Your inbound marketing campaigns live and die on your ability to convert potential leads into successful sales and repeat customers. To successfully convert these leads into sales, you need to acquire and take advantage of your lead's contact information. As such, contact information is the most important element of any inbound marketing strategy. It doesn't matter how many visitors you attract to your site, or what content you chose to post if you don't collect and make proper use of the visitor's contact information.
Collecting contact information to compile into a list or database first requires you to convince potential leads to give you this information. Visitors to your site typically are not going to give you this information for free. To get these visitors to part with their contact information, they need to be convinced that they are exchanging it in return for something equally valuable. This could be in the form of a white paper, ebooks, or other content which is relevant and interesting to your targeted persona. Ebooks are particularly effectively as calls-to-action promoting them have twice the click through rate as those promoting webinars. Give your visitors a call-to-action and convince them to exchange their information in return for additional information that benefits them.
Once you have collected this information, you can then compile it into a contact list or database to use in your inbound marketing efforts. This is where mere visitors become actual leads. Using a list of detailed contact information, you can further market toward these individuals with a personalized and targeted approach. Personalization is one the most effective methods of improving inbound marketing conversion rates. Personalized emails have a 14% higher click through rate and a 10% higher conversion rate than non-personalized emails. Additionally, contact lists and databases can be used to keep track of how each lead is progressing, with a detailed account of each interaction with the lead. This information can also be used to judge the effectiveness of your inbound marketing campaign as a whole.
Without a detailed contact list, your inbound marketing efforts are much less effective. Studies have shown that nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than un-nurtured ones. Building and maintaining such a list can help your business discover, pursue, and convert leads which may have otherwise been lost.
