Wart Fransen

improve free trial to paid signup social

How to Improve Free Trial to Paid Signup Conversions

Offering sales prospects free trials is often a very valuable marketing tool. It gives potential customers the opportunity to try your product, with their own data or experiment with how they would ultimately end up working with it.

Getting users to signup for a free trial is the easy part, making them actually use your product during the trial period is the really hard part. If the person in the free trial isn’t using your product during the trial period, there is no way that you can expect them to actually convert into a paid customer when the trial finishes. …

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lead generation ideas social

9 Proven Lead Generation Ideas

Creating and planning lead generation strategies takes up a lot of time when you’re trying to come up with clever ways to generate new leads for you business.

This is because having a constant feed of high quality leads is a key part of maintaining and growing a new or old business. Unfortunately, sometimes it can be really hard to get the attention of quality leads that are likely to convert.

Since it can be hard to come up with effective tactics to gather new leads, and we’re obsessed with helping you generate leads, we found 9 proven lead generation ideas that are immediately actionable. …

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4 Best TED Talks for Sales Professionals

There are countless TED Talks available. These TED Talks have the ability to motivate and inspire people to push their personal and professional boundaries.

We decided to spend some time looking for the best TED Talks for sales professionals. This means that we discovered the best TED Talks, under 15 minutes in length, that help teach or remind us how to be more effective people. …

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how to make a high converting landing page social

How to Make a High Converting Landing Page

You’ve created a product or service that is seriously awesome, but people aren’t showing their interest. They aren’t emailing you or signing up, and this is getting kind of frustrating for you! This is a common scenario (you’re not alone!).

Luckily, there’s an easy to implement solution for you to overcome this problem you’re experiencing; you may to need to refine or redesign your landing page.

If you don’t feel like putting the effort into making clean landing pages, you’re likely missing out on a ton of leads. To put this into perspective: According to HubSpot’s 2012 Marketing Benchmarks Report, companies see an average of a 55% increase in the amount of leads they collect when they increase the amount of landing pages they have from 10 to 15.

This is because the layout of the page is a major factor in website success. And, with this in mind, it becomes clear why making landing pages is important. The more landing pages you are sending traffic to, the better picture you’ll see as to which page design performs best.

When you have a lot of landing pages and collect data around the performance of each page, you are able to stop making design guesses and start making informed design decisions.

To help you make some design decisions, before you’ve kicked off your landing page testing, we have put together a short guide on best practices for how to make a high converting landing page. These tips will help you create high converting landing pages more efficiently.

1. Be straight-forward

Being straight-forward means that you quickly and clearly explain what you do. This is important to do because people very rarely take the time to read through a complete page of information. However, what people will do is quickly scan the page to find something that catches their eyes.

To catch the eye of a website reader, you should have very clear headers and sub-headers. In addition, you should use brief bullet points that explain the value of your offering, and also use bold or italics to emphasize key items that the page reader should know.

2. Color choices are important

The colors that you decide to use on your webpages are very important. To start talking about this, we’re going to start off with the main call-to-action. Your primary call-to-action should be a vibrant color that stands out. This will help increase conversions because it makes it clear where visitors should engage with to complete a desired action.

We suggest that you consider using contrasting colors so that you don’t miss an opportunity to grab your visitor’s attention. Use the color that pops on the items where you want the user to complete an action, and keep the more calm colors of the design aspects that may distract from your main goals.

3. Clearly display your logo

To help people constantly remember that they’re engaging with your company, you should have your logo placed clearly on every page (in a strategic location). This doesn’t mean placing your logo smack in the middle of the page. It means deciding on where to place your logo consistently so that trust in your brand grows as the user browses your webpages.

4. Avoid information overload

Fancy looking images may sound good in theory, but too many visual typically destroys conversion rates. This is because elaborate visuals distract from the main goal, while also doing things such as making your website load slower. The negative impact of having a slower loading website is surprisingly large. Research by the Aberdeen Group showed that when a webpage loads one-second slower than normal, pageviews drop by 11%, customer satisfaction decreases by 16%, and conversions drop by 7% on average. If you keep your page simple, your conversion rate will be higher than if you fill it with tons of text and images.

5. Include social proof

Including social proof is one of our favorite tips for increasing landing page conversion rates. We like this because, while it works, it also gives you an opportunity to look at nice things that people are saying about your product or service (and this builds your own confidence in what you’re working on!).

Anyways, you should include social proof on your landing pages because it adds third party credibility to your offerings. Social proof means adding testimonials, case studies, or similar to your landing pages. Basically, anything you can do to shows how other people enjoy your product makes you a more trustworthy company.

Spend time searching through Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks and you’re bound to find some nice comments towards your company. We also recommend that you ask the person for permission to use what they’ve said about you. Asking for permission isn’t just a good thing to do since not everybody will want to be on your site, but it will also make the customer feel very appreciated and warmly acknowledged. The person giving the testimonial you’re posting is likely to become a “super user” and refer friends, family, and professional connections to your product or service.

Now what?

These 5 tips on how to make a high converting landing page are all simple to implement when designing or updating your pages. We are confident that if you try all, or even just one, of these tips, you’ll gather more leads and increase the amount of sales you close. Your business will grow.

BONUS TIP: Collect leads with no forms or buttons

A big part of lead collection is convincing people to fill out forms or press specific buttons. There’s a pretty awesome way that you can avoid having to make website viewers fill out a form or press a button; you can use a lead pixel. A lead pixel is a pretty magical tool that tells you which people or companies are frequently visiting your website. You can use this data to make smart decisions on which people or companies you should contact to try to sell your product or service to. To learn more about lead pixels, click here.

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4 Proven Ways to Generate Leads Using Social Media

If you’re a business with an online presence, you probably have social media accounts.

If you’re like a lot of businesses who are trying to use social media to expand their reach online, you may be somewhat aimlessly posting and hoping that you’ll ultimately generate more sales from your efforts. …

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how to growth hack your b2b marketing

How to Growth Hack Your B2B Marketing

When you’re looking up articles on growth hacking, most reading that you’re going to find will be on how to grow a B2C startup and not a B2B company. While these articles about B2C will often have small nuggets of useful information in them, you’re going to still benefit most from blog posts that offer strictly B2B growth tips.

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Definition: Lead Hacking

Before we dive into what exactly lead hacking means, let’s quickly remind ourselves what a lead is. A lead is simply a person or business that may eventually become a client.

Once you have collected a lead, you’re going to need to figure out how to convert that lead into an actual sales. That’s where lead hacking comes in. The goal of lead hacking is to get the best possible result in the shortest amount of time.

This post is designed for those who want to hack sales or leads for a B2B service, to efficiently accelerate the pace at which you close deals.

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How to Collect High Quality Sales Leads

Collecting sales leads can be difficult; collecting high quality sales leads can feel impossible.

Figuring out how to collect high quality leads is perhaps the biggest win that a B2B company can make on the marketing front since it makes the job of the sales team much easier when leads are actually qualified.

We’ve spent time studying dozens of philosophies on generating, nurturing, and managing leads. What we’ve learned all revolves around the notion that marketing and sales teams need to spend more time working together on defining what exactly a quality lead is for their organization.

We’ve summarized some of the key things that we’ve learned into the following tips on how to collect high quality sales leads. …

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Content Marketing Will Replace Traditional Advertising

Blog posts, ebooks, email drip campaigns, and similar marketing activities will replace traditional advertising.

It’s a bold statement, but it’s hard to deny that there is currently a massive surge in interest in content marketing from all types of brands underway.

With this surge in interest in content marketing happening, a more tactical approach is now required to turn readers into email subscribers, social followers, repeat readers, and then eventually customers.

There is a very simple reason why content marketing will replace traditional advertising: it works really well. …

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7 Simple Tips to Collect Leads Online

Facing the task of collecting leads can often feeling daunting.

To make your lead collecting mission feel more manageable, using the right techniques and tools can go a long way.

In fact, using the right lead generation tools and techniques can make lead collection dead simple.

We’ve taken our lead generation knowledge and shared it in this post that explains how to collect leads online.

Collecting Your Quality Leads

We’ve scoured the web and combined our findings with our lead generation expertise to make this easy to digest article on how to collect leads online.

Our goal when creating this guide was to make lead collection feel less overwhelmed and increase the quality of the leads that you collect. We’re confident that if you follow some of the following suggestions, you will not only increase the amount of leads you collect, but also the amount of sales you close.

1. Add Your Phone Number

If you’re hesitant to pick up the phone, this tip might not be your favorite. However, adding your phone number to your website will increase the quality of your leads. Adding your phone number will increase the quality of your leads because it increases the perceived genuineness of your company. Think about it for a minute— when you see a phone number on a website, you feel somewhat comforted because you perceive a company that has an active phone number as being more trustworthy. This means that even if you don’t plan on using a phone to actively grow sales, your sales might ultimately benefit simply from the presence of a phone number on your website.

2. Include Photo Testimonials

Testimonials are a great way to increase the quality of the leads that you generate, but adding a photo to the testimonial takes this tactic to a completely different level. Photo testimonials are powerful because they increase the authenticity of a testimonial. A photo comforts a visitor and makes your brand more feel more dependable. Photo testimonials will help you not just collect more leads, but collect more high quality leads.

3. Use Strong and Actionable Words

Actionable words such as “free” or “get” increase an emotional attachment to a product or service, instantly. When somebody sees a strong and actionable word, they are suddenly more compelled to engage further with your offering. A potential customer is much more likely to want to begin receiving the benefits of your product when you use strong and actionable words.

4. Don’t Use Generic Website Templates

Collect Leads Online WordPress

When you use generic website templates, the quality of your leads will plummet. This is because a generic template won’t be the best designed, and likely won’t increase customer confidence in your product. Spending a few extra dollars on a good design, whether it be from a designer or a website like ThemeForest, will go a long way towards helping you collect quality leads online. A good design has your business goals in mind, which means the quality and amount of leads collected will rise. …

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9 Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugins

Lead generation is a vital part of any business. Without lead collection, it’s going to be virtually impossible to discover new business opportunities and interact with potential customers.

With WordPress being a massive force on the Internet, there are naturally dozens upon dozens of plugins available to assist you in your lead generation. With so many WordPress lead generation plugins available, it can feel somewhat intimidating to figure try to figure out which lead generation plugin will work best for your needs.

We’ve roamed the Internet, tested countless plugins, and found which ones we enjoy most. Many of these plugins suited our own WordPress lead generation needs well, and some weren’t quite right for us. Nevertheless, even the plugins that didn’t work well for our goals could potentially be perfect for your business objectives.

The right lead generation plugins for your growth strategy will help you do things like collect and manage emails, find potential clients, and grow your company faster.

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Best Desktop Email Clients Mac

7 Best Desktop Email Clients for Mac

Without an easy and effective way for you to communicate with your leads, you’re going to have a very hard time growing your business. This is why, as a lead generation tool, it’s only natural that we examine the 7 best desktop email clients for Mac. The desktop email clients for Mac that we look at in this article make tasks such as organizing email, searching through archives, and staying in touch with friends or professional connections simpler. When you start using an email client that fits your needs best, your daily life becomes much more streamlined and manageable.

Nurturing Leads With the Right Desktop Mail Client

Email is arguably one of the most important aspects of a great lead generation engine because it allows you to have personal interactions with potential clients instantaneously while managing existing relationships efficiently. When you are able to form and manage meaningful relationships with potential (and current) customers your business is going to grow.

Picking the Right Desktop Mac Client

To help you optimize your sales funnel even more (or even just manage your personal email), we’ve organized the 7 best desktop email clients for Mac. We’ve taken screenshots, written descriptions on features, shared pricing information and done everything possible to make your desktop email client choice insanely easy.

Our goal with this article is to make your picking of a desktop email client effortless. We’re pretty confident that we’ve done just that.

Meet the 7 Best Desktop Email Clients for Mac

These are our favorite desktop email clients for Mac, in no particular order.

1. Inky (get it)

Inky Best Email Client

Inky talks about itself as being an alternative to Outlook. It works with Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud email accounts if you opt for a free account. If you want to use your business IMAP email account, you’ll have to pay $5 per month (per account). For a clean looking and reliable desktop email client, that’s not too hefty of a price and well worth it. We like Inky because its powerful search functionality will save you time, its custom inboxes will keep you organized, and it’s dead simple to use.

An added bonus of Inky is that if you have multiple devices, you may also like Inky because it works with Windows and iOS, not just OS X.

2. Mail Pilot (get it)

Mail Pilot Best Email ClientMail Pilot is an email client that was designed with an intense focus on productivity. It has a minimalist interface that makes it easy for you to read and organize your email. Mail Pilot is a combination of a to-do list and email client, which makes it a potentially perfect tool for managing and nurturing your leads.

Mail Pilot works seamlessly on more than just your Mac desktop– it’s also compatible with iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Pricing for Mail Pilot is $19.99 for the email desktop client and $9.99 for mobile versions.

3. Unibox (get it)

Unibox Best Email Client

Unibox is a radically different take on email. Instead of grouping by message, your emails are grouped by a person. This makes Unibox a potentially great pick for lead nurturing because it means that every person only appears once in the main inbox list, making it easier to keep track of new messages and old conversations.

When you press on a person who has just sent you an email in the program, you’re going to see all of the emails that you’ve ever exchanged with them. Previous conversations will be visible to you so you’ll never forget the context of a message when writing back.

In addition to Unibox being available on Mac, it’s also available for iPhone and iPad. The Mac desktop version costs $15.99 and the iOS version is free (with a pro version available for $4.99).

4. Thunderbird (get it)

Thunderbird Best Email Client

Thunderbird is made by Mozilla, the creators of the Firefox browser. If you like email clients like Outlook or the standard Mac Mail app, you’ll probably enjoy Thunderbird. The biggest advantage that Thunderbird has over its competitors is how much more customizable it is than them. You can pick themes and find tools or add-ons that make your email life more enjoyable.

Thunderbird is free to download and also available for Windows and Linux, in addition to OS X.

5. Polymail (get it)

Polymail Best Email Client

Polymail is a new mail client that is currently in beta. It’s ultra-sleek and looks somewhat like Slack, style-wise. With Polymail you’ll be able to easily manage all of your email accounts. It works with Gmail, iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, or any other IMAP account.

Polymail is currently in private beta. If you get early access to Polymail, it’ll be free to use. Pricing for when Polymail becomes publically available isn’t currently posted anywhere.

6. N1 (get it)

Nylas N1 is a new email client built on Chromium’s code. It is meant to be a simple and powerful way to manage your email. It lets you schedule and translates messages, with dozens of other plugins available for you to use.

N1 works with hundreds of email providers, such as Gmail, iCloud, Microsoft Exchange, Yahoo, and others. It works perfectly with Mac, Windows, and Linux. N1 dubs itself as the email client for everybody, and with its compatibility and customizability, anybody should be able to make N1 fit his or her needs.

7. Airmail (get it)

Airmail is a fantastically simple email client for Mac OS X and iPhone. It’s a great a looking app and makes managing email feel easy (and even kind of fun!). Airmail supports Gmail, Google Apps, iCloud, Exchange, IMAP, POP3, and local accounts. It also allows you to add unlimited email accounts to a unified inbox, powerfully search through archived messages, and much more.

Airmail is $9.99 for OS X and $4.99 for iOS.

Now What?

We’ve shared the 7 best desktop email clients for Mac with you, so now it’s time to decide on which one you like most. Each mail client that we’ve shared makes reading email on your computer more enjoyable, but they all have their own quirks and nuances. Take some time to learn even about that email client that looks best for you and decide if it will help you achieve your goals, whether it be talking to friends, family, or nurturing a newly collected lead.

Suggested next read:

Bonus: Newsletter & Email Tracking

Even with the best email client, you’re not going to have any luck nurturing leads if you don’t have any leads. Leadboxer identifies website leads & customers by email.
Collect valuable leads that will grow your business. Take a moment to try Leadboxer, for free. We know you’ll love using it.

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