One of the best ways to generate high quality email leads is to take advantage of the today’s popular social media sites which only continue to grow. Today we’ll focus on Facebook, which boasts more than 300 million active members that is most-likely harboring a significant share of YOUR market just waiting to be reached. But why bother?
Well, the thing that separates Facebook profiles from a regular old website is the level of personality that is automatically injected (and expected to be) in your profile. The personal “nature” of a Facebook page breeds a lot more trust than a website or even a blog, and it’s easy to see why. Would you be more likely to trust someone who is real, has a personality, is helpful, and whom you can communicate with directly? Or would you rather trust a cold website that seems rather flat in comparison?
By contrast, Facebook is a clear winner.
So why not use it to generate email leads? After all, the effectiveness of an email list depends greatly on the level of trust you have built up with it. From whatever perspective you look at it from, it just makes sense.
Here’s how you can get started with using Facebook as a highly effective email lead generation tool:
Offer Subscriptions Directly From Your Page
In order to use Facebook as an email lead generation tool, it’s obvious that you need to let your visitors know that you HAVE an email subscription to offer in the first place. If people don’t know about it, how can they even begin to be interested?
You can place your subscription offer wherever you want, but because of all the “commotion” that goes on in most Facebook profiles, the one place you can ensure that most people will see your subscription offer is your sidebar. I recommend displaying your offer at least twice on your page, but make sure you’re not being overly pushy or you might be viewed as just another tricky Facebook spammer.
Offer Something.. For FREE
Now that you’ve got your subscription offer on your profile, it’s time to give people an incentive to subscribe. In today’s online world, the words “subscription”, “free updates”, or even “free newsletter” don’t really cause people to come rushing to your door to see what you have to offer. So to maximize the amount of subscribers your Facebook page pulls, offer something for free.
A free giveaway or trial offer (though “trials” are starting to become less and less effective) is a perfect way to entice people into becoming your newest subscribers. After all, who doesn’t want something for free? Especially someone who was interested enough to visit your page.
If it is viable for your niche/market, I recommend using a free PDF report offering valuable, free information as your giveaway incentive. Not only are these convenient, but if you outline a powerful benefit with your subscription offer, it becomes a perfect push to drive people to subscribe. Not only that, it’s a form of value that you can deliver over and over again to as many people as you want at no extra cost. Many feel overwhelmed at the idea of putting a report or “eBook” together, but it’s not that difficult. The report doesn’t have to be long like the books you see at stores, it simply has to be useful.
Can you offer some useful information to your market in just a few pages? If so, then it’s good enough for a free report. I recommend OpenOffice.org for a free word processing solution with a good PDF export feature.
Use FBML to Capture Leads Directly
Now you’ve got your subscription offer on your page with a good incentive (freebie) to entice visitors to become your newest leads; however, when they click over to your website or “squeeze page”, you still have a chance to lose them. They might get turned off by a small detail on your website and click away, never to return. Or, they might get distracted and leave before they had a chance to opt-in. There are countless variables that may or may not be out of your control, but the fact of the matter is, when people click from your Facebook page to your opt-in page, you’re losing some valuable leads.
Why not combine everything to turn as many of your Facebook visitors as possible into email leads? You can offer a subscription, an incentive, AND your opt-in form all on your Facebook page in an attractive, compact, and unobtrusive manner that produces results by using a unique Facebook concept called FBML (the Facebook Markup Language).
Use the Facebook Static FBML application in conjunction with the opt-in form code that your autoresponder service provides to place a subscribe form directly below your free incentive. That way, they don’t have to leave your Facebook page and be re-convinced to subscribe. You simply make your free offer compelling enough, and you’ll get a new email lead… simple as that!
Network Effectively
Here’s where the real work comes in. As with any other social media website, you can’t just go out and SPAM the Facebook member-base in hopes of pulling a vast amount of email leads. You have to network effectively to get people interested in YOU. Then, and ONLY then, is when THEY decide if they’re interested in what YOU have to offer.
In fact, when placing comments on other people’s walls and participating in relevant groups, simply be helpful to others and make friends. Networking isn’t where you promote yourself or let people know what you have to offer, it’s about being a real person that is helpful to your online community. Once you do that, you’ll get more and more followers and as a result, more and more email leads. Always remember that your page is the only thing that does any kind of subtle advertising (mainly for your free incentive and subscribe form), not you.
So to re-cap on everything, place your email offer directly on your Facebook page with an enticing FREE offer and a subscribe form. From there, simply become an active, helpful member of the community and you’ll quickly realize just how effective Facebook can be to building your brand and producing a vast amount of high quality email leads.
I highly recommend you give Facebook a shot and see if it improves your email lead capturing efforts. Besides the portion of your market that fits into 300 million active Facebook members, what do you have to lose?
