Give it away!
In the past, I’ve been a pretty strong advocate for setting up lead generation programs that require up front registration. What you end up with is numbers like this: for every 100 people you attract to a site, you get 3-5 who actually register for the fact sheet, webinar recording, or what-not, and 95-97 who go away, mostly to some other site.
This approach works just fine if you’ve got a huge list. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of people, real people (not just mickey mouse AT foobar DOT com or somesuch), to make the math work. You end up with 300,000 on the email blast list and then 15,000 at your landing page (if you’re a rock star), then maybe 400 who get your white paper. But surprise, 300 of them are interns doing research for their boss, a business analyst in phase 0.1 of their research (who doesn’t want to hear from you), or somebody in the media trying to figure out what the heck you’re saying.
Of the remaining 100, chances are that you’ll just have to keep hitting them with more and more things to keep them engaged, such as a webinar series, an e-newsletter, a Twitter feed, whatever, until they build enough trust in you to make some kind of move in your direction.
And that’s all fine and dandy if you can start with a big enough list and can keep hitting them with high-quality stuff in a high-integrity way.
If that’s working for you, okay, fine, sure.
If it isn’t, let’s turn the model on its head and try the opposite. That’s right. No registration form at all. Let them watch your video free, download your ebook for free, whatever. Always embed a way to get ahold of you. Try something low-risk and unobnoxious, like a Twitter feed. It’s much better than email for this kind of thing. (If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that I’ve been ruthlessly killing BACN in my inbox.)
Just say, on the first and last page of your ebook: “Here’s where you can find me: @myerman on Twitter.” (Of course, you’re free to point them at my tweetstream, but you might want to use yours instead!)
If you’re on Twitter, don’t be a jerk, okay? Don’t do the autoresponse with 100 different messages and options and links. Who wants that? If you do an autoresponse, say, simply, “Hey thanks” and give them a phone number or email address. Then keep up with the good tweets.
If they like you, they will message you, or figure out a way to get a hold of you. But start it off by giving away this interesting bit of content. Something human, something that will make them laugh or think or rethink something. Especially if they can give it away easily to 10 of their colleagues or friends.
Try it for a month. Watch what happens. I bet you get a whole lot more downloads that way. (And notice that you can still track downloads of PDFs using things like Google Analytics. Sounds like a topic for next time!)
