How are your lead gen numbers looking right now?
Whether it’s the dog days of summer, the post-event lull, or drowning in deadlines, the best marketers know how to overcome slow traffic and stretch capacity to grow their database creatively.
If you’re looking to increase your acquisition, we’ve got a couple of tricks that may help. We’ll leave the standard distribution process alone, i.e. social sharing or campaign launches, and instead focus on ways to make the most of your email sends.
3 Surprising Ways to Grow Your Database + How to Get ‘Em Done
1. The Email Share
Have you ever received a marketing email in your inbox and thought, “Wow, I bet my colleague/friend/etc. would love this information.” Enter the email share.
Historically, email is the leading channel for Kapost’s new name acquisitions, which means emails we send to our existing database are the largest source of new emails to our database. The numbers don’t lie: In a recent campaign, we received about 48% of our new names from email.
Email is the leading channel for Kapost’s new name acquisitions, which means emails we send to our existing database are the largest source of new emails to our database.
There’s two reasons for this. The first being that, for whatever reason, a known lead/contact uses a new email address when they submit a landing page form linked in an email. Best practice in this situation is to mitigate this by pre-populating the form fields for cookied visitors.
The second reason is that a known lead/contact forwards the email or tracked landing page to a colleague. As we track downloads via UTM parameters on the form landing page, a share of the URL or email itself will track as an acquisition from the email channel.
The How
So, what are the tactics you should use to maximize email sharing potential? Of course high-quality, targeted content is going to be a great start. But, on top of that, you can encourage recipients to forward emails along to colleagues who may find it helpful. Think of email as a B2B social channel, where CTR and open rates aren’t the only value metric; email “shares,” in the form of forwarding, can provide additional users to your database with little additional effort.
<tweet-this>Email shares in the form of forwarding can provide additional users to your database with little effort<tweet-this>
2. Build a Social Army
Your corporate social media accounts can only do so much. Managing paid social ads to reach new eyes can be time consuming to manage, not to mention expensive. It’s about time you delegated your growth—use your colleagues to maximize your social reach and grow your database.
Our savvy Communications Manager at Kapost, Brittany Morris, has built a social army of loyal Kapost employees who share our content via their own personal networks. Individuals across teams, from sales to engineering can share content curated by marketing (including design and copy), all curated on single automated platform. We currently use Oktopost as our social media management software, but SproutSocial and Hootsuite are both stellar alternatives.
The How
If you’re ready to build out your social army, here’s three key tips for encouraging employee participation:
- Make it simple using a dynamic platform (e.g., SproutSocial)
- Provide a variety of content that appeal to different personas
- Remind employees sharing builds their own personal brand, in addition to the company’s brand
3. Participate in Partner Webinars
At Kapost, we’re lucky to be able to benefit from working with awesome partners across a variety of content types. One of our favorite ways to engage is via partner webinars, like this one with Uberflip or this one with SproutSocial.
I personally love a partner webinar because not only does it provide an additional way to garner new names for our database, but it also allows us to work with experts. While I consider myself to be an expert at content creation, I love learning about new areas of content from best-in-class marketers in other areas—like social distribution, full-funnel analytics, or marketing automation. Partner webinars can help educate your own team, so you can keep learning best practices and growing your own expertise.
The How
This is one area where trade shows lend themselves to digital success down the road. Use these in-person events to grow relationships with vendors, analysts, etc. This builds a base relationship for you to reach out following an event and schedule a webinar—even if it’s months and months away. In fact, schedule your webinars a few months in advanced because they take time.
If you didn’t attend any events, or perhaps you’re new to a role and don’t have a collection of contacts, you can use your company name/brand as leverage. Then, follow these steps:
- Make a list of potential partners that align with your target buyer
- Develop 1-3 potential topic ideas for each prospect, based on their expertise and current content focus, which is assumed at this point
- Reach out—cold—to see if they have any interest in acting as a guest for your webinar
- Remind them you’ll be building a landing page, email sends, social copy, etc., all they need to do is help fill in the content and then present!
- For those that agree, schedule them in, focusing especially on times when you expect overall traffic to be low
Final Thoughts
Growing your database doesn’t have to be complicated—or involve a significant addition to workload. With a few tweaks and well-thought out content strategies, you can ensure you have a steady stream of new names coming in each and every month.