building content. Once you have a profitable business, and are spending much less than you’re making, you can reinvest back into your marketing and scale up.
Your income from your business can be re-invested continually into advertising campaigns which have proved themselves. You can then also test and measure other campaigns and attempt to improve on your lead cost and conversion rate.
A good sales funnel and marketing campaign should be capable of turning $1 into $2. Once you manage this through automation, you can increase your marketing budget and scale up. You’ve then learned how to automate leads and generate sales. Simply leave those campaigns running and you’re in profit (hopefully)!