What Is Lead in Lead Generation

Lead generation is a marketing process that involves capturing and stimulating people’s interest in a specific product or service to develop a sales pipeline. It entails all marketing practices that initiate consumer interest in the products or services a particular business offers.

With lead generation, the marketer aims to warm up target customers and get them on a path that leads to buying. It also involves reaching out to users and converting them into people who are naturally interested in what a particular brand provides.

Leads are sourced from different avenues. For instance, from personal referrals, telephone calls by telemarketers or the company, events, advertisements, and the internet. According to a recent study by Mailgen, about 89 percent of polled respondents said that email was the most used method for lead generation. Coming in second was content marketing, then search engines, and events finally rounded up the top four.

What is the definition of Lead Generation?

The term lead generation is one that you frequently hear if you are in the online sales and marketing world.

Even if you practice lead generation already, do you know what it means at the most fundamental level? Reviewing what something means at the most basic level is a great refresher and it always helps you come up with new and impactful ideas.

In this post, we are going to review what the definition of lead generation is.

What is a lead?

A lead is a person who has expressed interest in the product or service that a company offers. Collecting a lead means that you have already skipped the first two steps of the sales cycle which are the dreaded prospecting and cold-calling and can directly proceed to a warm call.

A warm call is much more valuable than a cold one. Many have already declared cold calling dead and would rather focus on warm leads because when you contact a warm lead, a person is expecting to hear from you or at least has shown some interest towards your business.This means that he or she is much more willing to listen to you and consider purchasing your offering since they have already considered you an option.

When you contact a lead, you use the information collected to personalize the sales outreach efforts so that the sales call is as personal and enjoyable for the client as possible.

What’s lead generation?

Attract and get people to give you their contact information. The best lead generation services create warm lists for your sales team.

If you are a marketer and have to tell somebody who is not marketing savvy what you do, you most likely tell them that you find ways to attract people to your business. Lead generation expands on this notion to become: Finding ways to make a person interested in your company and make them want to request more information from you.

It is a method of starting to funnel-in eventual purchasers of your product or service down the path of buying.

Why is lead generation important?

Lead generation is very important for the growth of a business. The buying process has changed and marketeers need to rethink and refocus their efforts in order to stay relevant. If people demonstrate to you that they are interested in your business, when you go to contact them about your offering they are no longer a stranger– but rather a true sales prospect who has “told” you they are interested in your product or service.

How do you collect a lead?

The standard way to collect a lead online is through a form on a website. However, there’s finally an easier way to collect and score leads: LeadBoxer. LeadBoxer makes it so that you can collect leads with no forms or buttons.

For visual learners, below is a diagram highlighting the lead generation process.

SendPulse is an excellent tool for the second step in the lead generation process, namely the “CONVERT” stage. The service offers a great variety of useful features: you can create different types of brand subscription forms absolutely for free, craft, and A/B test effective calls-to-action.

How does lead generation work?

Within the inbound marketing methodology, lead generation comes in at the second stage. It happens like so:

Discovery of a business: A visitor learns about a company via the various marketing channels a brand employs, such as blogs, social media, pages, or business websites.
A customer clicks on a call to action (CTA): A CTA is a button, message, or image that prompts a potential customer to take action.
The customer visits a landing page: By clicking on the CTA, the visitor is redirected to a landing page that captures useful information about the lead in exchange for a delightful offer.

Note that the offer refers to something valuable that is provided on the landing page. It could be a course, template, or even an eBook. The proposal should be appealing enough to the visitor to make them provide their details in exchange for accessing it. Where is this personal information provided? Well, on a subscription form, of course. This feature is for gathering useful information regarding the visitor in exchange for the available offer. Now, while these forms can be embedded virtually anywhere on the website, they are typically put on the landing page.

If you still don’t have a landing page promoting your product, you can create one totally for free with an easy-to-use SendPulse landing page builder. You don’t need any coding skills — just drag and drop the necessary element to your future landing page. You can add images, carousels, videos, subscription forms, links to your chatbots or blog, connect payment options, and design fonts, colors, and background to your liking. Look below how creating a page looks like.

You can add the link to the landing page to your Instagram bio to convert your followers into customers. Follow this step-by-step guide.

Here is a brief recap of the lead generation process. A prospective customer clicks on a CTA that redirects them to the landing page of a business. While on the landing page, the visitor fills out a form in exchange for an offer, and in turn, becomes a lead.

How to Do Lead Generation using Email Marketing

Create emails that convert
Implement the opt-in strategy
Send out meaningful content
Nurture the leads
Include a call to action in the email
Provide tools to share

Seeing as email marketing is the most effective method for acquiring new leads, it makes sense for a marketer to learn how to leverage this online tactic for the most gain. So here is how.

Create emails that convert

For a marketing email to be a success, it should entice the target consumers to click, engage them, and provide them with proper steps that bring them much closer to converting. Here are some things to include in an email for increased conversion rates:

An excellent subject line.
Suitable images to reinforce the message.
Concise and easily comprehensible writing.
Appropriate links for sharing on social media.
A compelling call to action.

Implement the opt-in strategy

Logically, for lead generation, there should be people to email. Nonetheless, rather than adding people to the mailing list automatically, one should allow potential customers to decide to opt-in. This approach enables a marketer to get better leads since customers choose to receive emails from the business. For ultimate success, the marketer should:

Provide the potential customer with different chances and ways to opt-in by providing an opt-in email link in sidebars and website pop-ups, various posts on social media, and so forth.
Include the unsubscribe option.
Give plausible reasons as to why a customer should opt-in by clearly stating the benefits that come with joining the mailing list.
Use a double opt-in subscription method for a better quality mailing list.

Send out meaningful content

Undoubtedly, people want emails that are interesting or have valuable offers such as educational material, discounts, or downloads. To make an offer worthwhile, a marketer can:

Emphasize on quality instead of high-quantity offers.
Research the market thoroughly to understand the target audience adequately.
Segment the target consumers and send curated offers that appeal to each specific segment.

Nurture the leads

To nurture leads, a marketer can send different content to different segments of customers at different stages of the purchase process. Leads can be cultivated by:

Sending out customized emails to target consumers at the various stages of the purchase process.
Sending content that boosts brand awareness to consumers in the awareness stage (top of the sales funnel).
Sending the content that has to do with the conversion of individuals at the bottom of the funnel – those in the consideration or decision stages.

Include a call to action in the email

The marketer can insert a CTA if they have downloadable or other valuable content to offer. These offers are usually relevant enough to be provided in exchange for specific information from the customers. Here are some qualities of a good CTA:

It has a clear value proposition.
Stands out from the rest of the content in the email.
Makes use of actionable words that prompt the readers to act.

Provide tools to share

Seeing as good content is often shared among friends, which is suitable for a brand, it is necessary to make this process easy by:

Providing a “Forward to friends” link in the email.
Including social media sharing buttons in all content pieces and the email as well.

How to Use SendPulse to Convert Leads into Customers

Set up a subscription form on your website
Collect subscribers
Send them useful content along with promotional offers
Convert your leads into customers
Add leads to your CRM

Marketers can save themselves a lot of hassle while making substantial gains by using SendPulse for converting their leads into actual customers. Let’s break down the process.

Set up a subscription form on your website

With SendPulse, a marketer can quickly come up with a distinct subscription form bearing the style and colors of their brand. The process is quite easy too, and one can try it out for free on the site. There are many pre-designed forms that one can use as a basis for their own. Infusing some recognizable business elements into the form is also smooth with SendPulse. Functions such as editing texts, changing form style, and adding images can be achieved by using SendPulse’s form builder. To communicate effectively with your customers, create multichannel subscription forms. All you need is to add links to your messengers.
There are four types of subscription forms on SendPulse:

Embedded form: Allows the marketer to place a subscription form anywhere on their business website.
Pop-up window: This type of form appears after a visitor spends a specified amount of time on the site or when they are about to leave.
Floating form: Is a form that is easy to notice while visiting a certain site.
Fixed form: This type of form is fixed at the bottom of the webpage and does not disappear when scrolling down the page.

Get leads with SendPulse while managing all settings from a single location.

Collect subscribers

With a fully functional subscription form, a marketer can then proceed to gather subscribers who want to stay updated about the products and services offered by a particular business. To get more subscribers, use the SendPulse subscription form to reach to the market segment. All the forms created in SendPulse imply a double opt-in method so that you will send campaigns to active and engaged subscribers.

Send them useful content along with promotional offers

To generate the most leads, a business should send out valuable content to their prospective customers. The point is to offer content that resonates with the target audience. SendPulse helps do this job be offering in-depth segmentation. Check out our article on our blog to find out how to use mailing list segmentation for creating relevant campaigns.

Convert your leads into customers

Use SendPulse to create emails that nurture leads effectively and encourage the customers to act when necessary. The service offers lots of professional features to generate more sales without much effort.

Add leads to your CRM

A customer relationship management system allows you to streamline business processes by collecting customer data in one place, tracking their purchasing history and history of interactions with your brand to create highly personalized offers. SendPulse provides a free CRM so you can collect data, accept orders, control deals at each stage, and communicate with customers via emails and a chatbot in one place.

How to Improve Lead Generation

Here are some useful tips on how to boost lead generation:

Provide offers for each phase of the buying cycle.
Enhance the CTAs on the landing page by working on aspects such as design.
Use compelling imagery, headlines, and forms. Also, use clear and easy-to-understand language.
Test for best practices before settling on a strategy.

Lead Generation Best Practices

Improve lead capture
Use proper lead magnets
Use effective conversion techniques on landing pages
Perform lead scoring

For successful lead generation, here is what each marketer should do:

Improve lead capture. Find new and effective ways to capture leads via email. To boost the capture of leads, one can offer promotions and advertisements that are valuable.
Use proper lead magnets. These are tools that offer value to prospective customers in exchange for their details, such as social media follows, opt-ins, subscriptions, and so forth. Watch our video to get some fresh ideas, oh how to use lead magnets effectively. Here are some examples of lead magnets: webinars, free trials, eBooks, whitepapers, bonus trips, interviews with experts, training videos.
Use effective conversion techniques on landing pages. For one, make use of click-through landing pages and CTAs on them. Moreover, leave out all unnecessary information and focus on putting out content that boosts conversion.
Perform lead scoring. This approach is whereby a marketer uses marketing automation software to prioritize leads as per their levels of engagement with inbound marketing content from a particular brand.

Lead Generation Examples

Below are images displaying some excellent lead generation efforts by different brands. To start us off, here is how Casper is doing it:

And now, Basecamp:

Here is a landing page from Portnox

Finally, a lead generation strategy by Snappa

CONCLUSION