Top Tools for Identifying Website Visitors

Lead Generation, lead hacking, Marketing, Sales / Wart Fransen

Identifying who visits your website provides important data your sales team can leverage to scale your business. People visit your website because they are interested in what you offer. Not all website user data is equal and the more detailed information you get, the better.

As great as your website is, only 2% of your visitors will contact you. That means 98% of your website traffic will visit, browse and leave without heading a call to action. Additionally, you don’t know much about these passive website visitors, which makes it difficult to develop a strategy for convincing them to return.

In this article, you’ll learn what website visitor information is available, how to access it, and why it’s important. You can go further and learn how to contact those visitors and make them more likely to become customers. That way, you and your sales team can keep your pipeline filled with high-quality leads.

Continue reading or use the links below to “jump” to topics:

The Benefits of Identifying Website Visitors
What Website Visitor Information is Available
Software to Help Identify Website Visitors
New Tools Available to Identify Website Visitors
Steps for Identifying Website Visitors
Start to Identify Website Visitors and Increase Sales Leads
Looking for more qualified leads?

The Benefits of Identifying Website Visitors

Why is it so important that you know who visits your website? What is the value of using technological tools to identify them? Gathering and properly analyzing this information or data is crucial to your sales success for a number of reasons:

For one, there’s no telling why 98% of visitors are leaving without taking the next step in the buyer’s journey.
Are they outside your target market?
Is there an issue with the landing page?

Identifying visitors to your site will help you find the answers to all these questions.

The major problem is that by not having an understanding of who is coming to your site, you are missing out on huge opportunities! There is no way to measure who among that 98% of visitors might convert and become a loyal customer provided the right user experience and proper nurturing. Knowing your visitors can make a big difference to your bottom line.

What Website Visitor Information is Available

Google Analytics does a great job at showing a snapshot of a website’s overall performance. It breaks down a website’s audience, their demographics, behavior, how they were acquired, and what the conversion rates are. Best of all, it’s completely free.

Some key performance indicators and reports to keep in mind when looking at Google Analytics are:

Demographics – The age and gender of site visitors will let you know if who’s visiting aligns with your ideal client profile.
Location – Like demographics, knowing the geographic location of visitors is useful for understanding if your digital marketing strategy is attracting ideal clients.
Device – This shows whether visitors are using a desktop or mobile device.
Acquisition – Knowing how a visitor arrived at the site can show you how well your marketing strategies are working and help identify potential areas for improvement.
Behavior Flow – This shows the journey from popular landing pages to other pages on the site, highlighting where traffic drops off and visitors leave.
Session Length – Knowing how long visitors are staying on a site provides insight into how useful and engaging it is.
Bounce Rate – If there’s a high bounce rate associated with a site, you may need to look into the time it takes to load pages or the overall site design.
Popularity – Knowing which pages are most and least popular can help you decide which are best suited to connect to paid advertising.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics has long been the gold standard for collecting and analyzing website visitor data. The platform provides information such as the number of users, the type of device used and the user’s source. Google Analytics 4 is a great starting point for learning about the type of people who visit your site.

Google Analytics offers a variety of reports that highlight different website traffic data. Here is how to use the new Google Analytics 4 platform to identify website visitors:

Log into your Google Analytics account (or create an account)
Create a property (the website you want to track traffic for) and add a tracking code
Go to Acquisition, then All Traffic, then Channels
For more detailed analysis, go to the Source/Medium Report under All Traffic

For step two, here is how you add the tracking code to your property (website):

Under Admin, select the right account in the account column.
Go to the Property column and select create a property
Enter a name for the property and select your time zone and currency.
Click on show advanced options
Turn on Create a Universal Analytics property
Enter the website URL and select either the HTTP or HTTPS protocol
Create both a Google Analytics and Universal Analytics property (code tags).
Accept the terms of service and data processing amendment and hit finish

You can further identify website visitors with the Network Report which looks into acquisition data, behavior and conversion rates. This is found under the Audience category and the Technology sub-category in the Google Analytics menu. The Network Report bundles visitors into the service provider they’re using to access the site.

However, when it comes to gathering and qualifying leads, Google Analytics falls short. The Network Report doesn’t show the name of individual visitors, their role within a company, their contact information or their unique behavior.

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Software to Help Identify Website Visitors

Not all website visitor identification tools are created equal. Some are bare-bones but budget-friendly, able to identify visitors and nothing more. Others can turn that data into action, showing you which of those visitors are worth pursuing as a possible client.

New Tools Available to Identify Website Visitors

Tools that analyze website visitors have been around for years. However, the online lead generation landscape has changed since 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic. More people are browsing the web and shopping online than before the pandemic, which increases the importance of website visitor tracking.

With the ease and speed of online shopping, you’ll get more website visitors. The increased importance of website conversion means you can’t rely on people merely finding your site. Below are tools that help you take advantage of increased web traffic and land more conversions:

LeadBoxer

Cost: $195/month for the basic plan and $505/month for the premium plan. There is also a free trial.

LeadBoxer not only identifies website visitors, it turns that information into actionable data that accelerates your sales pipeline. This is done by capturing around 50% of visitors that would otherwise remain anonymous.

You can track your users’ online behavior including website visits, email opens, newsletter clicks, advertising and social media use. This offers a comprehensive view of website visitor engagement. LeadBoxer can also provide visitor details such as the prospect’s industry and specialty.

Based on the criteria set by the organization, LeadBoxer calculates a lead score for each prospect. The higher the lead score, the more promising that prospect is. Sales reps know instantly who is most likely to convert and who isn’t.

Leadboxer Tracking users online behavior

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Hubspot Sales Hub

Cost: Free for individual salespeople. There is also a $50/month option and a $1200/month enterprise option that utilizes all HubSpot features.

Hubspot Sales Hub is a tool for managing a sales pipeline with visitor identification and lead qualification tools built in. Hubspot shows what companies are visiting a site in real-time and how many visitors there are from each company. You’ll see what pages they’re visiting and the number of page views they’ve made.

Hubspot collects information like company size and geography, then turns them into filter options. Using filters helps sales reps hone in on only those prospects that meet specific ideal client criteria.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Cost: Has four pricing tiers ranging from $25/month/user to $300/month/user. There is also a free trial.

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a pipeline management system with added features that identify website visitors. It highlights what marketing campaign generated a lead and what effects that campaign has on the pipeline. This allows organizations to make informed decisions about where to invest their marketing budget.

There are also functions like lead scoring that help sales reps follow up with only the most engaged prospects. With Salesforce Sales Cloud, it’s easy to route and assign leads to the right rep.

Overall, Salesforce best accumulates data on existing customers. It combines a customer’s social content, the deals they’re involved in and what they’re saying about a product or service.

Visitor Queue

Cost: Ranges from $16 to $160 per month. The basic plan identifies up to 100 company visitors per month and the top-level plan identifies up to 1,000 visitors per month.

Visitor Queue is a user-friendly, simple visitor identification tool that tracks company contact and visit information. It also tracks visitors’ social media accounts. It displays the name, contact information and user data of visiting businesses.

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Leady

Cost: $149/month. This plan identifies up to 3,000 visitors per month.

Leady is unique in that it helps you better invest in the right marketing campaigns. Leady automates your marketing process, enriches Google Adwords and creates highly relevant content campaigns for your ideal buyers. This helps you develop a list of prospects to fill your sales pipeline.

Happierleads

Cost: $69-$129 per month. Plans range from 100 lead identifications per month up to 1,000 leads per month.

Happierleads offers information on website visitors including contact information, the number of visits, length of visit and pages viewed. Features include:

Company-level visitor identification
IP and network data
Firmographic data of companies
Behavioral and demographic filters
Automated lead scoring
Real-time phone and email information verification

IPinfo.io

Cost: $99/month to $499/month

IPinfo allows you to find out who visits your website through IP data. This IP provider specializes in IP to geolocation, company and carrier, ASN, VPN detection, IP ranges and hosted domain data. IPinfo is simple, scalable, user-friendly and handles 420 billion API requests per year.

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User.com

Cost: Starts at $249 per month and goes up to $1349 per month

User.com is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that boosts website engagement and improves conversion. This is done using a single data source for your customers. User.com allows you to reach clients through email, live chat, chatbot, push notifications, dynamic page content and more.

ExactVisitor

Cost: There is a limited, free tier available and a $50/month basic tier where you’ll have up to 100 lead identifications per month.

ExactVisitor is a B2B lead generation software that identifies the real person and companies visiting your website. It analyzes how they got there, their behavior and their purchasing intent.

With ExactVisitor, you’ll get alerts when key accounts visit your site, insights into technologies visiting companies use and website personalization.

LeadRebel

Cost: $19 to $305 per month depending on the plan.

With LeadRebel, you can get daily email summary reports, employee contact details and support for multiple websites. This software uses company-level reverse IP lookup for its data so you can get visitor information even if they work remotely.

Visitor Insights

Cost: You must call for a quote.

Visitor Insights offers a front-end funnel builder that uses information on buyer intent. It also allows customers to outsource marketing programs. Visitor Insights is not GDPR compliant in the EU.

Visitor Insights feature tracking pixels, user identification data sources, Identity Graph, user contact information and buyer intent details. Visitor Insights is not reliant on website visitors already in your CRM.

WatcherMe

Cost: $80/month to $299/month across three pricing plans. Some of the unique features of WatcherMe include:

Real-time email alerts
Website activity tracking and basic lead scoring
Smart filtering on good leads
LinkedIn company contact discovery
Visitor reports

Steps to Identify Website Visitors

Identifying website visitors with the right tool couldn’t be easier. LeadBoxer, for example, comes with a pixel that automatically starts collecting data as soon as the code is installed. There are also several third-party integrations you can use with your existing marketing stack and CRM platform.

If you want to try this out without committing to anything, LeadBoxer offers a free trial account. Setting up LeadBoxer with your site requires just a few steps. Best of all, you don’t need to have any coding experience to get it done.

After you start your trial account, follow the steps below to identify your website visitors:

1. Install the Pixel

LeadBoxer comes with a Lead Pixel, a snippet of JavaScript code that needs to be dropped into the backend of your site. To track incoming traffic on the entire site, install the Lead Pixel into the footer. For specific landing pages, install the pixel into the code for those pages.

If you have a WordPress site and you don’t want to code, LeadBoxer created a user-friendly WordPress plug-in. Once the pixel has been installed, all incoming visitors are automatically tracked.

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2. Integrate With Other Tools

LeadBoxer seamlessly integrates with many third-party tools, such as Google Analytics, MailChimp, Slack and Pipedrive. When it comes to enriching visitor profiles and qualifying prospects, start by focusing on LinkedIn, MailChimp and website contact forms.

Capturing a visitor’s LinkedIn information is a quick and easy way to populate their profile. You can easily connect to their LinkedIn page and reward them with a white paper when they provide their information.

Identifying and qualifying leads from your MailChimp newsletters is even easier. To track who is clicking newsletter links, add the “?email=*|EMAIL|*” merge tag to any links you want to track. To track email opens and reads, install the email tracking pixel into your email template code.

3. Establish Leadscore Criteria

LeadBoxer automatically calculates a lead score that will indicate how likely a prospect is to convert. This helps sales reps know which leads they should prioritize over others.

You can adjust how LeadBoxer calculates a lead score by establishing unique criteria. What criteria you set will depend upon the organization’s ideal client profile. Consider the following for lead scoring:

Buyer Profile

It’s important to have a thorough understanding of your organization’s ideal client profile. Include fields on contact forms to help gather information so you’ll have data to use when calculating the lead score. You can give points for answers that align with the profile and take away for those that don’t.

Online Behavior

High levels of engagement with your site are a likely indicator that a prospect is interested in your product or service. Toggle points for page views, visit length, downloads and visit frequency over a 30, 60 or 90 day period.

Email Engagement

This doesn’t just mean that you should add to the lead score if someone is on your email list. Instead, prioritize high open rates and click-through rates. These are more meaningful indications of interest.

Social Media Engagement

The more a prospect interacts with you on social media, the higher their lead score should be. LeadBoxer can help track Facebook or Twitter likes, retweets, shares and click-through rates from your posts.

Spam Detection

Sometimes bots fill out contact forms and interact with your site. Things to look for include using all lowercase letters when filling out forms or using Gmail or Yahoo email addresses.

After establishing lead score criteria, you can automatically see which of your website visitors are worth following up with. You can then have LeadBoxer send alerts the next time ideal prospects engage with your site. That way you or the assigned sales rep can contact them while your company is still fresh in their minds.

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Start to Identify Website Visitors and Increase Sales Leads

There are several reasons why it’s vital to know who is visiting your site and how they’re interacting with it. You’ll know if your marketing campaigns are working or if your ideal buyers are noticing your product or service. It also shows if there are weak points where visitors are dropping off and navigating away from your site.

But that’s not all website visitor identification is good for. With this data, you’ll be able to optimize campaigns and site design. Knowing your site visitors increases the number of prospects available to you, keeping your sales pipeline filled.

A solid website visitor identification tool automates this process and enables you to invest in the best prospects. Using the data collected about your visitors is the first step toward a highly productive pipeline.

Looking for more qualified leads?

LeadBoxer offers lead identification and lead intelligence through website and email tracking. Watch the Video or Book a Demo to learn more.

Top Tools for Identifying Website Visitors Read More »

MQL vs SQL: What’s the Actual Difference?

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing, Sales / Wart Fransen

A MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a lead that matches with one of your customer personas and, most importantly, has engaged with your business and shown interest in your product. Hence, such leads can be termed Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) A SQL (Sales Qualified Leads) is a lead ready to become your prospective customer and who has been vetted by the marketing team. In short, this is lead who is prepared to make a purchase. Hence, such leads are Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). Difference between an MQL and an SQL is the lead’s intent to buy. Regardless of your business, both types of leads are essential to your pipeline. Still, it’s important to differentiate between those two to know where to allocate your time and what sort marketing efforts to implement to keep your leads flowing. In this blog post, we will go through mql and sql definitions, mql vs sql differences, and talk about lead transition of how mql becomes an sql.

What is MQL?

The acronym MQL stands for “Marketing Qualified Lead” In the shortest definition we could find, courtesy of H ubspot, an MQL is a person who is more likely to become a customer when compared to a typical person. Think of it this way: Many people may connect with your company. They may visit your website, attend your webinars, or chat with you at a trade show. For some of these people, the products and services you offer are exactly what they’re looking for. But for others, your product or service may not be a good fit. They may never be in the position to buy anything from you at all. The people in that first group — those who are interested and have the potential to buy your product — are considered as MQLs. Separating MQLs from unqualified leads typically involves using a lead-scoring program. LeadBoxer assigns a score based on lead interactions and behavior with your business, between 1- 100. This score can be efficient for ranking a lead’s sales readiness in your pipeline.

What is SQL?

The acronym SQL stands for “Sales Qualified Lead.” This person has not only shown a deep interest in your products and services, but they have also shown some intent to purchase. They not only like what you offer but also need to buy what you sell. They also may need to make that purchase soon. While defining an MQL can be done through automated software that assigns scores, defining an SQL is a little trickier. To move leads to sales, this involves a conversation between someone in sales and the potential lead. An SQL is someone in the marketing funnel:-

Who may has some specific questions about how your product works or how much it costs.
Who may not understand how your product fits into their other products.
Who may not be entirely sure the solution is right for them.
Who may be unable to find the answers they need in the marketing materials they’ve seen.

At the end of that discussion, if the salesperson senses a real opportunity, this he pass leads to sales hence moving mql to an sql.

MQL vs SQL: What’s The Difference

Difference between MQLs and SQLs is essential because it ensures sales team to spend time on right qualified leads for sales, that can lead to more efficient sales processes and better conversion rates. Also, at the same time, it helps the marketing team to understand which marketing channels and what type of marketing angle can bring in more qualified leads for their business goals. Hence they become more efficient in nurturing every lead. Therefore understanding the difference between mql and sql helps a business drive both marketing and sales efforts in the right direction.

1) Decision-Making Stage

As you should know, there are various stages of the funnel that leads goes through before a lead becomes an MQL and later an SQL. MQLs are typically at an earlier stage of the decision-making process. They are aware of their problem and know there are solutions out there in the market to help them. Hence, you can say MQLs are in a sales funnel’s ‘awareness’ stage. They are more in a ‘consideration’ stage because they are interested in your company’s products or services but not ready for sales yet. Also, they have engaged with your marketing content, such as downloading an e-book, signing up for a webinar, or subscribing to a newsletter. However, they have not yet clearly intended to purchase or enter a sales conversation. Most of your MQLs are open to options and might not be interested in a purchase right away. Basically they are in a lead nurturing phase. Whereas SQLs are in the bottom stage of the sales funnel, they are in the ‘Decision Making’ stage. They might not even engaged with marketing content but have also taken actions that indicate a readiness to consider a purchase, such as requesting a product demonstration, filling out a contact form with specific inquiries, or engaging directly with sales material. Their decision-making is more focused on selecting a vendor or product, comparing different offerings, and making a final purchasing decision.

2) Top of Funnel vs Bottom of Funnel

Another great way to differentiate MQL vs SQL is the type of marketing content they interact with. MQLs are more about seeking information and educating themselves, they are trying to understand their problem better and are looking for potential solutions. They interact with top of the marketing funnel lead magnets and content like:-

Reading your blog post on ‘Best X Tools for lead generation’
Signing up for your lead magnet, which said ‘Generate Leads on Automation’
Signing up for your newsletter
Following you on social media

On the other side, SQLs are more focused on consuming content that targets the bottom of the bottom-of-the-funnel audience. The content can be relevant to selecting a vendor or product, comparing different offerings, and making a final purchasing decision. For example:-

Reading your blog posts on ‘Your Tool vs Competitor Tool’ or ‘X Alternatives For Competitor 1’
Requesting for a demo call on your website
Enquiring for your product features on social media (or) through contact form

Engaging and interacting with sales materials, which are more precise and designed for a bottom-of-funnel audience, indicates and differentiates the lead as an SQL.

3) BANT Qualified

BANT is a system (or) framework for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. It’s a B2B framework used by sales reps to qualify leads and prospects during their journey, and it can be applied while assessing MQLs vs SQLs. It’s another great way to distinguish between lead as an MQL (or) SQL If a lead is BANT qualified, it’s an SQL rather than an MQL. In the following, let’s see how the BANT looks different for MQLs and SQLs. For MQL’s:-

Budget:- At the MQL stage, the potential customer may not have a defined budget yet. Maybe they are still exploring solutions and may not know how much they should spend on their answer.
Authority:- If a mid-size business’s junior or senior executive employee interacts with your business, they might not have the authority to make a final purchasing decision for their organization.
Need:- The need for leads to purchase your product depends on their pain points and how your product (or) service can help them solve them. Also, it is majorly important for your marketing strategy to define their pain points and educate them. For an MQL, some might not be aware of these pain points; hence, there is a long way to go to educate them.
Timeline:- MQLs typically do not have a set timeline for making a purchase and are not under pressure to make an immediate decision.

For SQL’s:-

Budget:- SQLs are expected to have a clearer picture of their budget or at least have a range in mind. Most importantly, they can afford your product or service. It’s just that sales teams have to negotiate with them on pricing.
Authority:- SQLs are usually the stakeholders of the company or someone from an organization responsible for their final purchasing decision. Hence, they have the authority to buy from you.
Need:- SQL’s know their problems and what are the existing solutions for their issues in the market. Their pain points are clear, and often, it nails down to what specific features and benefits your product offers to help them feel the need to choose you over your competitors.
Timeline:- SQLs have a defined timeline to make the purchase. By offering them discounts and any other benefits with their purchase, they are more likely to buy immediately.

Transitioning a Lead from MQL to SQL

Transitioning an MQL to SQL in your pipeline isn’t something that will happen on your own. Your marketing and sales teams must communicate and coordinate to make this happen. If you’re using software like LeadBoxer to track leads, it becomes easier to note down the MQLs with a higher probability of becoming a sales lead through lead scoring. However, lead scoring is a critical process most businesses use while transitioning a lead from MQL to SQL.

Now, this involves:-

Setting Up a Scoring System: As you identify the lead actions and lead behavior, you assign points/scores to each interaction. For example, downloading an e-book might score lower than requesting a product demo.
Demographic Information: As we discussed earlier, not every lead has the authority to purchase even though they match your ideal customer profile. Factors like job title, industry, company size, and location can significantly determine the lead’s potential to buy.
Engagement Scoring: Track how leads interact with your emails, social media, and blog posts. Repetitive and frequent interactions tell you that leads in your system are MQLs, and some might be ready to be SQL.
Lead Score Thresholds: Establishing a threshold score is essential to help sales teams understand when a lead is ready to move to SQL. This threshold should be based on previous data of information with your business and marketing content.
Regular Review: Sometimes, SQLs who get on a call with you are not ready to purchase. Hence, do not fill your pipelines with leads with improper attribution. It’s essential to review and adjust your scoring criteria continuously. The best way to make it happen is to arrange regular meetings with both sales and marketing teams to help them understand better lead qualifications to help your business grow.

How LeadBoxer can help you transition MQL to SQL:-

One-time visitors to your website are most likely not a lead for your product (or) service. Those returning visitors who interact with your content are the ones who can termed as leads. Using LeadBoxer’s lead identification feature, you can specify what is a lead for you, and it identifies such specific visitors.
As these leads interact increasingly with your business, they can later be qualified as an MQL or SQL. Hence, using a leads scoring system and enriching those leads are great ways to qualify and differentiate leads.
For example, you know that leads interacting with Top-of-funnel marketing content (Reading your blogs) can be termed MQL, and leads interacting with Bottom-of-funnel content (Requesting demos) can be termed SQL.
Both MQLs and SQLs need to be in a lead management cycle where, with workflow automation, you retarget MQL leads with your marketing (It can be through emails or retargeted ads), whereas SQLs are given to the sales team to contact. Integrating your lead management tool with your existing CRM makes it more accessible.
As MQLs are being retargeted, potential buyers in your MQL segment will start to interact more with your business, like reading your email and asking questions with your marketing teams.
Once these MQLs are warmed up, Lead scoring suggests they are ready to move to SQL. Then, you move those leads and ask your sales teams to contact them.
Remember, not all SQLs will convert. The ones who didn’t convert should be moved to MQLs again so that the marketing team can nurture them with more marketing material.

Conclusion

We knew from the start that the distinction between Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) is crucial for the efficiency of your sales funnel and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Differentiation MQL vs SQL doesn’t mean you need to neglect one set of leads, both are important for a b2b lead generation. Thus, both marketing and sales teams need to identify these leads and not get stuck up with the thought that ‘I am not gonna handle their lead’ Effective communication and coordination are essential between the sales and marketing teams to identify, nurture, and pitch their leads. Here, tools LeadBoxer are going to help them successfully.

MQL vs SQL: What’s the Actual Difference? Read More »

19+ Lead Generation Tools from the Experts

Inspiration, Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

Effective lead generation is more than using a specific tool. However, tools make our lives easier and allow us to generate leads at scale. Knowing which lead generation tools to use and how others use them successfully can save you a lot of time trying out each solution.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of lead generation tools straight from sales and marketing experts who use these tools everyday.

Our question was simple, we asked these experts “What is your favorite lead generation tool and why?”.

Here are their responses:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lite Chrome Extension

One of my favorite lead generation tools that I’ve been using for years, is the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lite extension for Chrome (formerly Rapportive). Once installed on your Chrome browser, the extension populates a nifty little sidebar full of useful prospect information to the right of your inbox within Gmail, like so:

When you hover your cursor over an email address, all of this information will pop up (if the recipient’s email address is connected to their LinkedIn profile).

Now, while this tool alone doesn’t generate leads for me, it’s been useful beyond measure

In helping me scale my extremely valuable B2B client base since my outreach approach is so high touch and my contracts often run into the six figures.

I use the extension to both verify that an email address is correct before hitting send, and to properly research a prospect with the goal of personalizing my cold emails before reaching out.

If you want more, I also recently wrote an epic guide breaking down several of my most successful lead generation tactics that I would recommend checking out.

Ryan Robinson
www.ryrob.com

Ryan is a writer and content marketer for the world’s top entrepreneurs and startups. He teaches over 200,000 monthly readers how to start and grow a profitable side business on his blog and podcast.

Callingly

When it comes to collecting leads, it’s all about casting a wide net and using lead generation tools that will get people to respond to you. One tool that’s underutilized, but extremely powerful is an online form. Online forms are great for lead generation because they’re simple to set up, fully customizable, and integrate with many third-party apps.

My favorite lead generation tool is a combo of an online form builder and Callingly. When these two lead generation tools are integrated, calls will start immediately after a new lead is submitted to your form. I love it because your salespeople will automatically get on the phone with incoming leads—it’s efficient and effective!

Annabel Maw
www.jotform.com

Annabel is a Marketing Communications Specialist at JotForm, a popular, easy-to-use online form building tool based in San Francisco. Annabel’s marketing role focuses on generating leads for press.

Voila Norbert

I’ve recently started using Voila Norbert, and it’s the most effective lead generation software I’ve used. It’s simple: you type in someone’s name, and their company’s URL, and it finds the email associated with that name. I use Linkedin for sourcing the leads, and Voila Norbert for quickly finding the right email.

For a complete list of email tracking tools, check out this list of the best email tracking apps for Gmail and Outlook.

Carter Grieve
www.northone.io

Carter is the Head of Growth at NorthOne, a mobile first banking platform.

Leadpages

My favorite lead generation tool is Leadpages. There are two very important reasons why I use Leadpages:

Reason 1 – Leadpages Host The Landing Pages On Their Servers

Leadpages hosts all the landing pages I create on their server, I don’t have to worry about my website going offline due to my own web host issues. I remember once when I was self-hosting my landing pages and sent paid traffic to it, my web host suddenly had problems and my site went down for a full day. That cost me lots of money. Ever since then, I have switched to use reputable software for my landing pages like Leadpages.

Reason 2 – Easy To Create High-Converting Landing Pages

I have a pretty tight schedule as most of my time is spent coaching my clients. Hence it’s important for me to find a software that is easy and straightforward to use, without having to spend lots of time on it. Hence I use Leadpages because I can easily create a highly-converting landing page (which they have already determined from their own tests) and create one in 15 – 30 minutes.

Overall, when determining a good lead generation tool to create my landing pages, I look for reliability (in terms of their site being up) and ease of use. And on both fronts, Leadpages has done a good job for me so far.

Davis Lin
www.clientacquisitionlab.com

Davis is the owner of Client Acquisition Lab, a site that helps businesses and startups generate leads and find new clients.

LeadQuizzes

The one tool we’ve seen that everyone could benefit more from is any kind of lead quiz platform, like Lead Quizzes or Qzzr. With enough creativity, you can think of a quiz (personality or test-your-knowledge) that will fit your audience. Prospects find these interesting or fun in both B2C and B2C. To get their results, they have to first give up their email.

The lead quiz approach to simultaneously creating engaging content and opportunities can lower your lead costs because prospect interest in quiz outcome boosts your conversion rates, reducing the amount you need to spend to get each lead.

When I was researching my Content Marketing World talk, I did some research on 11 lead magnet types across multiple social networks via Buzzsumo, and quizzes were the most shared kind by far

So, if you want some viral effect from your lead gen piece, quizzes are a great way to go. They definitely do best on Facebook and Twitter- not as well on LinkedIn, where whitepapers and case studies reign. But it is possible to come up with professional quiz topics that fit the B2B mindset. Or you could tie a whitepaper or case study into a lead quiz, linking one to another, and promoting both on all three social networks.

In a B2C context, we created a lead quiz for a self-help author who wanted to reach women on relationship topics. An ebook lead magnet yielded leads that cost more than $3.00, while her quiz leads cost only $0.44 each.

As you can see, lead-generation quizzes are both highly interesting to prospects, and highly profitable for marketers. The lead quiz is the one tool I would recommend more lead gen practitioners explore.

Brian Carter
www.briancartergroup.com

Brian Carter is a popular digital marketer and keynote speaker with clients like NBC-Universal, Microsoft and Humana.

Hubspot

My favorite lead generation platform is HubSpot. I like it because of its comprehensive ability to track behavior and touch points across email, social media, website, landing pages, and calls to action. It’s an integrated system that provides all of the critical elements for lead generation and lead nurturing under one roof.

From its built-in CRM, you can see how your leads interacted at various points. You can even setup alerts for lead revisit notifications to alert the lead owner of critical activity.

As an example, a visitor may land on a blog article on your website via organic traffic. There is a HubSpot call-to-action (CTA) button in the blog article that takes them to a landing page with a lead magnet. You can get data on the call-to-action button that shows you how many impressions you’ve had as well as the click-through rate.

This helps you identify CTAs that are performing well and those that need improvement

When the visitor clicks on the CTA, they are taken to a HubSpot landing page. Similarly, you have data on the landing page performance and can look for what’s working and what’s not working. You can also A/B test landing pages to drive incremental improvements.

Once they complete the form on the landing page, they are entered into a HubSpot marketing automation workflow. This places them in a nurturing program and you can track when they meet campaign objectives or not. You have tracking on emails they open and when they visit your website.

You can setup automated tasks and alerts for the sales team to react to behavior that shows a high intent to purchase. All of your lead’s behavior is in the CRM, so the sales team has context when they reach out to them. Again, everything is measurable in the system so you can see what is working and what isn’t working.

Craig Andrews
www.allies4me.com

Craig is the founder and owner of the digital marketing agency, allies4me.

My favorite lead generation tool is Hubspot’s CRM

The free version has a number of excellent lead generation tools to help you capture inbound leads:

1) You can sync an existing form on your website to both the CRM and your email provider. This allows you to seamlessly integrate people that visit your website into your lead generation pipeline and/or set up an automatic drip marketing campaign.

2) One of my favorite lead generation tools that comes with it is the ability to sync the CRM to your calendar. You can put a link on your website that allows people to book meetings with you. I think it’s a really great feature and I’ve actually gotten a number of new leads and clients this way. Here is an example of what it looks like after an inbound lead clicks on the link in your website: https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/maryclare

You can also use their Sales CRM. It is completely free and has tools to help you move leads through your sales pipeline. It has some excellent email templates to help you build and maintain a relationship with leads, qualify your leads and even close deals.

Finally, their Hubspot Academy is excellent. It has a number of free tutorials. This one is excellent: https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/inbound-marketing

Mary Clare Bland
www.bespoke-digital-solutions.com

Mary is the founder of the digital marketing agency, Bespoke Digital Solutions. She works with a number of small and medium size businesses to drive traffic to their websites.

Out of all of the lead generation softwares I’ve worked with, I’d be quickest to recommend HubSpot

Unlike lead generation tools developed by other notable companies, HubSpot consistently stays up to date on everything they offer.

HubSpot offers a wide variety of features that are relevant to lead generation, but some of the features that save me the most time are: contact creation automation, form sniffing, and the easy-to-use CRM.

The real reason that HubSpot sets itself apart from other options is the user experience. Just learning the ins and outs of a similar program could require extensive training and would require careful implementation, but HubSpot can be useful from day one.

Eric Johnson
www.techwaremn.com

Eric is a Digital Marketer for Techware – a Sage software partner. He has experience with a wide variety of lead generation tools and software – from Salesforce to Leadpages and Hubspot.

MailChimp

My favorite lead generation tool is MailChimp because it streamlines so much of the lead generation process (forms, landing pages, marketing automation, email), and it’s free. Now that marketing automation is included in the free plan, it really seems to good to be true. But it’s true.

I use MailChimp for companies who want to start generating their own leads, but aren’t ready to make a huge investment yet. Then when they are ready to scale, they are able to decide whether they want to start paying for MailChimp or migrate to a more robust tool like HubSpot.

Roy Harmon
www.advertoscope.com

Roy is a digital marketing professional with over 8 years of experience generating leads in multiple industries. He’s also the owner of Advertoscope, an online digital marketing publication that covers paid lead generation strategies.

Wix ShoutOut

I’d have to say my favorite tool has been Wix ShoutOut. Primarily because I was paying to use an email lead service before I learned that my website builder and hosting solution Wix provided a similar service at no extra cost to their website clients.

My package only includes 3 shoutouts a month for up to 5000 emails, but that’s fine given I was using the other service twice a month for about a total of 1500 emails. I use it to find insurance brokers that have an interest in offering my health benefits membership as well as a way to generate leads for my health insurance agency.

I get the email addresses for the brokers for free using public information and I get the email addresses for potential health insurance clients from leads I’ve purchased online in the past. So the whole process doesn’t cost me anything additional.

Larry C Medcalf
www.medcardmember.com

Larry is the owner of MedCard, an health benefits membership website. He also runs his own health insurance agency, IndyHealthAgent.

Unbounce

I would answer: Unbounce

This tool allows you to create and publish landing pages in a very simple and fast way. It has a great variety of templates adaptable to all devices. It is usually more focused on objectives such as registration or downloading information.

I would see it useful in your case if, for instance, you want to send the traffic of an advertising campaign to a page that is highly optimized so that for example the user registers, subscribes to your newsletter, etc. In the case of an e-commerce, the normal thing is that you send the traffic to the product page to generate the purchase.

Sophie Miles

Sophie is the the VP or Marketing and Co-Founder of CalculatorBuddy, a website for comparing loans and insurance policies.

CallRail

I’ve been using CallRail for about 6 months now to generate leads through my site, and so far I’m finding it incredibly simple to use and I’m also finding the reports within the dashboard very insightful. My favorite type of lead to generate is calls because I truly believe that if you can get someone on the phone, you have a much better shot at getting them to convert into a buyer.

CallRail helps me by providing detailed reports which include recordings of the calls that I’ve generated for the business I work with. Plus, CallRail has loads of other ways to customize the calls by adding messages which only the caller can hear etc.

Max Robinson
www.weswap.com

Max is working for WeSwap Travel Card – global travel money card. He is a Marketing Manager and he manages PPC campaigns.

Facebook Lead Ads

The tool we have seen the most success with is Facebook’s Lead ads. We knew that using a platform such as Facebook where we can specifically target certain audiences would be the most effective for our clients, and this ad-format works perfectly alongside any Lead Gen strategy.

It allows you to show consumers an advert, from which a form pops up that is already pre-populated with the contact information they’ve shared with Facebook. From there it’s only one ‘Submit’ click and you have a qualified lead from a user who has positively engaged with your ad-content!

The key here is that we don’t ask the user to leave Facebook to convert on a website

Social media is a very personal space so conversion rates will always be higher when the user is able to convert directly in their news feed.

On average we have seen 2x more leads generated through this tool compared to using traditional Facebook advertising methods.

Although on its own this strategy proves very effective, pairing it up with an Auto Responder such as LeadSync is the secret to our conversion success. This tool emails you the lead information in real time, which is often crucial for our clients as peak interest can drop if left 1 or 2 hours before a callback.

Being able to get consumers information sent directly to the call team means we can often follow up with leads within seconds of clicking ‘Submit’. This particular tool also gives you the option to send an automatic response out to the lead (which is handy if advertising out of hours), add their information straight into your CRM and many more useful features.

Lauren Beales
www.haystackdigital.co.uk

Lauran is an Account Manager at the digital marketing agency, Haystack Digital. She has been with the company for 2 ½ years focusing solely on managing and optimising Haystack’s largest lead generation campaigns.

Webinarjam

Right now, the best lead generation tool we use is Webinarjam. Why? Because it powers our main marketing webinar and fuels our email lead capture strategy.

Every week we use Webinarjam to run an informational webinar that shares with students tips they can immediately use to score better on the SAT or ACT, along with how to successful search for scholarships and get into the school of their dreams.

Through both email drip campaigns and targeted social ad spends, we use our webinar marketing funnel to capture leads, make sales, and also gauge general interest during our various seasons throughout the year.

In the year since we’ve started using it, Webinarjam is responsible for driving hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue to us that would otherwise go untouched and grow our lead lists by thousands of people.

Shaan Patel
www.prepexpert.com

Shaan Patel is the Founder and CEO of Prep Expert, a Shark Tank-funded test prep company based in Las Vegas, NV. His company helps high school students prepare for the SAT and ACT, using the latest online educational tools.

Intercom

One of my favorite lead generation tools is Intercom. Our member registrations are the lifeblood of our service, and Intercom helps us connect with our target audience in a meaningful way, helping users connect with our panel of doctors in minutes based on primary health questions.

Intercom is user friendly for both consumer and brand, making it a powerful lead solution that nets results.

Stephen Seifert
www.yourdoctors.online

Stephen is the Director of Marketing at Your Doctors Online, a website that connects doctors with people who have health questions. The site currently generates around 2,500 member registrations per week.

Our favourite lead generation tool has to be Intercom

From using various lead generation tools over the years, Intercom has always been the one that stood out. Not only is it highly customizable, but it also seems to capture the user’s attention much better than a standard email pop up. I also like the fact that different messages can be used depending what page a user visits which really helps with targeting.

In addition to this, all the messages are sent from a person’s profile so it looks like a real person is talking to the user. This greatly increases response rates and gives people a personal connection instead of just entering their email and waiting for a reply back.

The software is also really powerful in its report and analytic abilities

Not only can you see what pages users are viewing in real time, but it also helps you collect data and information about the user. Why just collect an email address when you can collect lots of other juicy information that will come in useful in the future?

Overall, compared to a simple email sign up form, Intercom has plenty of cool features which makes lead generation a breeze. The only downside about the software is it can get a bit technical and it takes a while to learn how to use everything. Overall, it’s certainly helped us improve our number and quality of leads.

Sam Carr
www.ppcprotect.com

Sam is the marketing manager at PPC Protect with years of experience generating high-quality leads for startups and small businesses.

Intercom works best in its category and that is why I use it successfully for my coupon business.

Intercom allows you to establish direct communication with the audience who visits your website. It enables you to send direct display messages to the person when certain criteria are fulfilled.

Suppose a person stays more than 45 seconds on your product page of your website on his or her second visit, Intercom enables you to flash any product related message on the screen of the visitor.

If the visitor responds against that message, your sales executive can directly start a conversation with the visitor through text, chat, or even video chat channels.

Andrei Vasilescu
www.dontpayfull.com

Andrei Vasilescu is the CEO and sales head of Don’tPayFull, a renowned money saving platform.

Hunter

Hunter (hunter.io) is by far, my favorite lead generation tool.

When I first started sending out cold emails, I would have no idea how to generate my own leads with the targeted company. I asked my CEO for help, and he told me about Hunter.

Finding emails only require the company’s domain, and Hunter does the grunt work by finding possible email addresses. A great feature they have is the ‘Hunter for Google Sheets’ extension.

The extension allows me to manage all my leads without switching back and forth between too many tabs. All in all, Hunter is a great tool that every company should use, if they have a need for it. Best of all, they include 100 free requests per month if you do not wish to sign up.

Jonathan Kong

Jonathan is the Product Manager at GrowthOK, a lead generation solution company.

For a deeper look at email tracking, check out our guide: “Email Tracking: The Complete Guide for B2B Sales Teams”

Data

As a digital agency in business for more than 10 years, we’ve used a variety of lead generation tools, platforms, and services at SEMGeeks. Our core preference for lead generation starts with a combination of Data.com (a Salesforce product), SEMRush, SpyFu, and a few others.

These lead generation tools help us scope out specific companies that we feel need help from a digital standpoint, with Data.com even providing core information about the decision maker so that we can make direct contact and educate them on what we do and how we can help grow their business.

Next, we utilize Infusionsoft (marketing automation tool) to capture contact form data

And automatically bring it into the platform, which then triggers a series of drip emails that educates the consumer about our agency, what we do, and how we do it.

Lastly, we use Salesforce to manage all of our leads/opportunities/accounts and keep track of our prospect pipeline. This unique combination of tools has been invaluable to our company and has helped us to become a leading agency in the tri-state area.

Pete Schauer
www.semgeeks.com

Pete is the Marketing Director and a member of the business development team at SEMGeeks. He has been working on lead generation for clients and the agency for more than five years.

Quora

Quora is a fantastic site when it comes to lead generation. In recent years, it has become as popular as Yahoo Answers once was for myth-busting, fact-finding and general advice; questions pour in from users from all over the world.

All a business needs to do is search for questions that are relevant to their industry and they are likely to find countless inquiries. This gives you the opportunity to submit insightful and well-informed responses to these queries (even giving you the chance to link your products/services if the person is looking for recommendations).

Doing this is a subtle and helpful way of promoting the knowledge and experience of your company, which then helps to drive potential leads to your website.

James Nuttall
www.cuuver.com

James is a Content and Outreach Specialist at Cuuver, a car insurance quote website.

Google Forms

I prefer to use a “hands-off” approach to our lead generation and only capture leads that want to be contacted. We’ve found that most SaaS clients do not want to have to provide their email or contact information when they are in the decision phase.

So we removed all roadblocks that require any information in exchange for content. We’ve found that clients who voluntarily give us their contact information have much higher open and engagement rates.

I use Google forms to capture leads on our company website and blog. It’s very simple to setup and easy to style your own forms and embed them on your website.

We also use Zapier to automatically add new leads to our CRM and add potential clients to our mailing lists. We recently started using a chat application to help nurture leads at the top of our funnel, with great success.

Blair Mckee
www.constellix.com

Blair is a digital marketing professional and website developer with 3 of years experience managing lead generation campaigns for two high-tech startups.

Interseller

Interseller.io is a hidden gem in the sales world, and the best tool I’ve ever used to generate leads. It combines prospecting and outreach into one simple (but powerful) platform, automates Salesforce integration, and uses 7 methods to verify emails.

My bounce rate is consistently under 4%, down from 10-20% using other tools. When you’re reaching out with personalized, thoughtful messaging, ensuring that your emails don’t enter a proverbial black hole can make the difference between hitting quota and falling short.

Sitora Serverova
www.alloy.ai

Sitora has 6+ years of sales experience in SaaS and advertising. She’s currently in an outbound, full-cycle sales role at a Series A supply chain company (Alloy.ai), and previously led a team of SDRs at a F&B SaaS startup (Partender).

Zoho CRM

My favorite tool to use to generate leads is autoresponders from Zoho CRM. Throughout our website, we have forms users can fill out to download free guides on software development, IT support, etc. After they fill out the form, they are enrolled in our “drip campaigns.” An autoresponder is sent to them every few days.

These autoresponders sound very personal and conversational, to the point that users think they’re from an individual and not scheduled beforehand. We’ve found these autoresponders to be very successful in garnering leads because of their conversational tone.

We’ve found them so successful that we’ve started using them to re-engage cold leads or lost deals with follow-ups as well

Autoresponders from Zoho CRM allow us to save time by not following up with every lead or contact individually. Instead, we write one email and let the CRM keep track of when contacts can use a little push.

Keri Lindenmuth
www.kyledavidgroup.com

Keri is the Marketing Manager at KDG, a web and tech solution company. Keri works with lead generation every single day and is always looking for new ways to garner leads.

Nextdoor

We’ve found that building landing pages for newsletter posts on Nextdoor to be an effective form of lead generation. Hyper local social media platforms bring credibility since those interacting with the forums are locals. In the home buying industry, many sellers want to work with someone who’s local because they are more likely to understand the true value of their home and can often make the most competitive offers.

Products like LeadBoxer allow us to track response rates for our newsletters and email campaigns so we get a better idea of what content connects best with our audience.

Evan Roberts
www.dependablehomebuyers.com

Evan is a local home buyer with Dependable Homebuyers in Baltimore, MD. His expertise is in generating buyer and seller leads.

Our Favorite Lead Generation Tools

As a platforms that helps companies and salespeople generate new leads, we’ve seen and used quite a few different lead generation tools ourselves. To complete this list, we thought it would be helpful to list a few of our favorites:

Buffer

Buffer is a dead simple way to share and schedule posts to social media. You can schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

If you opt to use the Business version of Buffer, you will also get detailed analytics that allow you to better understand your social media return on investment. This tool is important for lead generation because a strong social media presence is a simple way to drive qualified traffic to your website, while strengthening your brand.

LeadBoxer

LeadBoxer is a Customer and Lead Data Platform that allows you to see who visits your website, what company they work for; lists that person’s contact information and more.

With this information, you can pinpoint the “warmest” leads and find the perfect time to follow up with leads.

[cp_modal id=”cp_id_9d692″]Free E-Book: Click here to download LeadBoxer’s free E-Book, “7 Things to Consider in an Email Tracking App”[/cp_modal]

Callmaker

Callmaker adds an automated calling service on your website. It allows you to collect more phone numbers from sales prospects and call them back almost immediately. It’s a great inbound tool that has the potential to help you start more sales conversations.

RightHello

RightHello allows you to solve the problem of not having enough customers coming to you. The tool allows you to easily create a list of thousands of potential customers, pick the companies that appeal to you most, and then send a qualified contact at the company a personalized email message.

Colibri IO

Colibri IO allows you to find conversations about your products, brand, and competitors. It gives you the tools you need to discover quality websites where you can build influence and get valuable mentions.

Reply

Reply is a method for automating the way that you do email outreach. It allows you to create cold email campaigns that feel like warm emails. This service puts your email outreach on autopilot and is a valuable addition to your lead generation and prospecting stack.

Conclusion – Get Started

If you want to up your game, generate more leads and track your lead’s entire customer journey (including email activity, website activity, and more), we recommend you take a look at LeadBoxer.

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19+ Lead Generation Tools from the Experts Read More »

Email Tracking: The Complete Guide for B2B Sales Teams

Data-Driven analysis, Email, Lead Engagement, Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

Have leads and customers opened your email? If so, when, and what links they click? This is valuable information for Sales teams. With this information, you can find out if your emails are actually being read, and pinpoint the optimal for a follow-up.

Tracking emails is nothing new. Popular email marketing platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact have been providing statistics on open and click rates for years. What these platforms lack however, is the crucial ability to track a lead’s email interaction history over the entire course of their customer journey.

This is where email tracking software can provide Sales teams a much-needed edge in closing deals

With the right email tracking software, you’ll be able to identify when, exactly, a lead has opened your email, who opened it, and what pages they viewed since opening that email.

To help introduce you to email tracking software, we’ve put together this in-depth guide to cover what information you can learn from email tracking, how you can use that information, email tracking software options, how to setup email tracking, and a few tips for success.

Use the links below to navigate to each section:

What Can You Find Out Using Email Tracking & How You Can Use This Information?
Email Tracking Software Options
How to Setup Email Tracking (with an Email Tracking Pixel)
Email Tracking Tips & Best Practices

What Can You Find Out Using Email Tracking & How You Can Use This Information?

With email tracking, you can find out the following information:

If Someone Has Opened Your Email

The first thing you can learn is if someone has opened your email.

This tells you if you’re sending to the correct email address and if the email subject your using is capturing the recipient’s attention. If they don’t open your email, try to follow up and/or use a different subject line in the future.

You can also identify how many times a person has opened an email and which people have opened the most emails. This allows you to identify the warmest leads and pinpoint which people you should follow up with first/spend the most time contacting or calling. Best kept secret: do not waste time on people who aren’t interested.

Who Opened Your Email

As a salesperson, you often have to navigate through a few different positions at a company before finding the person who can actually make a purchasing decision (DMU or decision-making-unit). With email tracking, you can identify other people that may be opening the email and reach out to them directly.

What Time They Opened Your Email

If you find that a specific person opens your email in the morning, sending to them again at that time will increase your chance of capturing their attention.

If you find most of your list opens your emails at a specific time, send future emails at the time to increase engagement.

Additionally, you can pinpoint exactly when your emails are being opened and decide if now is the right time to follow up. In many cases, it’s best to reach out right away when the person is already thinking about you versus interrupting them when they’re focused on something else. Extensive statistics tell us that “pizza is best eaten hot”. In other words, people at work are making decisions, and their interest is the most valuable during that decision-making process.

Where They Opened Your Email

If someone opens your email in say Hawaii or some other tropical resort, you can probably guarantee they’re on vacation. It might be best to follow up a week or two in advance when they return from vacation and will have the time to respond to your email.

Additionally, some email tracking platforms will track the following:

What Pages the Person Has Visited on Your Website After Clicking via Your Email

Software such as LeadBoxer and SharpSpring (which we’ll discuss in further detail below) take tracking a step further and identify which pages the person visits after clicking a link in your email.

For example, in the email, the person may click on any link to your latest blog post. But from there, they then navigate to your features page and pricing page. This is all tracked and it can allow you to identify when to follow up, and on what subject.

Email Tracking Software Options

Now, let’s cover a few email tracking platforms that will enable you to track emails at a deeper level than most email marketing services.

This article doesn’t cover every single option out there. But, it does list some of the major players and a few different options based on how in-depth you’d like to go with your tracking.

A few of these options will integrate with Gmail or Outlook only, while a few others can be used with any email client or service you are using.

LeadBoxer

We’ll start this list of software with an introduction to ourselves and our email tracking tool so you know who we are and what LeadBoxer does. LeadBoxer is a lead analytics platform that allows you to see who visits your website, what company they work for, lists that person’s contact information and more.

All of this information is then organized into your “LeadBoard” and each of your different leads are given a score to gauge how engaged they are with your company:

Additionally, email opens and click-throughs can also be tracked. From there, any visits to other pages on your website can be tracked and each action is shown in the history for that lead:

This allows you to see every action that the person has taken since first opening your email.

You can use this information to identify when will be the best time to follow up (for example, if that person has visited your pricing page). You can also identify what emails work, which ones don’t, and where your visitors tend to go after clicking through via your email.

LeadBoxer tracks all of this activity via a tracking pixel (which we’ll discuss how to implement further below)

Therefore, LeadBoxer can be used with any email client or email marketing platform you are using. All you have to is add the tracking pixel link to any links inside your email that you like to track.

This allows you to track activity and identify leads at scale. Pricing starts at $250/month for SMEs. Custom packages are available for larger organizations.

You can learn more on our email tracking features here: Email Lead Generation

Or jump straight to our solutions for Gmail, Outlook, MailChimp, or Others

Note: For all our email tracking features a (free) trial account is available: Start your free-trial here.

SharpSpring

SharpSpring is a full CRM and email marketing platform. With the tool, you can manage contacts, customer relationships, create a content calendar, and send out emails all from the same tool.

In addition to tracking email opens and link clicks, SharpSpring will also track website activity. Therefore, you can see which leads have opened your email and which pages they may have visited directly after viewing your email (or at a later time).

This is all organized into what’s called the “Life of the Lead”. This page shows the entire history of the lead’s interaction with your company. It lists what emails the person has opened, what pages they’ve visited, and so on.

All of this information is then used to create a Lead Score that can be used to identify how engaged that person is and whether or not you should reach out to them.

SharpSpring will be great for teams that want to scale their sales follow up efforts and would like a tool that combines CRM and email automation. However, that amount of power won’t come cheap.

SharpSpring’s plans start at $450/month (for up to 1,500 contacts). Pricing goes up from there based on the number of contacts you have.

Hubspot Sales

Hubspot Sales’ email tracking allows you to track email opens straight from your Gmail or Outlook account. Setup with Gmail will require you to allow Hubspot to integrate with your inbox. This is done by installing an extension to Google Chrome.

This extension can be clicked to see who has opened your emails and who hasn’t. A notification will also popup when the recipient has opened the email:

You can also check the history of a lead in the Hubspot dashboard:

Hubspot’s email tracking feature is free to use to track up to 200 email opens. From there, paid plans for Hubspot Sales start at $50/month.

Hubspot is great for sales people who need a simple approach and want to track opens in Gmail or Outlook. However, it lacks the in-depth details of a platform such as LeadBoxer or SharpSpring.

Additionally, it can only be used with Gmail or Outlook. It can not be used with an email service such as MailChimp.

Yet Another Mail Merge

If you send a lot of emails from Gmail and want to track opens, Yet Another Mail Merge can help speed up your process.

Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM for short) integrates with Google Sheets. To use the add-on, you would create a Google Sheet with information for each person you want to reach out to (separated by row). You would include their email, but you can also include any custom information (such as their name, company, role, etc.).

Then, you can send out an email and use YAMM’s tags to insert that information. For example, you might say “Hey <>” in your email. YAMM will insert the name that you set for that email. This works similar to MailChimp’s “Merge Tags”.

Additionally, the tool will track who has opened your email, who hasn’t, and who has responded. This is all documented right in the Google Sheet you’re working in. You can then create a follow up directly in that Google Sheet and send from a template you create in Gmail.

The tool is great for speeding up your process if you currently use Gmail to reach out to leads. However, it will only work with Gmail and it won’t track information on the life of the lead. Thus, it will be difficult for teams to use to scale.

Yesware

Yesware is a tool that will work with Gmail and Outlook only. It is a paid application that starts at $12/month and is installed via a Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox extension.

The tool is similar to Hubspot’s email tracker. Email tracking can be turned on for a specific email by checking the Track box when using the email composer. However, Yesware does take over your inbox and change the look and layout:

From your email inbox, you can check tracking, templates, and create follow up drip campaigns. Additionally, you can also set reminders for email (much like the way Boomerang works).

The tool is powerful but is a bit intrusive. Some people may not like the fact that it will change their inbox interface. Additionally, the tool can’t be used with email marketing platforms such as MailChimp to track emails at scale.

Mixmax

Mixmax is another email tracker that installs via a Chrome Extension. It is not available via Mozilla Firefox or Safari, however.

One of the unique features of Mixmax is the “Enhance” feature inside the email composer of Gmail. Clicking this button will bring up a list of options that will allow you to share calendar availability, create a calendar invite, add a poll, add a custom CTA button, and more directly from the email composer.

Again, just like Hubspot and Yesware, email tracking can be enabled on a per-email basis. With Mixmax, you can do this by clicking the “Track” icon when composing an email. By default, this will stay enabled until you disable it for a particular email.

Mixmax can be used for free. However, a link will be placed at the end of each email that says “Sent by Mixmax”:

You can remove this link, but you will have to do so everytime you create a new email. Paid plans start at $12/month.

Mixmax will be good for anyone that uses Gmail and likes the features of a tool like Yesware but doesn’t want the intrusive interface that Yesware adds to Gmail. Again, Mixmax will only work with Gmail and can’t be used with email marketing platforms such as MailChimp to track leads at scale.

How to Setup Email Tracking (with an Email Tracking Pixel)

Setting up email tracking is different with each email tracking software. Some companies, such as Hubspot, have a Chrome Extension that will set this up for you if you track emails via Gmail. But as we mentioned above, tools like Hubspot can be a bit limited.

So we want to briefly cover how to setup email tracking with LeadBoxer so that you can track leads over the course of a person’s entire customer journey.

In order to track email opens, LeadBoxer uses a tracking pixel

This tracking pixel is a transparent image with the size of 1×1 pixels that can be embedded in an email. Then, once someone opens that email, the image is downloaded. This is how email tracking can identify when an email has been opened.

From this download, it’s also possible to tell the time and date the email was opened, how many times the email has been opened, and from what type of device the email was opened on.

From with LeadBoxer, this pixel can be generated and needs to be added to the source code of your emails (example below):

There are 3 parameters within this snippet of code that can to be set: the dataset ID, Campaign Name, and the email of the recipient. The recipient’s email can be added using a Merge tag. This tag will dynamically add a person’s email from your list to this link so that their activity can be tracked. Our generator can be used to easily create your tracking pixel.

For more information on these parameters, Merge tags and using the generator, please visit this article.

Tracking email clicks

The tracking pixel will take care of tracking email opens and reads. From there, to track link clicks and identify customers with it, parameters with merge needs to be added to any link in your email that you’d like to track.

Here’s how the URL will look once the code has been added and a person clicks on that link:

Once the code is added, LeadBoxer will be able to begin collecting data. For example, when a person opens that specific email, this action will be added to the person’s existing customer journey.

This way, you will know exactly when a person has clicked your email and you’ll be able to see their entire history. Also, once this person clicks through via email, they are then identified for all past, present, and future behavior.

Email Tracking Limitations

Of course, there are limitations when it comes to email tracking. The main ones include:

Images Need to be Enabled

With any email tracking software that relies on a tracking pixel to identify opens, in order for email tracking to work, image loading must be enabled by the person’s email client.

Some email clients block external images by default or can be set by the user to not load when opening an email. If this is the case, the pixel will not be loaded and there will be no way to identify whether or not that email was opened (or any other information that can be gather using email tracking).

Your Pixel Could Be Blocked

Just as there is email tracking software, there is also software to prevent email tracking. Pixel Block and Ugly Email will both prevent the email tracking pixel from being loaded. Ugly Email will also let the recipient know if you are using email tracking software and can even identify which software the sender is using.

While it may be rare that your recipients will use an application like this, it’s something to be aware of.

Email Tracking Tips & Best Practices

Lastly, we want to cover a few tips to make email tracking easier for you and hopefully, more successful:

Use Email Templates

Using email templates can help save time when adding tracking links to your email and help you follow up to leads quicker.

For one, having a few email templates that you can edit will save you time having to insert the tracking pixel code to links within the email that never change (for example, a CTA at the bottom of your email).

Additionally, having a few emails ready to go when you need to follow up with a lead will allow you to touch base quicker versus having to waste time trying to think of what to say.

Test Thoroughly

Before sending any tracked emails, make sure to test that everything is working correctly. First, send a tracked email to yourself or other members on your team to ensure that email opens and other track information is being identified.

Encourage Recipient’s to Whitelist Your Email

Whitelisting is an action that can be completed in a person’s inbox to ensure that emails from a specific email address are received and that images are downloaded.

By encouraging your recipient’s to whitelist your email address, you can ensure your emails are being delivered and that images are being download. Therefore, the tracking pixel will also be download, allowing you to track the recipient’s email and web activity.

Develop a Follow Up Strategy

Decide on a follow up strategy before you even send an email to any of your “hot” leads. That way, when someone opens your email or completes another specific action, you’ll already know what to do next.

Decide when will be the best time to follow up. For example, how many times do you want the recipient to open the email before following up? Or, how much time do you want to wait after they’ve opened the email?

Additionally, have some follow up emails already created and ready to go. This will help to save time and allow you to follow up quickly.

Start Your Free Trial to track your emails

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GDPR Compliant Lead Generation

Data-Driven analysis, Inspiration, Lead Generation, Marketing / Cralan Deutsch

GDPR compliant lead generation means collecting, processing, and storing leads according to the GDPR. This means putting lead qualification materials in place. These materials, consist of relevant content, and touch-points. Touchpoints range from downloads, trial sign-ups, contact forms and logins through newsletters, emails, and social media. A third element is data-processing, which consists of CRM (customer relation management) software and audience segmentation, which allows you to monitor sales cycles, and identify upsell opportunities. Click here to read an in-depth treatment of touchpoints for sales and marketing purposes.

GDPR Compliance

In May 2018 GDRP compliance arrives. What this essentially means is

1. you need to have your data secured properly and
2. the (general) Privacy disclaimers most websites currently use will no longer be sufficient.

What do I actually need to do?

1. Perform a serious audit on how your data is stored/ secured/ encrypted, and improve where necessary
2. Customize your Privacy statement – which should not be generic boilerplate, but needs to be tailor-made for your business.
3. Assign a person responsible for communications

What is the GDPR?

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation

In this article we try to explain and what it is, and how to comply.

If you use LeadBoxer, click here for a GDPR compliant-Privacy statement, which includes a specification of the data we collect.

The GDPR regulation was adopted in April 2016, and takes effect in May 2018. It replaces the previous Directive, covers all EU member-countries, and does not require individual countries to implement, interpret, etc.

The GDPR applies to the collection and storage of data regarding people residing in the EU, even if your organisation is outside of the EU

Definitions / roles

Any tool or service that collects and stores data from your online customers, leads, prospects, visitors, etc (on your behalf) is called the data processor, and your organisation is defined as the data controller.

What Does It All Come Down To?

In terms of communication with people in your database, two things:

As a company that collects data from your online users, you are the Data Controller. As such you have the following main responsibilities;

Make it clear what you are collecting and why.
According to the European Commission “personal data is any information that can be used to identify an individual, whether it relates to his or her private, professional or public life. It can be anything from a name, a home address, a photo, an email address, bank details, posts on social networking websites, medical information”, or even a computer’s IP address, if it can be used to identify an individual.
Grant the person rights to control their personal data
Give people the opportunity to file a complaint, have their data removed (deleted), stop tracking this person and provide a point of contact to a real person who can be contacted through your company website. In other words: the public now has the right to ask you – what information do you have about me?, and to request that you delete the information. Therefore, you need to appoint people to communicate with the public (within 72 hours) and process “right to forget” requests. The public may ask or communicate things such as –
- what information do you have about me?
- i want you to delete me from your system(s)
- i don’t want you to store my data – going forward
Secure your data
Additional (important) aspects: encrypt personal data, and have data in a format that can be exported. Put consent documentation in place, and ensure that you are able to quickly announce breaches.

GDPR in Depth

The General Data Protection Regulation is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, and the European Commission intend to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union. It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU. Click here to read about GDRP in wikipedia.

Informing the Public What Data Is Collected

Article 13 of the GDPR specifies what information must be provided to the public when their personal data is collected. Similarly, Article 12 states that you need to provide:

an “easily visible, intelligible and clearly legible….and meaningful overview of the intended processing”. In other words, as we mentioned above, no blanket Privacy principles. Everybody has to be able to read and understand your Privacy statement.

In short, The GDPR increases the scope of information required in your Privacy notice while demanding that the notice be “concise” (detailed).

Telling the Public How & Why the Data Is Collected and Processed

The question you are expected to answer on your website is: what are the purposes and legal basis for the processing data (for example, for purposes of lead generation). You (also) need to explain why the data is processed. For example, the purpose is to improve communication with customers. There needs to be some legal basis meaning, for example, that the processing is based on legitimate interests, details of which should be explained.

To repeat; this needs to be present in you publicly visible privacy statement

See our GDPR compliant Privacy Policy paragraph for LeadBoxer Customers

Meet Your New Data Protection Officer (DPO)

You will need to appoint (identify) a person in your organization who can be contacted directly by a member of the public, and who can provide and delete personal data upon request. This is called ‘right to forget’ – it is the right for consumers to have their data erased.

you need to provide the identity and the contact details of the controller (your company) and
the (contact) details of the data processor – being LeadBoxer if you are a client of ours

The point is you need to provide details of persons whom the public can contact.

Data Protection

A key element in being GDPR compliant, is making sure your data is protected properly. This includes but is not limited to:

The storage of your customer data
The transfer of this data between servers, computers, browsers, etc.
The encryption of this data
How long will the data be stored for
Where is the data stored (geograpically)
How customers can obtain the data.
etc.

You don’t have to publish these in the policy, but make sure they are being taken care of.

Conclusion – Plan Well and Avoid Stiff Fines

As a company specialized in B2B lead qualification for Sales and Marketing, we take the GDRP very seriously.
We recommend that you plan well do not underestimate the amount of time / resources needed to properly assess and implement your responsibilities. In terms of time – you will probably need 40 hours to completely research and document your tasks and requirements. Do not wait – begin planning as soon as possible.

Fines for GDRP non-compliancy are serious, from a lower level of €10 million and 2% of last year’s annual revenue, to an upper limit of €20 and 4% of last year’s annual revenue.What Does It All Come Down To?

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Data-driven Lead Qualification

Big Data, Lead Generation, Notifications / Cralan Deutsch

Why LeadBoxer Is The Best Choice For Automating Lead Generation

Q: As briefly as possible, what has LeadBoxer done that is so valuable for business websites?
A: Developed a way of applying Search Engine technology to qualify leads.

We started with visitor website tracking a number of years ago, and have evolved into a system which uses big data technology to identify interesting leads. Currently we’re working towards full automation of the process of lead identification.

Calling it AI or artificial intelligence would be wishful thinking, but we’ve definitely made enormous strides in the process of automating lead qualification and audience segmentation.

How have we done this? Basically, moving on from MYSQL to NOSQL using Elastic and Cassandra, we’ve built a system that can filter, in real-time, through website traffic, and create notifications based on a lead score. Click here to read how (technically) LeadBoxer’s lead score formula converts clicks into prospects via an algorithm.

What does this actually mean?
It means that now, as of December 2017, we provide the framework to organize Marketing and Sales data on the following traffic values:

FILTERS:

Company
Country / Region
State / Province
City
Industry
Company Size
Utm Tags (PPC-traffic, Adwords, LinkedIn, Facebook campaigns)
URL
Exit Link
Referrer
Lead Tags (competitor, customer, partner, prospect)
Identity Fields (Email, First Name, Last Name)
Visits
Page Views

Letting smart algorithms do the heavy lifting

In conclusion, in order to succeed, a software product needs to add value. The value we are adding is machine learning. You tell our machine what a valuable lead looks like, and we use algorithms to find these leads for you. Our goal is to automate the process, so that letting LeadBoxer loose on a website will provide a list of all activity, prioritized by lead score. To increase the efficiency of the system, and reduce the burden of logging in to (another) software product, we push email Notifications to your team’s mailboxes.

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How to Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generation Machine

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales, Warm Leads / Cralan Deutsch

Do you ever feel like your website is underperforming? Do you wish that your online presence could bring more customers and revenue to your business? If so, then this blog post is for you! We’re going to share with you the secrets behind turning any website into a lead-generation machine.

Keep reading, or use the links below to learn about effective strategies on how to optimize your website and make it an unstoppable force in generating leads.

Getting Started
Succeed With a Plan
Plan Ahead – How Will You Reverse Engineer Leads
Improving Your Website
Conclusion and Take-Homes

Getting Started

The first thing to turn your website into a lead generation machine is to install a lead pixel. A web designer, developer, or agency can put the pixel on your site within an hour or less. With a pixel, you can collect visitor and website activity data and customer touchpoints.

Data about website visitors and their experience on your website is important. If you notice a high bounce rate or the wrong people coming to your site, something is wrong. You’ll need to find out where the problem lies and make the necessary changes.

For lead generation, your website needs to be customer-centric. It should offer the specific information your ideal customer is looking for. Focusing on meeting the needs of your site visitors builds your credibility and boosts lead generation.

Source

Succeed With a Plan

Some companies don’t think about lead generation until after their website is up and running. They don’t see their website as a lead generation tool. Plan to keep the generation of new business front and center.

Getting a new business website up and running is a labor of love, among other things. When lead generation is not a priority, all your hard work may be for naught.

The first step with your website is to measure what is currently happening, even if it isn’t good. When you first put up a new site, track who is and who isn’t visiting.

Plan Ahead – How Will You Reverse Engineer Leads

Planning ahead avoids incorporating a lead capture, or touchpoint, into an existing site. Already having these lead captures on your site will better your lead generation efforts. Ask yourself the following questions to guide the building and designing of your website:

How do you want to capture leads?
What types of leads do you want?
What do you want to know about the leads?
How do you want to manage this information?

After identifying who you want to attract and the information you need, think of customer touchpoints. Where could you place a point of contact or interaction?

What does this look like? Let’s say you’re a SaaS company. You may use a variety of touchpoints like free trials, sign-up forms, and a demo contact form to collect leads.

Source

Improving Your Website

Launching a new site is an exciting project that involves the expertise of many people or teams. It requires significant communication, planning, coordination, and teamwork.

For these reasons, the website launch process usually takes longer than expected. If you launch your site on schedule, it won’t bring a surge in traffic or leads right away.

It takes time before the search engines pick up the new site and index the content and pages. Paid traffic through search engine marketing (SEM) and paid advertising on Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn can help.

Many successful organizations have a healthy mix of organic and paid traffic. A quality ad campaign has dedicated landing pages to optimize the conversion of visitors.

You will need to ask your team to iterate these pages after analysis and more time. After the initial site set up, here are other ways to improve your website to generate more leads:

Invest in a Quality About Us Page and Include Testimonials

Today, every business has a website, including your competitors. To generate quality leads, your website visitors must know who you are and that you are legit and trustworthy. A quality about us page and customer testimonials will tell who you are and establish your credibility.

Make sure the about us page and the testimonial pages are easy to find. It is a good idea to include any awards or certifications your company and employees have received. This will further add to your business’ credibility which will generate more, higher-quality leads.

Source

Make Contacting You a Breeze

Customers who are about to make a purchasing decision will have questions and concerns. Make sure it is easy for your website visitors to contact you should they like more information.

Include a ‘contact us’ tab in your homepage’s navigation menu. Also, include your contact information on the bottom of your homepage and in your sitemap. You can also list your contact details throughout your website in your CTAs (call to actions).

Have Simple Contact Forms

Besides making it easy for website visitors to contact you, ensure that your contact form is easy to complete. Contact forms are an effective way to generate leads as they capture valuable lead information.

The effectiveness of your forms for lead generation depends on the form you use. A general rule of thumb is the fewer the fields, the more conversions. Keep your contact form as simple as possible, asking only for necessary information.

Target Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

You’ve heard the adage of not putting all your eggs into one basket. This is true if you want to generate leads on your website. If your website targets a specific group of customers, the lead quality may be high, but conversion rate may be low.

A big part of lead generation is lead nurturing. When people visit your website, they are all on different stages of the buyer’s journey. To generate leads on your website, it must have content and a strategy for every stage of your buyer’s journey.

Source

Have Specific Pillar Pages for Each Buyer Persona

Pillar pages are standalone pages of your website that offer visitors specific content and/or digital assets. They often require a visitor to enter their contact information to access the content. Common pillar page assets include downloadable ebooks, guides, and other resources.

As you create your website and its content, you need to know who your ideal audiences are. Once you know the type of content they would find valuable and interesting. One way to do this is to develop buyer personas that represent your ideal customers.

You’ll need to use data you’ve collected about your current customers to generate a buyer’s persona. The pillar page content on your website should address the pain points of your target audience. It should be clear to your website’s visitors that you have the solution to their problems.

Feature Live Chat

To ensure your website generates leads, you’ll need to be available 24/7. This is especially important if your business is international. People tend to do much of their research outside of work hours and you’ll lose business by being unavailable.

Live chat makes you always available to answer questions, give information, and address concerns. Live chat uses chatbots installed on your website. You can pre-program the chatbots with common questions and answers.

Have Compelling (and Specific) CTAs

Many websites use the boring “contact us” as a call to action. Because it’s so common, website visitors can overlook them. If you want to generate quality leads, be creative with your CTAs.

Unique calls to action will get the attention of your website’s visitors. They should also be specific in how you want leads to contact you.

Source

Use Videos

Tell your company’s story and highlight your products and services with videos. Video demonstrations of your offerings in action are effective ways to generate interest in them. People not sure how your products or services work can watch a video of them.

Include testimonial videos from satisfied customers and “behind-the-scenes” videos of your business. You should use a variety of different videos on your website. Make sure the videos are short (no more than 2 minutes), compressed, and don’t need a media player.

Videos are so popular and effective in engaging your target audience that 86% of all businesses now include videos in their website content.

Using a mixture of different videos helps your website generate leads by:

Catching peoples’ attention and sparking their interest
Providing valuable, easy-to-consume information
Giving your company credibility
Making your business personable

Conclusion and Take-Homes

Your website will change as your value proposition and message pivots. The goal of your website is to generate leads. A solid lead-generating website begins with planning.

You won’t see instant growth in conversions with a new website. It will take time for your SEO and SEM campaigns to start bringing people to your site. Targeting leads on every buyer’s journey stage and an easy contact form are two ways to improve your website.

As the adage goes, fail to plan – plan to fail. Put careful thought into your website. Don’t be afraid to make adjustments if something isn’t working.

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How to Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Stay Ahead of the Game: Effective Lead Generation Strategies in 2017

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

Contribution from freelance writer Jackie Wills

Lead generation, like almost everything in the business world, is a fluid and ever-changing paradigm. Sticking doggedly to strategies that worked in 2015 may result in a business seeing a depressing decline in lead generation numbers in 2017. Staying ahead of the game is crucial to quality lead generation in a competitive marketplace, and in order to do so, it stands to reason that a business should be constantly analysing the range of lead generation strategies that are available to them, in order to ascertain which are the most successful, and which will suit their business model most comfortably.

In order to analyse which lead generation strategies are going to be the most useful and profitable for a given business, it is necessary to break down which strategies tend to be the most successful. There are numerous channels used by B2B marketers to generate leads, including online directories, re-targeted adverts, rented lists, live events and affiliate marketing, but there are four channels which stand out as being the most efficacious. A number of different surveys have been undertaken, and top spot tends to differ based upon which institution organised the poll, but there are four channels which consistently register as the strongest: Email Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Marketing and Content Marketing.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing has been a mainstay of lead generation for two decades now, but the proliferation of email sign ups and heavy spamming means that there are diminishing returns for traditional email marketing techniques. However, new advances in marketing automation mean that many businesses have had great success in using this refined version of an old technique. Marketing automation software allows email marketing to be both automated and, crucially, targeted and personalised to each potential client, by using data from the business’s CRM and metadata from their website and landing page. Instead of ‘spamming’ thousands of emails to every person who has ‘signed up’, i.e. entered their email address into your system, each person will receive a marketing email that seems to anticipate their needs. A fine example of this is the case of Paper Style, a business that sells wedding cards and invitations. They created a dual marketing sequence, split by whether the potential customer was buying for their own wedding, or for a friend’s. Each sequence had its own order, which was devised based on an analysis of their previous sales data. Brides-to-be, for example, would require different products than Maids-of-Honour; the former purchasing wedding invitations, for example, and the latter bridal shower invitations. The order in which they purchase products also tended to be sequential, with, for example, wedding invitations first and ‘Thank You’ cards last. By devising these two parallel marketing sequences, every potential customer who had entered their details could be, by way of an initial email, sorted into the appropriate marketing sequence. This then allowed the automated marketing system to send personalised marketing emails which seemed, to the customer, to anticipate their needs every step of the way. The results for Paper Style spoke for themselves, with, among others, an impressive 330 % uptick in revenue-per-mail.

Search Marketing

Search marketing is a product of the paradigm shift in marketing and sales that has occurred over the last two decades due to the monolithic growth of the Internet, and in particular Google. The fact of the matter is that, for many people, the first point of call when looking for a new service or product is a Google search. This being the case, achieving and maintaining optimum organic SEO rankings on Google is one of the key channels for generating leads. The ever-evolving complexity of Google’s ranking algorithms means that it is a great deal more difficult to achieve high organic rankings than it was a decade ago, however, that can also be a plus point: it is much more difficult for businesses to ‘game’ the algorithms, which means that a well-conceived and executed SEO strategy can pay dividends. The reality of search marketing now is that it is inextricably linked with our next topic: content marketing. The SEO strategies of a business need to be aligned with their content strategy, and achieving a symbiosis between the two is crucial to achieving the first-page ranking that isconten needed to deliver good quality business leads.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is increasingly important in an age when people are used to being on the receiving end of a great deal of information. Whether B2B or B2C, potential clients and customers expect it. This presents its own problems, but also its own opportunities: with so much information and content out there, much of it becomes, at worst spam, and at best nothing more than background noise. However, this creates a space for companies that can make their content stand out from the crowd, and deliver information that is both targeted and, most importantly, helpful to the prospective customer. This dichotomy of problem-and-opportunity is a theme within Content Marketing, as the sheer range of possible content means that is possible to waste time and money on creating content that will have no demonstrable impact upon ROI rates, but likewise the opposite is true; a judicious choice and deployment of content can generate a huge amount of interest. Content can also act as what is known as a ‘lead magnet’, in as much as they can offer an incentive for potential customers to provide their email address. Many people are wary of doing so because of the proliferation of spam messages and mailing lists, and are much more inclined to enter a company’s email system if they ‘get’ something before they ‘give’. Content can be deployed in such a way with superb results: offering a free E-book, or webinar, access to interviews or even a free trial are often very successful in generating leads, as well as beginning a process of engagement between the potential customer and the business. Furthermore, content such as blogs can perform a dual function: working in tandem with Search Marketing strategies to improve Search Engine Optimisation, while also engaging the potential customer in a personal way, leaving them feeling like they have tangibly benefited from their experience.

Social Marketing

Social Marketing is a slightly different animal, in that it can be broadly seen as an off-shoot of both Search Marketing and Content Marketing. Of course, there are leads to be generated by using a business networking site such as LinkedIn, particularly because, aside from networking, it can also provide a lot of data. EKA, a risk management software firm, used LinkedIn in this way – profiling network prospects, mining data to provide both market analysis and individual data profiles for companies, and mapping networks to identify viable connections- and created a $2 million sales pipeline in a matter of a few weeks. However, it is more common that a company’s social marketing amounts to little more than spamming promotional announcements on Twitter. In the case of social media platforms such as Twitter, it is more strategically useful to utilise Social Marketing as a tool of Content and Search Marketing, in so far as it can be a useful medium for directing people towards the high-quality content that will boost SEO rankings and engage the potential customer, both of which will, if done correctly, be effective lead generation strategies. It can also be a useful tool for establishing and promoting business brand identity, something that is crucial to standing out in a crowded marketplace. If your brand identity is established then it can make generating leads that bit easier, as potential customers can already be at a certain level of engagement before they have even hit a business’s landing page or explored their content.

Integrated and Reactive Approaches

In essence, successful lead generation strategies have to be flexible, reactive to customer-habits and realistic about changes in those habits. Flexibility means the innovative combination of aspects of each of the four major lead generation channels discussed, using data driven analysis to discover what works best for a given business. Being reactive to customer-habits is also a data-driven practice: for example, customers today, whether in the B2B or B2C sectors, are distrustful of what can be termed ‘traditional advertising’, and this can be seen by the fact that up to 80% of potential customers ignore paid ads on Google. They’re just not interested. As the old sales adage goes, people don’t like being sold to but they like to buy. This is why moving away from ‘traditional’ advertising or marketing methods, and into an integrated method that seeks to promote customer engagement and personalised promotional marketing emails is proving to be a more successful model. This is why a channel such as Content Marketing is so important – 80% of decision-makers surveyed, from a wide range of businesses, preferred to imbibe information about a company through articles and other content, as opposed to ‘traditional’ adverts. Adverts, in that sense, have lost their power to engage, and offering people content which they feel educates them and allows them to make an informed choice is now a far more successful model. This may not always be the case – re-activeness, remember, is crucial to successful lead generation strategies, but it is certainly the case in 2017.

Another aspect of this reactive approach, for example, is creating a scoring system for leads, such as awarding a numerical points score for acts of engagement, such as opting-in to an email system or downloading an E-book, and subtracting a numerical points score for acts of disengagement, such as unsubscribing from an email list. A system that scores and ranks leads allows a company to respond in real-time to the reaction of customers and potential customers to their marketing strategies, as well as identifying potential customers who are primed to take that step into becoming actual customers. This streamlining of lead analysis can also help to save time and money by efficiently deploying their lead follow-up resources.

Invest in Strategy

Effective lead generation strategies require just that; strategy. Throwing money at out-dated models of marketing and lead generation is only going to waste both the initial marketing investment and the time and effort of the staff who are responsible for turning cold leads warm. For lead generation success in 2017, willingness to be adaptive, flexible, analytical and innovative will give a business a far greater chance of staying ahead of the game.

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How to Contact Leads

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales / Wart Fransen

This article is part of our three step guide on lead generation basics. For this step, which is the third and final step of lead generation, we discuss how to contact leads. This is arguably the most important step, which can be anything from marketing automation to personal contact, because it’s where the beginning of a sale truly begins to take shape. A quick recap of what we previously talked about: In the first step, we talked about what a lead and lead hacking is, in the second step we outlined the process of lead qualification, and now we will share the best practices of lead contacting.

What Do You Do Once You’ve Identified a Lead?

This article is about what to do once you’ve identified a lead. While there is no absolute answer to this, there are few things you should be considering to make the strongest introduction possible. The items you should be considering include:

Lead name (a person or company)
Contact details
Subject matter

You will need 1 and 2 (pre-conditions) in order to make contact and talk (step 3).

Customer example question:

“I have a question regarding on how to follow up on possible leads. What if I notice a company is coming back regularly to check out our services, how can I best contact this company? Mail, phone? I don’t want to look like a stalker. Is there any proven strategy or best practices on this subject?”

Much depends on your company’s sales workflow. Is your product high-end – with service contracts, or are you targeting SME (small and medium enterprise) clients. How long is your sales cycle, do you provide a demo, do you have a dedicated sales team to contact leads, etc. These parameters will define the structure of the dialogue. In some cases the lead will get in touch with you, and in some cases you will be initiating contact. Lead generation software (keeping track of potential clients) helps in both scenarios because you can see what your lead is doing (what they are interested in) and their level of interest. “Strike while the iron is hot”. Once you have contact points and subject matter, you should make contact. Try a combination of both telephone and email. Telephone takes more energy, and is more effective when you actually get to speak to the right person. We’ve learned that a combination of both telephone and email works best. We’ve also learned that, in terms of best practices, you want to make an initial call (or email) that is short and sweet. Narrow the conversation down to a single deliverable, if possible. Important: once you make a promise, any promise, no matter how small – make sure you absolutely 100% follow-up. This is trust-building.

How Can LeadBoxer Help You to Contact Leads

LeadBoxer, or any other lead generation software, automates the process of determining who to call and/or email. Many established B2B sites receive hundreds or even thousands of visitors (potential leads) on a weekly basis. Time is often of the essence here. It is not humanly possible to screen all traffic, although it may be a good idea to have different people sort traffic, and do the actual contacting. This is where the software comes is. By “qualification” we mean an automated system for sorting potential leads and ranking them based on qualifying metrics. Allowing you to contact leads which you might have otherwise missed.

How to Contact Leads Read More »

Why are Warm Leads Better for Your Business?

Lead Generation, Sales, Warm Leads / Wart Fransen

Contribution from freelance writer Jackie Wills

Anyone involved in sales and marketing knows that developing sales through cold calling (cold leads) can be a thankless and frustrating task. In the modern age, though, an effective digital marketing strategy can mean that prospective clients already know all about your business and are ready to convert into customers with just a little encouragement. Welcome to the world of warm leads. An effective web presence and strong social media engagement means that the word is already out there regarding your business. People will be aware of your service and your unique selling points, and the whole sales dynamic becomes easier and more successful. This means better conversion rates and less time wasted on trying to develop interest in your product or service from scratch.

Is cold calling dead?

Everyone has experience of a cold call, whether it is a telephone call from a double glazing company, an unsolicited email offering you car insurance or a catalogue through your letterbox. Cold calls do generate some sales leads, or nobody would be doing them, but generation and conversion rates are poor. An increasing number of people block unsolicited calls and emails, and there is a school of thought that cold calling is no longer worth the effort. In the majority of cases, cold calls get you off on the wrong foot with the customer and put you at an instant disadvantage. They are suspicious of you and your motives, they never asked you to call and you probably interrupted them in the middle of dinner. Not the best start for a successful future.

What are warm leads?

A warm lead is someone who has already shown an interest in your product or service. They might have taken a look at your website or signed up for an email newsletter. Or perhaps they have followed you on social media or read an article or blog post that you have published. At the very least, you can be confident that warm leads are aware of and are interested in your product or service and have demonstrated an interest in learning more about it. They are far more promising than cold leads, as the initial “foot in the door” part is not necessary. There will not be the same level of suspicion and reluctance to engage. Many warm leads will approach you, rsocather than you having to chase them, but there are others that just need a little push in the right direction.

Getting hotter – qualified leads

A qualified lead is one that is a step further on in the buying cycle. While warm leads are aware of what you have to offer, a qualified lead is one that specifically needs that product or service. For example, if you operate an Italian restaurant in New York, then warm leads might be those who look at your social media pages and sign up for newsletters. They know something about your restaurant, and might be prepared to give it a try if they were in the neighborhood. Compare this with someone who has googled “Italian restaurant in New York” – this is a qualified lead, as it is someone who is specifically looking for a service just like yours.

Focus on Warm Leads

SEO experts Search Engine Journal carried out some research on warm leads versus cold, and the results are remarkable. They concluded that search-driven leads have a 14.6% close rate compared to just 1.7% for cold leads. This is simply because warm leads are already better prospects. Cold calls mean a lot of wasted time on prospects who have given no thought to your offering.

Identifying warm leads

The digital age is all about big data. There is more information available regarding every part of a business than ever before. Everyone who clicks on a link, conducts a search or uses an app leaves a unique data stream. The amount of data that’s being created and stored every day is truly mind-boggling, and it just keeps growing. The company that makes the best use of the data at its disposal is the one that will gain an edge over its competitors, but in the grand scheme of things, only a small percentage of data is actually analyzed and used to make critical insights. By making use of online lead generation tools, you can identify who is visiting your website and why. This gives you some useful information as to what people are looking for, and how they are driven to you. It provides a ready-made list of warm leads for you to develop into paying customers.

Evaluating your best leads

You can achieve unprecedented conversion rates by using the latest proprietary algorithms to rank those warm leads and make sure you focus on the ones that are likely to bring the highest prospects of a completed sale. Traditional sales strategies have relied on what is known as the BANT approach to evaluate leads. In short, this evaluates the following parameters:

Budget: does the potential lead have the funds available to buy your product or service?
Authority: is your prospective buyer in the position to make the purchase decision, or will they have to seek approval from somebody else?
Need: do they have a specific need that the product or service will satisfy?
Time frame: are they in the market for your product now, or at some future date?

Conceptually, there is nothing wrong with the BANT approach, and it has become the go-to sales qualification methodology. However, it does have certain flaws and limitations. For example, the implication is that Budget is the first and most important consideration, when in reality, most people will agree that Need is most important. What is it that people want, what problems are they facing or questions do they seek answers to that have driven them to your business? Customer need should really be the first consideration of anyone in sales, and in order to understand that, you need to know your customers.

Understanding your customers

Customer personas are the basic characteristics of your customer base. They might include basic demographic information such as age, gender, income level and employment status, as well as non-identifiable personal data, including geographic location, personal goals, past behaviour and lifestyle. Through personas, you also learn why they are looking to interact with your business and what needs they think you can satisfy. This information is of critical importance as it helps you decide where to focus your marketing efforts. Traditionally, companies have defined their most valuable customers as those who spend the most money. However, that may be over-simplistic, and there are plenty of other factors to consider, including the following:

Acquisition costs: How much did you have to spend on sales and marketing to win this type of customer? If acquisition costs are high and returns are low, then it could be time to rethink your methods.
Retention costs: What do you need to do in order to keep your customers? Do they expect a large amount of communication, support or training? In general, acquisition costs are higher than retention costs, so it makes sense to do whatever you have to, in order to maintain a close relationship with your customers and give them no reason to look elsewhere.
Average purchase size: On average, how much does your customer spend on a single purchase? Consider this question not just in the aggregate, but by each persona or customer type. Bear in mind that people often make purchasing decisions on the basis of value, not just on price. Ask yourself whether you might sell more to any customer segments through carefully targeted promotions and by developing an awareness and interest in other product lines. Social media coverage can be great for promotions like this.
Lifetime value: Single purchases are great, but repeat purchases are better. How much does each segment spend with your business over the course of their lifetime? This metric says a lot about the overall relationship that you have with your customers.
Customer satisfaction: To what extent are your customers satisfied with your product or service offering? Can you identify groups of satisfied and dissatisfied customers? If so, what makes one group happy and the other group unhappy? This is a great way to identify areas for improvement, or it could be a case of needing to communicate better to manage customer expectations.
Value alignment: Are your target customers actually the people who are buying from you? If not, then who is? Knowing this will help you to further refine your customer segments, and to make sure you are perfectly aligned.

By examining the above metrics, you will have better knowledge than ever about your customers. Armed with this knowledge, you will be in the ideal position to develop those leads that can bring real long-term success to your business and ensure you maintain that all-important competitive edge. In our next article that you can find here, we have discussed our best Lead Generation strategies for 2017.

Why are Warm Leads Better for Your Business? Read More »

LeadBoxer Wins the 2017 Lead Management Software Award

Inspiration, Lead Generation, Sales / Wart Fransen

At LeadBoxer we have always let our customers’ needs determine product development. Our lead identification platform has improved dramatically in recent years, and our efforts were confirmed when FinancesOnline, a popular software review platform, distinguished us with the Lead Management Software Award for both creating efficient sales opportunities, and for our lead generation capabilities.

The platform’s review team prepared a thorough examination of our software and concluded that LeadBoxer meets all of their quality criteria to be recommended both to SME’s and Enterprises.

Their experts prepared a detailed LeadBoxer review, and made a unique correlation between our system’s main functions and more beneficial business processes. The highlight of being featured on this software review platform was receiving two of their most prominent awards, namely the Great User Experience Award and the 2017 Rising Star Award for their lead management software category. We couldn’t be prouder to receive these prestigious recognitions, keeping in mind that both are exclusively reserved for user-friendly and fast-developing applications.

What did FinancesOnline’s experts like the most about LeadBoxer?

According to them, our system enables users to quickly and effectively filter their visitors and streamline the qualification process to work on high value, high quality leads. Basically, they said, LeadBoxer allows businesses to be selective even in a highly-competitive economy, and makes operations effective with unique features such as Smart Lists, Alerts, Auto-Form Tracking, and Identification from anonymous traffic.

Another interesting aspect that readers will learn from the review is that LeadBoxer was praised for being very intuitive to use, alongside the ability to integrate into every ecosystem. These possibilities, combined with automated lead collection, scoring, and qualifying make LeadBoxer a recommended sales automation product, and one of FinancesOnline’s favourite suggestions for saving time and adding value to your business operations.

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LeadBoxer Wins the 2017 Lead Management Software AwardRead More »

LeadBoxer Wins the 2017 Lead Management Software Award Read More »

How to contact leads with LinkedIn

Lead Generation, lead hacking, Lead Nurturing, Sales / Cralan Deutsch

LinkedIn is the world’s 4th most popular social network. As a professional social network, LinkedIn is the most popular among salespeople. LinkedIn is our favourite social platform to use, so it was just a matter of time before we wrote a piece about it. This is definitely not the only time we will talk about its usefulness but today, we wanted to talk a little bit about how to contact leads with LinkedIn.

What can you do with leads identified by LeadBoxer?

Scenario: you have installed the LeadBoxer lead pixel into your website. A few days later, you have a list of companies who are interested in your products and services. You are not 100% convinced that you want to call them up and say “Hey, I saw you clicking around on our website, what’s up?”

People are looking for specific information. Therefore, if you can help them get the information that they need, you are helping them, not bugging them.

In this case, we recommend an indirect approach as you can see below.

Best Practises

1. When you see that a company has visited your website, target them through LinkedIn (obviously, you can use any alternative to LinkedIn – which is just the example given here).

2. The strategy is to know that a company is interested – and give them information that makes them aware of your services. Keep in mind that if a lead is actively looking for a solution to their problem, they will appreciate good information.

Note: surfing behaviour is Goal-Oriented. People do not visit (B2B) websites because they are curious as to what they look like. People are looking for specific information. Therefore, if you can help them get the information that they need, you are helping them.

3. Use lead/visitor activity (click streams) to know what your leads are actually interested in and speak to the content/ subject-matter of the pages they visited.

In other words, use a prominent bit of the text on the pages visited in the subject heading of your communication. This will immediately capture the person’s interest much more effectively than sending a generic sales pitch.

4. Locating decision-makers – if your product/ service is related to staffing, find the person(s) responsible for Human Resources. Meaning: locate the company on LinkedIn and then you research who is responsible for Human Resources, etc.

5. You can then advertise via LinkedIn in order to post content on that person/ company’s LinkedIn personal feed. Click here for a blog post we wrote on LinkedIn advertising.

Step-by-step

a) locate the company identified by LeadBoxer on LinkedIn b) find the person or persons responsible for the problem you solve c) send a LinkedIn invite request d) OR use Chrome extension called (email) Hunter – to locate their email address and email them e) OR send relevant materials via LinkedIn advertising (see above)

How to contact leads with LinkedIn Read More »

How to use LeadBoxer to reach your leads on LinkedIn

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing / Wart Fransen

After installing the LeadBoxer Lead Pixel onto your website, you’ll instantaneously see your web traffic turn into quality sales leads. Your lead generation efforts have magically taken a positive and noticeable turn. With all of these new leads coming your way, it’s only natural to ask, “how can I best turn these leads into sales?” …

How to use LeadBoxer to reach your leads on LinkedInRead More »

How to use LeadBoxer to reach your leads on LinkedIn Read More »

How to make LinkedIn ads that actually work

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

It’s extremely hard to make LinkedIn ads that actually work. Targeting can be confusing and LinkedIn ads are typically much more expensive than other platforms. Because there is a decent amount of risk in starting LinkedIn advertising, you may decide not to dabble in experimenting with it at all. …

How to make LinkedIn ads that actually workRead More »

How to make LinkedIn ads that actually work Read More »

Are high converting pages destroying your sales?

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

Seeing your pages convert at a high rate is always exciting. There’s an unusual thrill in seeing your work appear to pay off. But, what if you your high converting pages are actually hurting your business? It’s a potentially odd question, but it’s worth considering if all of those “10 ways to make high converting landing pages” blog posts are actually during your business more harm over time than good. …

Are high converting pages destroying your sales?Read More »

Are high converting pages destroying your sales? Read More »

5 magnificent lead generation ideas

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

Whether you’re a small local store, a tech startup, or a freelancer, lead generation is how you grow your business. There are a wide variety of ways to grow leads, so how do you decide which tactics to use? …

5 magnificent lead generation ideasRead More »

5 magnificent lead generation ideas Read More »

How to Create a Lead Generation Funnel in Your Product

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

In this post, we are going to work through a way to think about funnel optimization that could potentially produce some impressive growth numbers. We’ll call this the lead generation funnel concept, and it’s a fantastic way to scheme up methods of growing a SaaS company. …

How to Create a Lead Generation Funnel in Your ProductRead More »

How to Create a Lead Generation Funnel in Your Product Read More »

Best Lead Generation Landing Pages Featured Image

8 best lead generation landing pages

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

There are a lot of components and considerations that go into making great lead generation landing pages. While adding LeadBoxer is a great start, you’ll also need to come up with tactics to make your website visitors convert from visitor to sales prospect. You will need to think about your website copy, colors, design, and more. …

8 best lead generation landing pagesRead More »

8 best lead generation landing pages Read More »

13 amazing lead generation ideas that work

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

Lead generation is an art. Gathering up high-quality sales leads takes skill and intense planning. When you implement the best lead generation ideas with smart planning you will drive big business results. …

13 amazing lead generation ideas that workRead More »

13 amazing lead generation ideas that work Read More »

How to build a strong email list

Email, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing / Wart Fransen

According to Ascend2, 82% of companies now use email marketing. That is quite an impressive number, and probably a lot higher than you would have guessed if you were asked, “What percentage of companies do you think use email marketing?” …

How to build a strong email listRead More »

How to build a strong email list Read More »

How Can Startups Generate Leads

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

The most important thing that a startup can do to accelerate success is to increase the rate at which the company is able to generate leads. Lead generation is key to success because sales leads are how you grow your revenue. If you don’t have any leads, your company simply can’t grow. …

How Can Startups Generate LeadsRead More »

How Can Startups Generate Leads Read More »

How to Create Growth Marketing Goals

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

Behind Every Marketing Decision Should Be a Goal

Marketing Goals are effective because goals are for learning. Learning intensifies when there is a goal because goals make you focus on your efforts. Additionally, goals make it so that you can leverage the powerful psychological benefit of goal setting to hack your own brain. A goal should not be thought of as make-or-break demand, but rather a hypothesis:

If [variable], then [result], because [rationale].

For example, if our marketing goals were to “get 100 new free trial users per month,” the hypothesis would read something like this:

If we create 15 high quality blog posts each month, we will generate 100 new free trial users per month, because I think we can generate 2,000 new leads and maintain a 5% new lead to free trial conversion rate.

If this was a goal of ours at LeadBoxer, and we were to hit this example goal, that would be great. We would now know that we would need to make more blog posts because writing blog posts is a great use of our time. However, if we don’t hit the goal, we still have a brilliant starting place to learn and iterate on our strategy from. When things don’t work out, we should be asking questions like: Are blog posts the wrong format (variable)? Did we overestimate how many leads we would get (result)? Or was the problem with our ability to convert those leads into free trials (rationale)? When your company is in the stage of trying to figure its business out, the information you learn from accomplishing and failing at goes is immensely valuable.

Why Do Goals Often Not Succeed?

Goals typically go wrong when they aren’t clear enough. When a goal isn’t defined well (or is even too defined), it becomes impossible to succeed. And setting goals that are clearly impossible (or highly unlikely to succeed) are dangerous for a company because they set teams up for failure.

Setting Too Many Goals

Setting too many goals is also very dangerous for a company. Too many goals lead to what is referred to as “false hope syndrome.” This will mean goal after goal is missed, and this will destroy both motivation and focus of the team building a company.

Setting Marketing Goals That Are Impossible

Company leaders often set marketing goals that are clearly impossible to reach. This is one of the most dangerous things that a company leader can do because it’s demoralizing. A great leader creates a team of high-achievers. If these team of high-achieves is forced to chase impossible goals, it can be devastating. Leaders need to be focused on building a culture of success; so creating smaller goals that are actually attainable is a key ingredient for building a business. Steering clear of vanity metrics is incredibly important. Defining success and failure from metrics that don’t matter will lead to failure. Vanity metrics are metrics that don’t truly explain the health of a company. For example, the number of free trials doesn’t really matter for a company. Free trial numbers just say people are signing up, but don’t signify if real traction is being built. Vanity metrics are things like free trials, registered users, downloads, and pageviews. These numbers don’t typically correlate to the metrics that really matter. Metrics that actually matter include: active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenue and profits. The real data that matters are the numbers that help you understand if there’s repeat usage of your product and if you’re able to retain users.

How to Create and Use Goals Like a Growth Hacker

The best way to avoid common goal mistakes is to remember that goals are not definitive make-or-break numbers, but wonderful learning opportunities. Here’s how goal setting should work:

Form hypothesis
Select KPI
Set goal
Execute
Track progress
Talk about what happened and iterate

This structure helps guide a company away from “set-in-stone” goals. It helps make goals more enjoyable, realistic, and beneficial for a company. It’s how you set a company up for success.

How to Create Growth Marketing Goals Read More »

How to generate leads using social media

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

Social media can be one of the most authentic ways to connect with qualified sales leads. Once you figure out how to generate leads using social media, you can work with these new leads to generate more sales for your business. …

How to generate leads using social mediaRead More »

How to generate leads using social media Read More »

Definition of customer touchpoints for sales and marketing

Lead Generation, Marketing, Sales / Cralan Deutsch

Visitor or customer touchpoints are any way to collect information in order to qualify a lead. This pertains to sales and marketing cycles where some contact is needed to close or further a deal, for example in the B2B or personalised B2C sectors.

What are customer touchpoints?

In creating a Best Practice guide, we came across extensive literature on the subject, which we are summarising here. To begin with, there is currently a lengthy Wikipedia article running at 20 pages without references, and over 16,000 words. Let’s unpack that.

Goal: the point here is to understand that there are numerous points at which (potential) clients come into contact with brands (products & services). This is the buying / decision-making process, also called customer journey, and can refer to both B2C and B2B scenarios.

For purposes of lead generation, we are concerned with contact points through which decisions to purchase or not purchase are made.

Specific to identifying and nurturing leads, we recommend creating touchpoints that can be measured. In other words, touch points that involve some sort of interaction. Ideally, a touch-point will result in another piece of the puzzle being revealed, meaning that you learn something about your lead, and get a step further in the qualification process.

Definition: a ’visitor touchpoint’ refers to any way to collect information in order to qualify a lead.

We also call this enrichment; it means adding touch-points to your website (or other digital assets) which enrich the information that you have about leads. Please click here to see a list of examples with technical documentation: visitor touchpoints.

Using touchpoints in practice – examples for lead generation

Q: So what does this all mean in the context of nurturing leads?
A: It means an opportunity for companies to structure their information-gathering techniques.

Historically, lead generation technologies created techniques such as contact forms, demo calls, and product surveys for interacting with visitors. This has not changed. What has changed are the interaction points. This technology has been formalised into what is currently called Marketing Automation – which bundles all steps across the spectrum.

List of example touchpoints

Blog
Trial sign-up
Purchase
Demo/ video
Webinar
PDF brochures / downloads
Implementation / configuration/ enrichment
Customisation process
Feedback/ data analysis
Automated report generation
Email newsletters
Contact form
Login event
(Social media) logins – meaning ‘login with Facebook’ or ‘login with LinkedIn’
Downloads
Social media sites and feeds
For SaaS products, the website itself is the main touchpoint

Useful definitions from Wikipedia article on Touchpoints

“A touchpoint can be defined as any way a consumer can interact with a business, whether it be person-to-person, through a website, an app or any form of communication… Touchpoints allow prospective customers to become knowledgeable on the brand and the benefits offered and allow them to make a decision to whether they will buy the product or service.”

“Touch points are the first association that a customer has with a product or service offered by a company or individual and are the contact points between a customer and said provider of services. The touch point offers a link between the customer and the service, acting as a go between of what the customers wants and what the service provider is offering, providing a central service in the communication between customer and supplier. The touch point is the first interaction that a customer has with a company and that interaction is considered as the starting point of a customer journey.”

“The customer journey/experience is the full involvement that a customer has with a particular brand, starting at the first connection between customer and service, and ending with the purchasing of a product or service and the advocacy of said product or service to others.”

“Touch points provide the basis and foundations for information gathering techniques used by customers.”

Definition of customer touchpoints for sales and marketing Read More »

Definition: Lead Enrichment

Lead Generation, Sales / Wart Fransen

The term lead enrichment is important to know when you’re trying to understand lead generation. When you know the definition of lead enrichment, you have a much more firm grasp on a core concept of sales and lead generation.

What is lead enrichment?

Lead enrichment is when you add actionable intelligence to your sales leads. This means that instead of just seeing an email address, for example, you have a way to add phone number, company details, and more to a lead.

Why is lead enrichment important?

Lead enrichment makes sales easier because when you have more information on a potential customer it becomes easier to know what influences their buying decisions.

This information can be thought of as sales intelligence. When you have enriched leads, you can make smart choices as to how to approach and interact a lead. When you can have a more personable interaction with a lead, you close more deals.

How to enrich your leads better?

A tool like LeadBoxer makes lead enrichment much easier because it has the ability to automatically work with all website forms, give you more information about your web-traffic, and capture lead information on your website.

Tools, such as LeadBoxer, help enrich leads by giving you a lead score, information about the company from a LinkedIn profile, and an understanding of what pages a lead is browsing the most. A great lead enrichment solution will include information such as lead’s career history, how the person is interacting with your product or website, and much more.

The type of lead enrichment tool that we have described above will ideally do the following to the form lengths on your website:

This will make your potential clients more eager to subscribe and fill in your forms without sacrificing important information as everything else will be captured with our cutting-edge technology.

If you want to jump-start your lead enrichment, we suggest creating a free LeadBoxer account. Click here to create an account.

Definition: Lead Enrichment Read More »

Free Tools Generate Leads for B2B SaaS Products

Lead Generation, Marketing, Sales / Wart Fransen

If you offer a B2B SaaS product, marketing can be quite difficult. B2B SaaS products are often difficult to integrate or the majority of the people on your website may not be the decisions makers at companies. …

Free Tools Generate Leads for B2B SaaS ProductsRead More »

Free Tools Generate Leads for B2B SaaS Products Read More »

Best Marketing and Sales Zapier Automations

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing, Sales / Wart Fransen

Marketing and sales automation is important because it helps streamline and remove tedious tasks from your life. In this article we will discuss some of our favourite Zapier automations. …

Best Marketing and Sales Zapier AutomationsRead More »

Best Marketing and Sales Zapier Automations Read More »

What is a landing page?

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

If you’re new to online marketing, you may often see the term landing page floating around. With this term commonly used, under the assumption that everybody knows what it means, it’s easy to get confused.

In this post, we are going to answer your question “what is a landing page?” so that you can become an even better digital marketer.

…

What is a landing page?Read More »

What is a landing page? Read More »

How to Build High Converting Landing Pages

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

The internet is filled with landing pages.

Landing pages are a core asset of every great online business, since every great business needs to entice sales prospects to convert into actual sales.

Since landing pages can be such an integral part of the sales funnel, we thought it would be important to share with our readers how to build high converting landing pages. …

How to Build High Converting Landing PagesRead More »

How to Build High Converting Landing Pages Read More »

Cold Calling is Dead. Warm Calling is Taking Over.

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing / Wart Fransen

The phrase “cold calling is dead” has been getting said more frequently recently. People have been saying this more frequently because, often, people just assume that cold calling comes off as overly salesy, unprofessional, and likely a waste of time. …

Cold Calling is Dead. Warm Calling is Taking Over.Read More »

Cold Calling is Dead. Warm Calling is Taking Over. Read More »

5 Call-to-Action Best Practices That WILL Make People Click

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

When you run an online business, your call-to-action (CTA) buttons are often vitally important to your company.

In this article, we are going to talk about call-to-action best practices that WILL make people click. …

5 Call-to-Action Best Practices That WILL Make People ClickRead More »

5 Call-to-Action Best Practices That WILL Make People Click Read More »

How to Generate Leads with Content Marketing

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

If you’re having a hard time collecting qualified leads for you business, you’ll gain a lot of valuable lessons from this article. We are going to explain exactly how to easily generate more leads, using high quality content. …

How to Generate Leads with Content MarketingRead More »

How to Generate Leads with Content Marketing Read More »

great books about lead generation social

3 Great Books About Lead Generation

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

Lead generation is an amazingly complex topic, which means that there are a vast variety of books on the topic. Great lead generation ultimately comes down to having a highly optimized sales funnel and way of nurturing leads into sales. Optimizing both of these items can often come down to micro-improvements that really add up; marginal gains in lead generation can drive massive results over time. …

3 Great Books About Lead GenerationRead More »

3 Great Books About Lead Generation Read More »

9 Proven Lead Generation Ideas

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

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. …

9 Proven Lead Generation IdeasRead More »

9 Proven Lead Generation Ideas Read More »

How to Make a High Converting Landing Page

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

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.

How to Make a High Converting Landing Page Read More »

generate leads using social media social

4 Proven Ways to Generate Leads Using Social Media

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

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. …

4 Proven Ways to Generate Leads Using Social MediaRead More »

4 Proven Ways to Generate Leads Using Social Media Read More »

What is Inbound Marketing?

Lead Generation, Marketing / Wart Fransen

Inbound marketing refers to marketing methods that attract visitors, rather than a marketer having to go out and earn the attention of a sales prospect. Instead of your company waving its arms in the air and saying “look at me!” you are instead producing compelling content that draws customers to your website. …

What is Inbound Marketing?Read More »

What is Inbound Marketing? Read More »

Definition: Lead Hacking

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

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.

…

Definition: Lead HackingRead More »

Definition: Lead Hacking Read More »

Definition: Sales Lead

Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Sales / Wart Fransen

A lot of our blog revolves around marketing and lead generation tactics. While tactics and techniques to collect leads are important, it is also vital to reflect on the basics and be reminded of what exactly it means to contact, nurture, and collect a sales lead. …

Definition: Sales LeadRead More »

Definition: Sales Lead Read More »

How to Collect High Quality Sales Leads

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

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. …

How to Collect High Quality Sales LeadsRead More »

How to Collect High Quality Sales Leads Read More »

7 Simple Tips to Collect Leads Online

Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

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

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. …

7 Simple Tips to Collect Leads OnlineRead More »

7 Simple Tips to Collect Leads Online Read More »

9 Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugins

Lead Generation, WordPress / Wart Fransen

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.

…

9 Best WordPress Lead Generation PluginsRead More »

9 Best WordPress Lead Generation Plugins Read More »

7 Best Desktop Email Clients for Mac

Email, Lead Generation / Wart Fransen

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

7 Best Desktop Email Clients for Mac Read More »

Lead Generation

The Benefits of Identifying Website Visitors

What Website Visitor Information is Available

Google Analytics 4

Software to Help Identify Website Visitors

New Tools Available to Identify Website Visitors

LeadBoxer

Hubspot Sales Hub

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Visitor Queue

Leady

Happierleads

IPinfo.io

User.com

ExactVisitor

LeadRebel

Visitor Insights

WatcherMe

Steps to Identify Website Visitors

1. Install the Pixel

2. Integrate With Other Tools

3. Establish Leadscore Criteria

Buyer Profile

Company Information

Online Behavior

Email Engagement

Social Media Engagement

Spam Detection

Start to Identify Website Visitors and Increase Sales Leads

Looking for more qualified leads?

What is MQL?

What is SQL?

MQL vs SQL: What’s The Difference

1) Decision-Making Stage

2) Top of Funnel vs Bottom of Funnel

3) BANT Qualified

Transitioning a Lead from MQL to SQL

How LeadBoxer can help you transition MQL to SQL:-

Conclusion

Now, while this tool alone doesn’t generate leads for me, it’s been useful beyond measure

Reason 1 – Leadpages Host The Landing Pages On Their Servers

Reason 2 – Easy To Create High-Converting Landing Pages

More educational content that sells will naturally suggest itself from the quiz you create

When I was researching my Content Marketing World talk, I did some research on 11 lead magnet types across multiple social networks via Buzzsumo, and quizzes were the most shared kind by far

This helps you identify CTAs that are performing well and those that need improvement

My favorite lead generation tool is Hubspot’s CRM

Out of all of the lead generation softwares I’ve worked with, I’d be quickest to recommend HubSpot

The key here is that we don’t ask the user to leave Facebook to convert on a website

Our favourite lead generation tool has to be Intercom

The software is also really powerful in its report and analytic abilities

Next, we utilize Infusionsoft (marketing automation tool) to capture contact form data

We’ve found them so successful that we’ve started using them to re-engage cold leads or lost deals with follow-ups as well

Our Favorite Lead Generation Tools

Buffer

LeadBoxer

Callmaker

RightHello

Colibri IO

Reply

Conclusion – Get Started

This is where email tracking software can provide Sales teams a much-needed edge in closing deals

What Can You Find Out Using Email Tracking & How You Can Use This Information?

If Someone Has Opened Your Email

Who Opened Your Email

What Time They Opened Your Email

Where They Opened Your Email

What Pages the Person Has Visited on Your Website After Clicking via Your Email

Email Tracking Software Options

LeadBoxer

LeadBoxer tracks all of this activity via a tracking pixel (which we’ll discuss how to implement further below)

SharpSpring

Hubspot Sales

Yet Another Mail Merge

Yesware

Mixmax

How to Setup Email Tracking (with an Email Tracking Pixel)

In order to track email opens, LeadBoxer uses a tracking pixel

Tracking email clicks

Email Tracking Limitations

Images Need to be Enabled