While the past few years made us endure many changes, one thing that hasn’t changed is the holidays.
Yup, they are coming, my friend, and that means it’s time to prepare for the first big holiday sales of the season:
Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
If you’re looking for some ideas on how to generate leads from your website traffic, then buckle up because we’ve rounded up the best strategies to help you do just that.
Turning traffic into leads that you can target in your email marketing is vital, especially this month.
Here’s why.
Now Is The Time To Focus on Email List Growth
Let me ask you something. If you had to guess, what month of the year would you say a new email address has the highest value?
If you guessed October, then you would be right.
According to some fantastic research done over at Common Thread Collective, emails acquired in October have the highest three-month value than emails acquired at any other time of year.
And it makes sense because most people are gearing up for holiday purchases during this time and throughout the rest of the year.
To add the cherry on top, customers this year are on the hunt to try new brands like yours.
That means now, like… right now, you should be busting your chops to nail your cross-channel marketing and fire up that lead gen engine.
So let’s cover some ways to do that, shall we?
Here are three ways you can get the most of your website traffic, and just in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
3 Creative Strategies to Convert eCommerce Traffic Into Leads Before Cyber Monday
1. Test Quizzes and Gamified Opt-ins
Pop up forms are the cornerstone of modern lead generation. No email marketer worth the salt will say other ways.
But email opt-in forms have made some impressive strides in the lead gen department with quizzes and gamified opt-in forms being some of the most impressive.
Quizzes are interesting for a few reasons:
- They’re a fun alternative to what people usually encounter.
- They have helped other online brands generate thousands of leads and excellent open rates. You can find examples of that here.
- They can offer you a ton of powerful insights into who your audience is.
- They can be excellent for segmentation and personalization.
You can’t just throw up a quiz on your site and expect it to work. There needs to be some giving here… I mean, it IS the season of giving, right? What will the user get out of it?
Measure & Made use quizzes to help potential customers figure out the best size and type of jeans to purchase from their site.
This helps customers find the right type of jeans while also limiting returns for the brand. ThirdLove has something very similar, but instead of jeans, it’s about helping get the right bra fit.
Depending on what you sell, the quiz can change to fit your audience and further segment your list.
Makeup brand, Il Makiage, uses a quiz to provide their shoppers with the perfect foundation shade.
Then, these contacts and their information are added to a segmented list, and certain products are promoted depending on the answers submitted.
If you go this route, you should utilize tags to segment and hyper-personalize your emails.
Other form options are ones that take a gamified approach, like Spin the Wheel.
These opt-in types give contacts a chance to “spin to win” to unlock a discount or win a prize listed on the wheel. Once they enter their email to “spin” the opt-in form and unlock their reward, a discount code is sent to their email.
It’s a game, it’s fun, it’s free, and it works.
One eCommerce brand added this type of form to its site and added 1400 new contacts to their list in under two months. Not too shabby for just one change in their lead generation. And one you can easily test on your site to see how your audience likes it.
2. A/B Test Your Pop-up Forms
It’s not just enough to have your forms on your site and ready to go. You need to make sure they’re working to bring in leads.
To do that effectively and make sure you’re squeezing everything out of your traffic, you should be A/B testing your forms.
There are a few strategies you can use to help you figure out what’s working:
- Test the headlines and the copy. If you’re not offering an incentive, test that to see if it increases conversions.
- Test one form type versus another. For instance, if you don’t have exit intent pop-ups, why not test that versus what you already have. You can do that with any form type.
- Test the design. Design matters, and everything from images to button color could affect conversion rates.
- Test offering SMS opt-ins on mobile. Open-rates on SMS marketing are 99%, so getting people on to an SMS list would be a great way to boost your contacts and offer some variety to your marketing efforts.
- Test adding urgency to the forms. A countdown timer is an excellent example in this case. It kicks up some of that FOMO that works so well.
Don’t go too crazy testing every little thing. Test a couple of options and then stick with the one that increases your conversion rates.
Overthinking and tweaking one thing after another will only cause you to get stuck on the testing instead of the results, and you don’t want that.
Sendlane has opt-in forms built into our platform, but we integrate many other tools to offer the type of flexibility you need.
You can even test your forms to find the best ones! (Take us for a spin if you haven’t already!)
3. Run a Giveaway
People love winning stuff. For whatever reason, that is just the case.
Generally, a giveaway offers an enticing gift in return for entering an email address or other personal information.
One eCommerce store did a strategically planned giveaway and ended up adding 41,000 new contacts to their list. Even after cleaning that list, they still ended up with 38k active new subscribers to market to.
Talk about a big-time pay off! If you want to plan a giveaway, there is some strategy you need to use here:
- Make sure the offer matches your audience. If your giveaway is a free MacBook, you’re going to have everyone and their grandma signing up for a chance to win. That’s not your goal. The goal is to get your target audience into your list, so your offer needs to only appeal to them.
- Use ads to target your ideal customers. If you’re not sure which route to go, then test Pinterest ads and Instagram story ads. Both are lower in cost and high in conversions, so it’s worth the test for sure.
- Be thoughtful about how you position the contest. When you know your audience well, you’ll know what matters to them. You can position your contest around an event or purpose that resonates with who you want on your list as a potential customer.
- Include a referral loop system in your giveaway. These sorts of giveaways have potential virality, and getting people to refer others in their social networks to your contest increases your chances for more signups.
Depending on the contest, there may be a bit of an investment to consider before jumping right into it. It’s also worth banding together with people you know who are willing to promote it or other brands you know will want to do a giveaway together.
After The Opt-in: Use Automations To Turn Leads Into Buyers
Lead generation is only part of the puzzle to getting high ROI from your email list on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and into the holidays.
You should ensure you welcome email automation is in top condition to turn new leads into buyers. Meaning, you might need to make some changes to what you have to personalize based on what the customer is interested in.
For example, if you run a giveaway, your automation for those subscribers might mention that contest and offer them an exclusive discount for Cyber Monday.
Test what a new contacts journey from website visitor to subscriber will be like and look through how you can improve that experience.
Email marketing during the holidays can be challenging, so if you want help getting higher deliverability or access to pre-made revenue-generating automations, give Sendlane a try for free.