Email, the once forgotten digital medium, has been making a supreme resurgence over the last couple of years. Gone are the days where unsophisticated, and often unsolicited, bulk emails are sent out in their millions, with no desire to segment or target their recipients. Combined with increased interaction (social Media) and understanding (analytics) of your customers, email now operates as a very grown up and hugely rewarding digital exploit when used correctly.
So Is Email Such a Big Deal?
One issue that is common among those pursuing email or eCRM activities though is the struggle to get users to actually sign-up in the first place. Consumers have grown up a lot in the last few years, people are very careful about how and where they interact with brands. For some, this is more difficult than others, however one tactic that has been of particular success in my experience is incorporating an incentivised sign-up to a well thought out email welcome program.
The figures don’t lie either:
- 66% of in-house marketers rating email as having an “excellent” or “good” ROI [eConsultancy’s Email Marketing Industry Census 2013]
- Companies spend a whopping 15% of their marketing budget on email marketing
- 91% of businesses said email marketing was either ‘helpful’ or ‘very helpful’ to their organisation. [iContact The Small and Midsize Business Email Marketing Survey 2013]
US cross channel marketing company StrongView announced that in 2013 56% of respondents planned to increase investment in email marketing leading investment over social media (52%), mobile (43%) and search (40%)! Coupled with the continued rise of content marketing (arguably the biggest marketing buzzword of 2013, much to many people’s annoyance) many would agree that email is an essential, and unignorable marketing channel.
Maximising Your Email Potential
Based on how intelligent you are about attributing value to email marketing this can come in many forms, but assigning value to an email subscriber is the very minimum calculation that you should be making… Those embracing Universal Analytics, and particularly those lucky enough to be playing with Google Analytics Premium will have seen this feature rolled out a couple of months ago taking this to a very different level. But before I meander too far from the topic of the post, below I have scoured the web and found 5 plugins (both paid and free) that can help you:
- Engage more with your customers
- Increase conversion rates on your website
- Develop strong ROI
- And to help to generate loads more leads.
5 Top Lead Generation Plugins
1. PopUpDomination [Paid – $96 (One Off)]
Somewhat more aggressively named than some of the other options, PopUpDomination is fairly more stripped down and focuses purely on using lightboxes to acquire users email addresses.
PopUpDomination’s features:
- Pre-Designed Pop-Ups
- Fully Customisable Pop-Up Content
- Page-Level Targeting
- A/B Split Testing
- Analytics Integration
It handily plugs straight in to WordPress, but can equally be used as a stand-alone. Usefully it also works with the following mailing list providers:
- aWeber
- iContact
- ConstantContact
- MailChimp
- Get Response
See it in Action:
2. BounceExchange – [Paid – from $2995 Per Month]
An interesting proposition that is quite different to some of the other tools on the market, in both price and in functionality. BounceExchange uses what is dubs as ‘exit intent’ technology (pictured, right) to help engage with your users based on their site usage habits. Especially if it’s for capturing potentially lost visitors (and subsequently lost budget), by offering them something to entice them to stay like a whitepaper or time-limited offer perhaps?
BounceExchange can be used for:
- Email capture (lead generation)
- Instant Cart Recovery
- Diverting traffic to high converting ‘money’ pages
- Referral
- Promotional Reinforcement/Support
- Increasing Social Media Following/Interaction
See it in Action:
3. Sleeknote – [Free – Currently in beta]
A very new kid on the proverbial block is Danish company Sleeknote. Currently in beta, Sleeknote offers a stupidly simple and straightforward approach to integrating a lead generation layer. Whether it’s to assist with:
- Running promotional campaigns and competitions
- Boosting social following on:
- Snapchat
- Or directly engaging with your customers in your email campaigns, on:
- MailChimp
- Campaign Monitor
Sleeknote offers a similar functionality to Olark (to those that have seen/used it before), allowing users to decide where on the page that the layover is located, and also the functionality to create their own Sleeknote’s.
Hear it from the Creators:
Rather than describing the features myself, I actually got in contact with Emil, Daniel and Heine (all great guys!) and asked them if they could explain what Sleeknote offers, and answer ‘why should people choose them’? See their answer below:
Our first beta-tester went from 1400 fans on facebook to more than 4500 in just two months.
See it in Action:
4. Optinmonster – [Paid – From $49 (One Off)]
The rather more friendly named Optinmonster, offers a number of simple options and comes as one of the cheaper solutions. It flaunts a number of cool features like:
- Page-level targeting
- Exit-intent technology
- A/B Testing
- Analytics
It also provides the flexibility of multiple opt-in variations, such as:
- Lightbox
- Floating footer bars
- Slide-in
- Full page takeovers
- And more
See it in Action:
5. Drip -[Free for 21 days, then from $49 per month]
Last, but by no means least is Drip offers a super simple yet seemingly very effective way on engaging with visitors to your site. Unlike some of the alternatives, Drip offers the ability to send customised emails based on users interaction with the selected opt-in layover.
It appears to be one of the easiest to set up, simply by:
- Installing the code
- Selecting an opt-in
- Customise your email sequence
- Site back and watch it take effect!
See it in Action:
Any Recommendations?
I’d love to hear back from the State of Digital readers regarding their best lead generation tactics and technology. Have you:
- Experienced any of the technologies listed above?
- Did you like/dislike them?
- If so, why/why not?
- Or, have I missed any other lead generation plugins/add-ons that you would recommend?