26 Lead Generation Secrets: How to generate leads tomorrow (without huge budgets, big lists or large marketing departments)

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Do you want more leads tomorrow? You're going to love this article then!

Back in 2006, I built a £5m business in 19 months, and on the way, I learnt a huge amount about lead generation.

I've compiled everything I've learnt into my new guide, ‘The Ultimate Lead Generation Formula: The Science of Successful Selling‘, which you can download for free here.

In the meantime, here are 26 of my top strategies that I use to generate hot, fresh, pre-qualified leads for my Private Consulting client's businesses. (Feel free to steal any of them and implement in your own business.)

Let's get straight into it then…

1. Create upsell funnels

You’ve probably heard of a marketing funnel (a pre-defined path to turn a prospect into a customer), but great marketers don’t stop there.

They’ll have several upsell funnels too, each designed to move each prospect to the next level (us nerds call it ‘ascending’).

This can be as simple as a list of offers you need to put in front of a new customer, a well-thought-out sales script, or you can create an automated sequence in your CRM (I use Active Campaign).

Here are some examples of this in action:

  • ‘Fries with that?’ – McDonald’s age-old example of an upsell. Still very effective.
  • The Warranty – love it or hate it, the majority of PC World and Currys’ profit comes from the sale of warranties and aftercare (I’ve been told by a store manager that they sometimes even lose money on the actual hardware)
  • One Time Offer – when you are the point of purchase, some sellers will offer you an extremely limited offer, that goes away forever if you say no. This adds genuine scarcity and can often result in upsells of 40% or more
  • Subscribe and Save – if the customer commits to regular future purchases, they often get a discount on the purchase price. (Can be tricky to ensure the customer actually follows through)
  • Staged payments – You can offer a payment plan to bring in more revenue. (e.g. instead of a one-time price of £100, test offering 3 payments of £39 over 3 months)

However you do it, the profit from the extra product or service costs you no extra in marketing fees – it goes direct to your bottom line.

Want to be even more wealthy? Create several upsell funnels – such as:

  • Upsell to a longer warranty
  • Upsell to an annual service agreement
  • Upsell to the premium version of your product
  • Upsell to a ‘done for you’ service
  • Upsell to an event for premium customers

Link multiple funnels together and you’ll have an upsell path that can go on for months, and, when implemented respectfully & elegantly, can automatically deliver huge increases in profits for each customer.

2. Create a resell trigger

One of the quickest & easiest ways to increase your profits is to get your existing customers to buy more. (The other 2 ways are to increase your number of customers and to increase the value of each transaction).

A resell funnel/sequence like this works well if your product or service can be sold more than once.

Essentially it is a sequence of discounts that are sent to the customer – however as soon as the customer redeems a discount, the sequence stops.

Let’s use a lawn care company as an example.

  1. Customer buys a one-off lawn care service,
  2. The CRM starts a 40 day countdown,
  3. If that customer does not buy again within 40 days a 10% discount voucher is sent at day 40,
  4. If the customer does not redeem that discount by day 50, then the customer gets a 20% discount,
  5. At day 60, if they still haven’t bought, they get a bundle offer,
  6. Day 70 they get a ‘12 months for the price of 10’ offer,
  7. Day 80 they get a ‘2 for 1’ offer,
  8. Day 90 they get a ‘last chance offer’

Because the sale is tracked via a CRM, the offer is ‘reset’ each time they buy.

This way, the customer is only actually seeing the level of discount that makes them buy, and never any more.

If a customer will buy on day 40, with a 10% off voucher, they never see your ‘2 for 1’ offer.

So, those customers who don’t need an incentive to buy, simply won’t see one!

Of course, it is smart to send multiple reminders about the discount voucher at each stage in case the first email gets lost.

3. Create an onboarding sequence

This is also called ‘indoctrination’ or ‘welcome’ sequence, and its sole aim is to build trust.

For example, if you sign up to Basecamp, then the creators have designed a very well thought out process to get you off the ground and using the app.

Important: your onboarding sequence is not designed to sell. It’s designed to help the user achieve the outcome they wanted when they bought your product or service.

This builds trust, and allows you to make further up-sell, cross-sell and re-sell offers.

E.g. If you have a roofing company, then a smart onboarding sequence will begin the moment an order is agreed. It might look like this:

  1. Email 1 thanks them for their order and including a short story about an existing customer (prevents ‘Buyer’s Remorse’)
  2. Email 2 explains what happens next, who their key contacts are and perhaps some frequently asked questions
  3. A few days before the job starts, a checklist is sent out via email, helping the homeowner prepare for the contractor’s arrival
  4. On the night before, the homeowner gets a text, saying ‘Hi, I’m Frank, and I’m coming tomorrow to do your roof! I’ll be arriving at 8.30am – this is my mobile, if you need it. See you soon! Frank.’

This kind of sequence is not only super easy to set up (I use Active Campaign for this kind of thing), but will build trust & loyalty – how many times have you wondered if a contractor would turn up when he/she says they will?

4. Segment your list

A good database has lots of names. However, a great database has lots of segments.

A segment is basically a group of contacts who meet a certain criteria.

You can segment your database based on lots of things, such as:

  • People who live in a certain town
  • Contacts who have bought from you
  • Contacts who have bought from you AND have spent over £1000
  • Contacts who have been to your pricing page on your website
  • Contacts who live in semi-detached houses
  • Contacts who are self employed

The list is only limited by the data you collect. Start combining those segments to allow you to do super-targeted marketing.

The real benefit of having segments is that it allows you to personalise your communications.

Imagine being able to send a special offer only to those contacts who have enquired about a new bathroom AND have been to your shower pricing page on your website in the last 7 days.

This kind of super-targeting helps you to enter the conversation your customer is having in their heads, at precisely the right time. It’s like you can read their thoughts!

5. Have a list of super engagers and interact manually with them

Remember talking about segments? This is just a segment of your database who frickin’ love you.

If you track who opens emails and who reads blogs (and if you don’t, you should), you’ll likely find a small number of super-fans.

These are contacts who might:

  • Read every blog you send out
  • Open every email
  • Refer in new customers
  • Answer all your surveys

These are your ambassadors, so you need to treat them really well.

  • Send them private emails asking them what else you could be doing for them.
  • Send them unexpected gifts just to thank them for being great customers.
  • Give them priority access to any offers or deals or events.
  • Give them direct lines to your key staff

Make them feel really special – the time and money you spend on these guys will give you an ROI better than any other type of marketing you could do.

Pro Tip: If they pay regularly, like a subscription, set aside 15% of each payment to cover regular gifts for them – I call this my ‘Delighting Fund’.

6. Answer question on Quora

Quora.com is a site where people can ask questions about problems, and get answers from others, often experts.

It works really well if there is a particular problem that you know your target market has.

Have a browse and find some questions that your product or service might help with and have a go at answering them.

The more unbiased your answer is, the better chance it’ll be voted as the best answer. Use this as an opportunity to position yourself as an expert – don’t sell! (But do link back to your product/service page)

7. Ask a question when someone signs up

This alone has been responsible for a huge jump in conversions in one of my client’s marketing.

This is how it works:

    • When a prospect signs up, immediately send them a personal email (this can be automated, but works best if it’s done manually).
    • That email has the subject line: ‘Can I ask you something…?” (this builds curiosity)
    • The email simply says:

 

  • Hi FIRSTNAME, Thanks for downloading my book. I’m curious – what would you say was your single, biggest challenge at the moment? Hit reply and I’ll send you some hand picked resources that should help (I personally read every email!).
  • PS. Don’t worry – your reply is totally confidential.

 

  • A percentage of contacts will reply, and this has 4 benefits:
    • You will start to see trends in problems your customers have. This is invaluable when planning your marketing strategy, adverts & content
    • You can tag this contact in your CRM with exactly what problem they want to solve. Perfect for very targeted marketing.
    • You can identify super-keen leads. Generally speaking, the longer and in-depth the reply, the more of a problem this is for your contact, and the more keen they are to buy a solution soon
    • A lot of email clients (like Gmail) filter promotional emails (either into a promotions tab, or by marking them as spam). By getting your contact to reply, it can signify to Gmail that you’re not spam, and your future emails should be in the main inbox

It’s a brilliant strategy with the only downside that it requires a bit of work.

However, if you find you’re spending your time filtering lots of replies, then you’re clearly getting lots of responses, meaning you’re getting lots of leads.

It’s a nice problem to have!

8. Use humour, personality & gifs

Back in the 90’s, businessmen wore suits and took themselves very seriously.

These days, thanks to billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg who wear hoodies to work, being laid back in business is much more acceptable.

So why do we still see business owners writing emails that use phrases like, ‘I will revert back to yourself’ – that’s not the way we talk in real life is it? (and if it is, then you’ll get much more bedroom action if you stop talking that way. Weirdo.)

  • Inject some personality into your business.
  • Use Gifs (try giphy.com) in your emails, FB posts and tweets.
  • Be normal.
  • People buy from people they like.
  • Most humans are likeable when they are themselves. So, be yourself.

You’ll probably see that I swear sometimes. I tell stories and I write to my clients like I would write to my friends – if someone doesn’t like it, then they won’t like me when they meet me, so they’re not my customer!

9. Retarget existing customers to upsell

Retargeting is frickin’ gold for marketers (New to this? Learn the basics).

If you’re smart then you’ll already be using it to get new customers. But what about existing customers?

The truly great marketers start remarketing to brand new customers, either to:

  1. Raise awareness and overcome buyer’s remorse (remarket testimonials, and the customer will feel reassured that they made the right decision)
  2. Upsell or cross-sell
  3. As part of the onboarding sequence

And if you are uploading emails to your remarketing platform (which you would be if you were retargeting new clients), then the cost is usually very small, and you can be super targeted with your message.

10. Speak at an event

The ultimate in credibility!

However, it doesn't have to be just that audience that you can influence. Here are 4 more ways to get better marketing via public speaking:

  1. Record the presentation. You can then turn it into audio, chop it up into small sound bites, use it as video on FB or even use a still image as a profile pic (this works really well – it positions you as a speaker without even having to say it)
  2. Call yourself a speaker. Adding ‘speaker’ after your name adds great authority
  3. Ladder up to bigger gigs. Want to do a TED talk? Work your way up through smaller gigs and you'll not only be a better speaker, but you'll be able to show the TED organisers that you've done it before
  4. Approach a university for a speaking slot. Even if it's just 10 mins in front of 5 students, how impressive does it sound to be able to say you were a guest speaker at Manchester Business School?

Speakers are authorities. Fact.

11. Listen on Twitter

The search feature on Twitter is really good – you can find conversations that are going on right now about your products, service or the problem it solves.

This goes one step further with apps like Twilert which can monitor Twitter and give you real time alerts via email when a user is discussing something you could help with.

You can benefit from this in two ways:

  1. You might be able to get involved in a conversation with a prospect about the solution your provide. Remember: be cool. Don't try and sell, just try and help them solve the problem. If you're a good guy then they will often ask you for a quote
  2. Just by reading these questions and answers you'll learn what conversations are going on in the heads of your customers. You'll discover what concerns or objections they might have. All of this is invaluable – create a FAQ sheet with all these questions on there and offer to send it over to anyone on Twitter who wants it. It will build massive trust.

Just remember – treat conversations on Twitter like chats at somewhere like Starbucks. Don’t barge over and start pitching your product – instead be respectful and offer genuine advice or link to good, helpful content.

The sales will come when you’ve built trust.

12. Upload slides to slideshare (and link to the landing page)

Who said PowerPoint was boring!

If you've got any old presentations on your hard drive, upload them to Slideshare.com

Whilst it's unlikely that someone is going to read your slides and call you up, begging to buy from you, Slideshare ranks well with Google, so you can link back to a landing page on your website to collect leads.

Bonus:  it gives you credibility as an expert too!

13. Don’t mention SPAM

Got a sign-up box on your website? Good work.

Got a promise about never spamming them underneath it? Delete it.

Yup – studies have shown that mentioning the SPAM word on your website hurts sign ups – even if you’re promising never to spam!

Instead, either write nothing, or write something like :

“We promise we’ll never ever share your details with anyone. Ever.”

14. Use specific domains to track lead sources

This is a great one!

Got a billboard campaign? Go buy a domain for £7, and use that on the billboard instead of your main domain.

You can set up a redirect so that visitors are automatically forwarded to your home page, but you'll be able to track exactly how many visits your billboard is generating.  

Or, for bonus points, send them to a specific page on your site that's customised for people who've seen the billboard.

Use the same image as the billboard, the same headline and the same message (this is called ‘ad scent’).

Bonus for super nerds: set up individual tracking in your CRM on that web page and ensure you tag any leads who come from that page with the name of the billboard campaign.

This way, you'll be able to see not only the numbers of visits, but which customers you got from that billboard campaign and how much they spent.

Imagine how useful that will be when planning your next campaign!

15. Give away your product for free to influencers in return for a review

If this can work for Rolex watches, I bet it’ll work for you!

The idea is that you give away your product or service to people with big Twitter followings or bloggers with a large audience.

They use your product/service, ideally fall in love with it, and subsequently tweet/chat/promote it meaning you can generate awareness and leads.

However, there are several rules you need to follow:

  1. Determine influencers in your market only. No point giving a guy 4 free tyres if he only ever tweets about Minecraft to teenagers.
  2. Only ask for a fair review. “If you like my stuff please feel free to share. There's no commitment or pressure to do that though. Enjoy!”
  3. Choose your influencer carefully. Lots of Twitter accounts have high follower numbers but they can have lots of fake followers. Use a tool like Klout to determine how influential they are.
  4. Don't go for mega-stars like Lady Gaga – they’re inundated with requests. Set your sights lower at first. Anyone with 20,000 Twitter followers or FB fans is a good start.

16. Create a decent email footer

Here's my email footer – at least once a month I get a comment on it and people remember me for it.

Look, bottom line is this: We trust you, so we don't see the need for a formal email disclaimer.

However, if you got this email by mistake, or it contains sensitive information, or it has figures, prices and outcomes that aren't explicitly promised, then please don't be irresponsible with the data, or treat it as a contract (we'll happily write you a contract with detailed outcomes, if you like). 

Also, let us know if we've messed up, and, although we'll be embarrassed as heck, we'll do everything we can to put it right.

And please remember, emails are sent by individuals, not companies, so please treat all views, opinions and comments as the author's, and not necessarily Dallas Matthews.

Oh, and never run with scissors, smoke in bed or investigate odd, chainsaw-like noises in an old barn after dark. It won't end well.

I could make it even better by;

  1. Putting some kind of promise in there: ‘Want to become a master marketer? Take our free 7 day challenge here’.
  2. Linking to some testimonials
  3. Adding links to all my social media accounts
  4. Putting a quote from a delighted customer at the bottom
  5. Coming up with a creative job title. ‘Head of Customer Smile Generation’

However, here’s a list of things you shouldn’t do:

  1. Add images. Some email clients strip these out and convert to attachments which can flag spam filters and be generally annoying
  2. Add your ics file with your contact details. (That's so 1990’s!)
  3. Be pompous. You're a normal person not the Prime Minister
  4. Use weird businesses language like ‘if one receives this correspondence by mistake, please destroy’(be normal – “got this by mistake? Just delete it and let us know. Ta!”

You probably send out hundreds of emails every week – how many of those could be to prospects?

17. Other People’s Lists

An increasingly interesting strategy is to mail to other people’s lists with a non-competing offer of your own.

There are quite a few ways to do this, but most campaigns follow this strategy

  1. Find a related, non-competing business who is likely to have your target prospects on their list
  2. Agree a payment with the list owner for sending a specific number of emails over an agreed time period (3-5 emails over 14 days is a good number)
  3. Give the email content to the list owner
  4. Ensure that there is a clickable call to action to your own site, so you can track results.

When done well, you can build a pretty good list in a very short period of time.

Advanced tactics:

  1. Before approaching the list owner, sign up on their list using a couple of non-identifying email addresses (create new Gmail accounts if you like). You can then make sure they actually send the emails you agreed.
  2. Ask for the list owner to append each contact’s email to the end of the link, like this: http://mywebsite.com/link_to_click?email=al@dallasmatthews.co.uk. Then you can use analytics to track who has visited the page but not signed up.
  3. Agree with the list owner to resend your email(s) up to 3 times to those who have not opened them
  4. The emails should come from the list owner and reference you as a trusted source.
    1. E.g. “Hi <FIRSTNAME>, My friend Al Elliott is doing something pretty cool and I didn’t want you to miss out.”
  5. Don’t try and sell, or get appointments on this mailout. You’re just looking for them to raise a hand and show interest. Downloading something for free, or registering for a webinar is a perfect strategy.
  6. Don’t spam the shit out of the contacts you get! You’re borrowing someone else’s credibility, so treat your new sign-ups with respect.

18. Use quizzes to get more traffic

This is increasingly popular way to generate leads and works brilliantly on Facebook as a either a viral campaign or with paid traffic

I use Thrive Quizzes to generate my quizzes and so far it's working well.

Here are some great tips I’ve discovered to creating a good quiz:

  1. Make it about them. ‘What dog breed are you?’, ‘How many plants can you identify’, ‘How healthy is your roof?’
  2. Stick to fewer than 10 questions.
  3. Make the questions easy to answer. E.g. “Is your garden,
    1. Like a jungle,
    2. Tamed, but only just,
    3. Generally pretty neat,
    4. Makes the Queen’s garden look shabby”
  4. Use humour. Don't take yourself too seriously (unless your business relies on serious topics like health). Have fun answers. Make the negative answers appealing to choose.
    1. E.g. ‘Nope – too scared to open the back door, in case it’s like Jumanji’
  5. Ask for an email once the quiz is complete, but before you give the answers. You’ll get a much better response rate this way. ‘Enter your email address and we’ll send you the results’

You can share this directly on FB or grab the code to embed on a page on your website.

18. Use Retargeting to cut the cost of leads

We touched on this before, but retargeting is one of the most important strategies around right now.

In its simplest sense, this is how retargeting can improve your lead generation:

  • Send cold traffic to an opt-in page
  • Track everyone who lands there (this is called ‘pixelling’)
  • Create a segment of people that meet this rule: ‘visited opt in page, but did not visit thank you page’ (i.e. those who didn’t take the action you offered)
  • Target that segment with adverts for 30 days trying to get them back to opt in

(This can also work with basket abandonment, or repeat purchases).

You’ll find that a certain percentage of people intended to opt in, but never got round to it – these are the people you’ll win back.

NOTE: Just to set your expectations, most of those you retarget will ignore you. Retargeting is there to catch the people who were on the fence in the first place, not convert those who never wanted your product/download/service!

19. Use split testing on headlines to increase conversion

Yeah, yeah, yeah – you’ve heard it before, You should be testing stuff.

But listen for a minute – it actually does work!

If you’re sending an email out to more than 1,000 contacts, it’s worth split testing stuff to see what impact it has.

Here’s a few rules to ensure success when split testing:

  • Don’t even attempt a test if your sample group is under 100 – you won’t get a statistically significant result.
  • Split test one thing at a time. True, there’s a trend towards Multivariate Testing (testing several changes at once), but to start with, stick to simple A/B tests.
  • Test screams not whispers. Wondering if a red button or blue button is best? You’re wasting your life. Test things that will make a huge difference, like headline, or purchase price.
  • Talking of testing pricing… test higher prices. In some cases a higher price gets better response!
  • Know what you’re testing & ensure you have enough opportunities to test it.
    • Testing the wording of a link in an email? Great, but make sure that at least 100 people will click it or your conclusions won’t be statistically valid
    • i.e. if you send 1000 emails and your emails tend to have a 4% CTR, then you’re likely to get only 40 clicks – not enough people for a proper A/B test

Decent split tests could test:

  • Headlines
  • Link text
  • Testimonials
  • Images
  • Offer
  • Bonuses
  • Price
  • Guarantee

Your CRM/Email system should allow A/B testing – if you want to test pages on your site, there’s a huge number of software packages that can help like Visual Website Optimiser and Google’s own Website Optimiser.

20. Track lead sources to reduce costs

Tracking where each lead comes from is one of the most important things you can do in your marketing, as you can identify exactly what part of your marketing is working to generate leads.

However, the marketers who are true geniuses ensure that they also track which marketing brings in paying customers – leads are nice, cheques are better.

When you know exactly which lead sources are delivering the most valuable customers, you can start reallocating your budget and pausing marketing that isn’t performing.

Imagine knowing, for a fact, that running a specific marketing campaign with £X budget would bring you in Y number of new, high-value customers!

There are 4 main ways to track lead sources:

  • Referral domains. As mentioned above, you can use different domains to refer traffic to your website. If you’re advertising offline, or in a medium that you can’t control, try using a different domain for each lead source.
  • Phone numbers. Running a print ad? Get a phone number from SwitchboardFree and redirect it to your main office number. Use that number on the advert, and SwitchboardFree can:
    • Track your incoming calls,
    • Record them,
    • Count a call as a conversion a call as a conversion in Google Analytics,  
    • Announce to you before your caller is connected which campaign the caller is replying to (e.g. ‘Call from newspaper advert’)
  • UTM parameters. You could write a whole book about this, (and someone has), but in its simplest sense, UTM parameters are a way to pass information between web pages using parameters in the link.
  • Hidden pages. By creating web pages that are not linked to on your website, (often called ‘orphan pages’), you can make ‘hidden’ offers to publicise only on certain mediums.
    • E.g  You can build a ‘2 for 1’ offer page, and publicise the link only on Facebook.
    • Its likely that only customers you get from this will be from Facebook, as nobody else will know about the link.
    • Of course, this isn’t a secret page – Google could rank it, and if you have an auto-generated sitemap, then it will likely appear in that.

It might sound like extra work, but imagine knowing exactly which lead source delivers:

  1. The most amount of leads
  2. The best paying customers?

That’s got to be worth a little bit of effort, surely?

21. Test day-parting to reduce costs

Day-parting is a term that originated in Google Adwords, and means to split your day into ‘parts’ and only show your advertising at certain parts of the day,

E.g. You might decide to only show adverts between 7am and 9am, or maybe decide to only show a specific advert after 6pm.

The advantages of this are:

  • You can run an advert with a message tailored to the time of day.
    • E.g. “Cold shower again this morning? Get our new high-capacity instant demand boiler and start enjoying showers again!”
  • You can target people more specifically.
    • E.g. targeting only mobile devices, between 5pm and 7pm, in Greater London is likely to catch large percentages of commuters
  • If you track the times when each lead comes in, you can analyse your customer list to see if there’s a particular time window that they signed up in.
    • E.g. In my property business, I discovered that a certain part of the day yielded much better leads (and customers) than others, so I just advertised during those hours, saving myself hundreds of pounds every day

In almost every businesses there are hidden shortcuts like this, which, when exploited, can reduce your lead costs, increase your conversion rate and overall massively improve your marketing investment.

22. Have a cross sell bundle

If you’ve shopped on Amazon (and I’ve yet to come across someone who hasn’t!) then you’ll have seen this in action.

By cross-selling other related items, you can increase the average order, and have a big impact on the profit.

For example, imagine this:

  • You sell a product for £100, with profit of £30,
  • It costs you £20 to acquire a new customer via Google Adwords, so your total profit on the first sale is £10. (£30 – £20),
  • However, you cross-sell a £50 product with a profit margin of £15,
  • For each of these you sell, you get to keep the entire profit (as the customer acquisition costs are covered by the first sale),
  • This means you’ve just increased your total profit on this sale to £25 – 2.5 times your original profit!

Of course, the related item needs to be, well, related. No point trying to cross-sell dog food with a new hoover.

23. Use a CRM/Automation platform

In the old days (yeah, I mean 1996 – nuts, isn’t it?), CRM would refer to a clunky database where you’d write your notes from a sales call (probably on your Nokia 3210).

These days, generally CRMs are automation apps that can:

  • Send out broadcast emails
  • Send out one-to-one email sequences (autoresponders)
  • Track visitors to your website
  • Tag contacts and create sophisticated segments
  • Track open rates and click-throughs from emails
  • Link into other systems to trigger things like sending postcards & letters
  • Score leads based on behaviour so you know who’s most likely to buy next
  • Provide subscription forms to collect leads
  • Allow sophisticated A/B testing to improve conversion

If you’re planning on building a business with turnover of more than £100,000pa, then I think it’s important to have one.

There are several out there that do broadly the same thing, including:

  • Ontraport
  • Active Campaign (this is the one I use and always recommend)
  • Infusionsoft
  • Maropost
  • Marketo
  • Pipedrive

It’s down to personal choice – I recommend Active Campaign because it’s scaleable, cheap to get started and super easy to use, but like anything, It’s down to individual preference.

24. Use person-centric website tracking

Not to be confused with Google Analytics, person-centric tracking is code (often supplied by your CRM app), that sits on your site and tracks individual web visits.

If the visitor is a known user, then the actions are written to their record in the CRM.

This allows you to:

  • See exactly what pages a contact has browsed on your site
  • Set rules to automate sequences and campaigns based on specific pageviews (e.g. if a contact goes to the ‘pricing’ page, start them on a sequence to begin the sale)
  • Score contacts based on actions they took (e.g. if they visit the website more than 5 times, add another 20 points to their score)

Just be aware of the limitations though: this works via cookie in the browser, so if the contact usually visits your site from a laptop, and then visits again from a mobile device, the second visit is not able to be linked to that contact immediately.

However, with most systems, that visit is still tracked, and if the contact follows a link on an email sent to them, their previous anonymous profile & history is linked, giving you full view of their behaviour again.

Most advanced CRM systems (like Active Campaign) do this out-of-the-box, but if you want complete flexibility, you can build your own tracking system using something like Woopra.

25. Use Nudgemail

Though strictly speaking not a marketing app, Nudgemail is an email tool that allows you to snooze emails.

I’ve been using this for about 10 years and I probably use it every day. You simply CC in nudgemail into your emails, and nudgemail will remind you about that email by sending you a copy in the future.

I use it to remember to manually follow up with new leads, or remind me to check on new customers.

This is how it works:

  • You send an email to a lead asking if they want a consultation
  • You CC in the email address 3days@nudgemail.com
  • In 3 days, nudgemail sends you back the same email, to remind you to follow up
  • You can then click links to ‘snooze’ the email for 1 hour to 1 month (it gets sent back to you), or delete it once you’ve followed up.

I use it to:

  • Remind me to follow up with leads
  • Send links to nudgemail to remind me to look at an article on a specific day
  • Fire off recurring emails every month to remind me of goals
  • Send annual emails to me reminding me of birthdays and important events

There are other systems out there, like Boomerang, with similar features but I like the simplicity of Nudgemail!

26. Outsource jobs to Fiverr

Again, not a marketing app, but I use this to outsource small or repetitive tasks freeing up my time to do the stuff only I can do.

For example, I have used Fiverr to:

  • Get basic logos designed
  • Remove white backgrounds from images
  • Transcribe audio (though now I use Rev.com)
  • Transfer email addresses from spreadsheets to my CRM
  • Write short blog articles to ‘pad out’ lead generation blogs
  • Edit a book manuscript
  • Create short animations
  • Get voiceovers
  • Do explainer videos

I’ve heard of people using freelancers to collect emails from target client’s websites, but I’ve not done this myself.

Overall, it’s a great way to get little jobs done often for just $5 – this voucher gives you a $5 gig for free to try it out.

(Be wary of anyone offering larger jobs for $5, like website builds. It’s too easy for someone to insert malicious code into your site this way).

There you have it!

Was that useful? Did you get any great ideas from it?

I’d love to hear your feedback – drop me a line at al@stealmymarketing.com.