Gathering New Leads for Your CRM

Your ESP gives you tools to help you gather leads and feed them automatically into your CRM. Use these tools to grow your contact lists and potential clients. More leads means more potential sales, which means more actual sales, so take advantage of every means available to boost your ability to generate revenue.

Connecting forms to your email marketing

web forms are often a key part of any sales process, turning website visitors into leads. Spend a lot of time on them, because they automatically add contacts to your sales funnel and the better they are, the more your business grows.

It’s not enough to just design your forms and hope they’re used. Continually monitor how many people visit your webpages, fill out forms, and move along your buyer journeys. The more you optimize and improve your forms, the better they bring you leads.

Forms are useful to getting leads into your CRM and sales funnel

Updating recipient profiles in CRM o encourage list subscribing

Most ESPs provide a link you can add to your emails that directs email recipients to a page where they can customize their preferences and update their profiles. Sometimes this page gives your contacts the ability to unsubscribe. A profile update page can also include ways for the recipient to update CRM data, such as preferences or interests. Beyond updating their CRM data, you can also give recipients the ability to choose which lists they want to belong to.

When your contacts update their profiles, you give your contacts the opportunity to see what other products or services you offer. When she elects to sign up for other lists, you learn what the person wants and have an opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. If you build calls to action into your profile update page, you can drive people to buy from you.

This image shows how you can ask contacts to update preferences with an email profile update/unsubscribe page. You must provide a way to unsubscribe, but having ways to reconfirm intent to be on the list or join other lists is a good way to build more interaction with your contacts.

Using forward-to-a-friend

Your ESP can add a link to forward an email to a friend. This link empowers each of your recipients to forward the message to a friend so that the friend can subscribe to your email lists. In the modern era, people are more used to getting emails and don’t use these forwarding functions that often. You may still want to include it in your emails, but don’t expect your recipients to use that function often.

Your ESP can’t track when someone clicks the Forward button in an email to forward the message. As far as the ESP can tell, the person who received the forwarded message is the same person who received the original message. If you see a sudden jump in reads or clicks from an individual in your CRM, you may be recording reads and clicks from the person who received a forwarded message.