Last month I posted a video about how a “lead magnet” can double your website sales. And our Main Street Inner Circle members received a step-by-step guide to create a lead magnet in their monthly members only package. So you should be familiar with why and how to collect contact information on your website.
In this article, I’m going talk about the next logical step, which is email follow-up. Obviously, collecting contact information is a complete waste of time if you don’t set up a system to follow up.
So let’s walk through how to follow up with your prospects after they request your lead magnet.
How to Follow Up
You’ve got two options here. You can manually try to follow up with all of your prospects (unrealistic as you grow your business) or you can set up email automation. Now before you roll your eyes and mumble something about how email automation is too expensive or too complicated, let’s look at the facts.
Tools like Aweber, iContact, and ConstantContact start at around $15 per month. If you can’t afford $15/month, then you’re in trouble :) So cost is not the barrier to entry with email automation.
The other concern I hear is that it’s too complicated. I completely understand this fear. I personally hate learning new software. For example, I delayed buying a new computer for about a year because I didn’t want to have to learn the new Microsoft Word “ribbon” toolbar. So I was literally working on a laptop that sounded like a mower anytime I tried to open a file just to avoid the pain of learning new software.
But here’s the thing. If you can use Microsoft Word (or whatever you use on a Mac), then you can set up an email automation tool. It’s really not that complicated. There are 3 basic steps:
- create a list – this is where your prospects’ email addresses go when they request your lead magnet
- create your emails – select your template and then type up your emails just like you would in MS Word. You can create a sequence of emails and space them out several days or weeks apart.
- send the HTML code to your webmaster to add to your website – This is the only technical step and I recommend you simply copy/paste the code into an email and fire it off to your webmaster.
That’s basically all there is to it. Once your webmaster adds the code to your website, then anytime a prospect requests your lead magnet, their email address will automatically go into the list you created. Then the emails you set up will automatically be sent out according to the schedule you predefined.
Not too complicated right?
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