Become an SMS or Email Lead Gen List Owner
Do you want to be a list owner? Not just an affiliate marketer? You’ll need to create and start caring for your list of leads like it was your own baby. Learn some success strategies with this short guide!
You need a way to connect
The first thing is to attract your highly-qualified, motivated leads! Whether that is a landing page, a call center, or some other method of capturing their details depends on your resources. But in any case, you need a way for prospects to opt-in to receiving marketing and sales contacts. You also have to make sure you’re compliant with regulations, such as Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Your permissions, if you’re thinking of selling your list on, need to be verifiable.
As I told you in the “Creating a killer email lead gen program” post, in order to build a great list, you need to have two approaches. First, you need to understand where your customer is coming from, what their pain points are, in order to appeal enough that they want to sign up. The second is you need to get enough segmentation information from prospects, without putting them off. This is, in itself, an art which requires some experience.
You need some software
You can’t manage a list without some kind of database. Using a spreadsheet is limited in usefulness as it will be just too difficult to control when your numbers grow.
If you are planning to run an email campaign, software such as Aweber and MailChimp will have most of this built in.
Even if you’re not planning to run contact leads yourself, you need a piece of software to capture and analyze your leads’ details. In most circles, this is known as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system).
What features should your CRM have?
Search – this is a basic function, but the ability to filter your list to show your data by segments, or string matches (matching on text), is crucial.
Stats and analysis functions – you need to be able to see what’s happening in terms of numbers of sign-ups, opt-outs, unsubscribes, conversions… If you can’t see what’s happening, how do you know if you need to fix anything?
Pipeline management – as an extension of the above, you’ll likely need to be able to monitor next steps. What stage of the pipeline is each prospect at? Have they opted in? Been contacted again? Converted?
For email campaigns, you will need appropriate handling of unsubscribes and email addresses that bounce. If you’re getting a lot of either of these, you need to know quick as it’s a sign your list is circling the drain. On the other hand, if nobody is opening your email, you need to know that too. Your software should show this stat, but you’ll be the one who needs to fix this problem by analyzing your content.
Keep it clean
Just because you’ve captured your leads doesn’t mean you don’t still have work to do. You need to cultivate it. You are a farmer of leads, and if you don’t do the hoeing occasionally, you’ll get a weed-infested patch of wasteground. Metaphorically speaking.
Whenever there is a list, you are sure to get a bunch of duplicates. This can be for a number of reasons. They might have hit the send button on that web form twice by accident. They might have changed their address and signed up again.
(By the way, if you’re getting a lot of duplicates, it might be that you need some more form validation or a Captcha check.)
In any case, you need to find the duplicates and get them out of there! If you don’t and you send lead gens on to clients, you’ll just be annoying them and wasting your time. And if you are sending out your own contact campaigns, you’ll annoy people with too many mailer blasts.
If all this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. A successful list owner can be a full-time job. If you need some help monetizing and contacting your list, check out revJOLT‘s offering for list management services and get a better deal!