Ask Carlo About Lead Generation

Hey marshmallow!! You’ve been over to Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, placed your media buy and cleaned up.

But if you’re using direct marketing, you’re not just planting your brand in their head. You’re directly selling something and building a list of warm buyer leads.

A list of leads who you can contact directly by email is always going to be your most engaged audience and the most valuable asset in your business.

In this tutorial, I give you some tips to start building your list out of your media buys.

Your Landing Page

When you buy media from Facebook, banner ads or just about any other method, what page do you want people to land on after they click on your ad?

You want your landing page to be a squeeze page, also called a lead-capture page or an opt-in page.

A squeeze page should be very simple. It should call people to one single action, which is to enter their contact information. Then, you can use that contact information to follow up and send them offers.

The biggest rule of a high-converting squeeze page is that less copy is more. Remember that you’re fighting for people’s attention against other websites, so you don’t have a lot of time to win them over.

If you have a long squeeze page with many elements and a lot of copy, people won’t bother to read it all and your conversions will go down.

Instead, go for this simple 3-element formula:

  1. Headline
  2. Bullets
  3. Call to action

The Headline

The headline is the first thing people will notice when they land on your squeeze page. The most effective headline you can write is one that is curiosity-based and offers some instant gratification.

For example, a good squeeze page headline is “Download the Magic Bullet List Building Blueprint.”

This headline ticks both of the boxes. It provokes curiosity and promises an instant deliverable on the other side of the squeeze page.

The Bullets

For the bullets, use 3 big hooks from the content of whatever deliverable you’re promising on the other side of the squeeze page. This is sometimes called a lead magnet.

A good example of a deliverable is a cheat sheet that informs people how to get their first 1,000 leads. In the cheat sheet, you could explain the 3 biggest mistakes or misconceptions about list building and sell a system that solves it.

If you get stuck writing the bullet, always use the formula “How to get X result without Y pain.” For example, “How to get your first 100 leads without talking to friends and family.”

The Branding

Aside from the call to action that asks for contact information in exchange for the deliverable, there is one other thing that you are permitted to do on your squeeze page.

That is to elevate your status.

If, for example, your squeeze page is designed to funnel customers to someone else’s video sales letter? Include a picture of yourself with that person and include the copy, “Special Message from…” with the names of yourself and the other person.

This elevates your status and provides your own endorsement, rather than sending customers over without building any rapport first.

Especially if you are funneling leads to someone else’s offer, make sure that you elevate your status on your squeeze page so that you maintain a relationship with your own list.

You’re Still Making a Sale

To start building your list off of a media buy, the first thing you need is a sale. It doesn’t need to be for actual money. It could be an item of value that you give away in exchange for an email address, but you need to still think of it as a sale.

Why? People value their email addresses like they value their money. They will not hand over their email address unless they believe they’ll be getting something of great value in exchange.

That deliverable could be an ebook, a video, a consultation on the phone or anything that your customers will value.

Sure, I’ll Give You “An” Email Address…

When you start acquiring email addresses, don’t be fooled.

Most people have more than one email address. They have their best one, and maybe some other ones they hardly ever check.

When another marketer asks for your email address, do you give your best one or the one you never check?

If you’re like most smart consumers, it depends on how much you value the communication from that marketer. You might subscribe to your favorite marketers with your best email address, while the less valued ones get your “junk” email address.

As a marketer yourself, you must consider this. The majority of your leads are likely to be the “junk” email addresses. What can you do to get people’s best email address?

The answer to the above question lies in what you offer. The more value your customers perceive in your deliverable, the more willing they’ll be to hand over their best email address. Then, the more they’ll see the emails you send them.

Put some effort into creating a deliverable that your customers want. Then, you only need a landing page to link to your media buys, and a way to contact the list that you build.

Do You Need a Deliverable?

You’ve heard that you need to build your list. You need to collect people’s contact information and send them offers. If you don’t capture each lead, you don’t deserve to succeed.

Too many business owners give too little thought to how they capture leads. Capturing leads is more than just saying, “hey, give me your email address.” If that’s your strategy, you’re missing a big opportunity.

What do you do when someone hands you a business card? In most cases, nothing. Don’t expect and hope that people will simply flock to you. People are not stupid. They won’t give you their email address only because you want to pitch them.

You need to be more strategic than simply asking people whether they’d like to receive offers from you. Most people won’t get too excited about that.

This is why you need a deliverable. This is a small piece of value that solves a specific problem in your market, offered in exchange for contact information. When you offer them something of value, people will gladly hand over their contact information.

This is a clear strategy for capturing leads. When you offer a deliverable, there’s an exchange of value. People are not giving you their contact information because you want it. They’re giving you their contact information because you’re giving them something they want.

This way, you’ll capture more leads and create more goodwill in the process.

Suggested Deliverables

A lot of things can work as deliverables. Would any of the following work for your business?

As long as it’s free of charge and satisfies a demand in your market, it can be a deliverable.

Write down a couple of ideas for what your business could offer as a deliverable. When someone visits your website or sees your post on Facebook, what could you offer them that will make them agree to hand you their contact information?

Give this some serious thought, because this is how you start building a list.

How to Create Your Deliverable

If you want to be in the top 5% of marketers, write your own ebook and give it away to build your list. You only need to pay $20 or $30 for a cover design and you’re set.

Or, offer a webinar. Give it a compelling title like, “5 Lessons I Discovered From….”

If you’ve been to any mastermind or live event, you can do this. Put together the 5 biggest lessons you learned, tell them on a free webinar and call it something like “5 Wealth Codes I Discovered From an Exclusive Mastermind.”

Would that get people’s interest? Of course it would.

Once you do this, you can later reuse the content for other purposes. You could turn it into a CD that you sell by direct mail. The possibilities are endless.

Even just a video can be a deliverable. Write a headline like “Free Video Reveals 5 Dangerous Mistakes to Avoid When…” and film the video, and you can start building your list within a day.

Which Ones Work Best?

What kind of deliverable is the most powerful and effective to build a list?

At the top of the list is audio and video interviews. Especially if it’s someone influential in the market.

Lists are always compelling. Write a headline that begins with “5 Ways to…” or “Top 7…” and ends with information that’s relevant to your market. Then deliver the information in the form of a video, webinar or ebook.

Free reports or guides, cheat sheets, mindmaps, tutorials, quick videos and even softwares are also effective. Start offering something today and see how it works for you.

What About an Ebook?

An easy way to capture leads is to give away an ebook. To create the ebook, you could simply compiled all your old blog posts relevant to the theme of the book, and make a few adjustments.

If you’ve been blogging for 6 months or longer, you have enough material to compile an ebook. It doesn’t need to take you a lot of additional work. Another option is to use a private label ebook to save yourself the work of writing it yourself.

How to Offer a Strategy Session

One of the most effective kinds of deliverable for building a list is a “strategy session.”

On the landing page for your media buys, set up an online form for prospective customers to request a phone call with you. On the phone call, discuss with the customer about their needs and sell them whichever product you believe is most suitable for them.

Let’s walk through the way to set up strategy sessions in your marketing.

An Example Strategy Session

Wufoo is the easiest way to create a nice-looking online form and customize the questions that it asks.

On your strategy session form, ask for a number of fields to know more about the customer’s background. Ask for their name, email address, Skype ID, phone number and country.

After the customer completes those fields, they submit the form and move on to the second page.

On the second page, ask them some questions that require more thoughtful answers. What their dream life looks like, why they believe they’re not already living it, how much money they would like to make per year if they had a business, and how much capital they are willing to invest.

For numerical questions like these, use multiple-choice answers and give them brackets to choose from.

Why Strategy Sessions Rule

Every time that you receive a new form submission, contact the customer with the information they provided.

If you like their answers and believe your products can help them, congratulate them for being chosen for the strategy session. It’s a good idea to tell them how much the strategy session is valued, because your time has a value and you’re giving up some of your time to speak to them.

Note how this is different to cold calling or chasing after prospects. With a strategy session, the customer is applying to speak to you. They are the one convincing you that they are the right fit for your offer.

If they’re not the right fit, let them go and don’t get emotionally attached. If they are, you’ve already put yourself in a powerful position to make the sale.

Build Your List Fast and Often

If you’re not building your list, your business won’t grow.

Your income is going to be directly proportional to the number of new customers that you add to your list on a daily and monthly basis, the suitability of those customers for your offer and how well you follow up maintain the relationship with them.

Every single day, you should be doing the right activities to build and maintain your list.

How Many Leads is Enough?

If you want to be making six figures, you need to be adding 100 leads a day or 3,000 leads a month at a minimum.

That may sound like a lot, but remember that only about 2–3% of your leads will turn into buyers. That’s 2 to 3 front end sales a day, which will translate to six figures a year if you have a good back-end sales process.

You could potentially get 300 to 2,000 leads a day if you’re doing media buys in multiple places. There’s Facebook ads, banner ads, YouTube ads, Google ads and more to build your list.

Don’t Lose Them!

If you have a blog or a website, you don’t want people to visit once, leave and then forget about you.

You want to hold onto them by capturing them as a lead and following up with them. That way, you can continually provide them with more value and have them buy from you repeatedly.

Your blog can be one big lead generation mechanism. Once you capture leads from your blog, you can then send them through your sales process.

You’ve Got a List, Now What?

When you build your list, don’t just capture the lead and then leave it alone. Follow up with your list on a daily basis, and build a relationship.

When you follow up, your objective should be not just to make sales but to brand yourself as an authority figure, a trusted advisor and a friend. Also strive to be entertaining in your emails. That’s what will keep the attention of your audience over time.

There’s a skill to writing email copy, and the only way to get good at that skill is to start doing it and practice daily.

First of all, remind them of why they’re here. Remind them that they entered their email into one of your websites and requested your ebook, video or whatever you promised them.

This may seem unnecessary, but people forget quickly. They might not check their email until several hours later, and an unfamiliar name in their inbox might confuse them and cause them to hit the spam button.

Next, set the expectation of what your emails will be about. Give your leads a reason why they should read your emails over everyone else’s.

Don’t go overboard with your background. Keep it short, and give your leads a chance to warm to you first. Don’t take their attention for granted.

That’s it for the preparation. The next tutorial is about building it for real.