One of the most powerful lead generation offers these days is an informational e-series that utilizes the power of an email auto responder — a system that allows you to pre-populate messages to be sent to an opted-in subscriber over a series of days, months, or even years.
If you set up an auto responder, you can spoon feed little bits of information over a series of days.
Instead of your potential customer having to sit down and carve out time to go through a white paper or a PDF that’s 20 some-odd pages, your auto responder feeds them slowly, bit by bit on your behalf.
It increases your chances of your content actually being read and seen. They may not open every email in the series. But what’ll happen is they’ll open up the ones that are most interesting, and you can track the open rates.
You can see what bits of information were most interesting, and either eliminate some installments of the e-series, or you can reconfigure them or re-title them to make sure that you keep the offering very interesting.
The Unread Download
While PDFs, e-books, things like that really work well to generate leads and to get people to download them, and request information, there’s a surprising number of people out there who won’t ever open up what they downloaded.
They’ll download it to their Downloads folder.
They’ll have every intention on opening it up and reading it, but they’ll forget about it.
Once they’ve downloaded it, they’ve taken the action, and their brain checks it off their mental checklist, and they never double back to read it.
With an email series, you have a little bit of a nag factor. Now I mean that in the most positive way.
But it drips over a period of time. And so if they missed yesterday’s installment, today’s installment comes in, and oh yeah, I’ve got to check that out.
And ooh, look at that title. That looks really interesting. Yesterday’s wasn’t really a priority for me, but today they’re talking about such and such, and that’s a problem I’m working with right now.
And you have a number of opportunities to really target and hit on a nerve that is a client pain point or something that they need addressed today.
Ease of Entry
Furthermore, with an e-series, you can cultivate an audience that may not be ready to give you many details about themselves off the bat.
All you really need is their email address. You need them to opt in. Maybe their email and their first name would be nice.
But not a whole lot more.
People view subscribing to an e-series as a lot less threatening than filling out a long form to request information, where they may get contacted by a sales person as the next logical step.
Another element of an auto responder that is fantastically powerful is there’s familiarity that develops when somebody repeatedly pops up into your mailbox on a scheduled basis.
If you see somebody once, they’d have to make quite an impression.
But over a period of time, that familiarity that’s developed through an e-series also helps to foster trust, and that’s a critical component to getting people to become leads and to agree to be contacted by you.
Some outstanding systems can be found at strategicleadgeneration.com, including A-Weber, Get Response, and Constant Contact.
