The moment you make your first marketing push, in many ways, marks the true launch of your online business. Whether you target new members via an email blast, direct mailer or social media campaign, chances are you have a limited marketing budget, and the success of your first campaign will have a big impact in the overall success of your online business.
This is why it is vital to optimize your website to capture real leads prior to pushing the button on your first marketing campaign. to get members to claim their listing. Too often, we see email campaigns go out to businesses to “claim their listings” only to produce disappointing conversion rates. The guilty party is none other than having the unrealistic expectation that someone will jump from the awareness stage to the buying stage.
Skip to Part 1 of the Claim Listings series
Skip to Part 2 of the Claim Listings series
Adding A Pop-Up Form
Adding a pop-up form that promotes a special offer to download free premium content will increase the chances that someone that visits your website after getting an email to claim their listing will engage with your website. Hubspot’s free pop-up tool, Leadin, still leads the way as the best 3rd party lead generation tool.
Focus On A Quality Offering
The goal of your first marketing campaign should be collecting email addresses of potential members, not actual member sign ups. Yes, of course, in an ideal world, you could write an email so good that someone that has never heard of your website would want to take out their credit card and sign up because your offer engages them out of the gate.
The reality is that this is unlikely to happen, even if you offer a yearly premium subscription on your website for $1 for the first year.
Our data has shown the most effective marketing campaigns push quality content and take potential members to a landing page that includes a special offering that pops up to download additional content. The key is figuring out what a potential member would gladly exchange their email address for in order to download the premium content that you are promoting.
Here are some sample directory industries and possible PDFs that could be developed that would engage a potential customer to exchange their email in order to access your premium content.
- Tutor Directory
- Get more students today! Download the first ever tutor marketing kit.
- Plastic Surgery
- Download our guide on surprising negative online reviews! Stop being a hostage to negative online reviews today!
- Local Business Directory
- Download the “Toronto” business insider’s marketing guide!
So before sending out your first big membership push, make sure to develop at least one quality info pack or guide that will engage potential members to submit their emails to you. You will surely have some members sign up right away after your first email blast, but you will also get a significant amount of interested members that were not quite ready to sign up but wanted to read your premium content.
Every potential member that downloads your quality content becomes a quality lead. In our next post, we will cover how to nurture claim listing members that downloaded your premium content and have not yet signed up as an active member on your website.
