After you have completed stage one of lifecycle marketing Attract Traffic, and you have generated traffic for your business it’s important to capture the contact information from the people who visit your site, or your brick and mortar business. This is step two of Lifecycle Marketing – Capture Leads.
Every time visitors visits your business and you fail to capture their contact information, you can compare this situation to fishing with a net that has a big hole in it. To avoid this you’ll need an easy way to capture their information.
These examples can be used to capture basic contact information from every person that visits your business. Some of the most effective ways to capture leads from both online and off-line marketing include:
- Online Web Forms
- Event Registrations
- Networking Activities
- Referrals
- QR – Codes (those funny looking square barcodes)
- Phone Call Tracking
The most basic information that you should be collecting is something as simple as their first name and their email address.
As you are building the relationship with your visitors remember that less is more. Just secure the basics, because the more information that you ask for upfront the less likely people are to providing it. The more you ask, the less you’ll actually get.
Right now is not the time to get super personal about phone numbers, addresses or birthdays – you can collect all of this, plus more later on in the Lifecycle Marketing process.
The mechanism for asking people for their information has changed. It used to be as simple as asking for an email address to join your Newsletter. But times have changed and you have to exchange value for your prospects information. Think about it, when was you just entered your email address for a newsletter last time?
Take a look at the current best practices of Lead Capture Forms. How they compare to what you have on your site right now?
One thing that is important before we move onto step three of Lifecycle Marketing, Nurture Prospects. I want you to know that at this point you have NOT earned the right to turn on the hard sell. Just because someone has opted-in to get more information, does not mean that someone is ready buy. Some may be ready to buy your products but chances are you’ll need to nurture these prospects before they are ready to buy from you.
