I wrote this post last week for Smartinsights and have received very positive feedback on the concept behind using search to personalise the email subscribers experience.

But before we begin, we also need to understand the difference between a pull and a push channel.

Websites and search are both pull channels, whilst email is a push channel.

The strength of search being a pull channel, is that people are on a mission – they have a purpose and are focused on completing that mission.

The strength of email as being a push channel is that it is able to push the valuable content and offers to the subscribers inbox.

What we ideally want to do here is harness the strengths of each of these channels to deliver a personalised and relevant subscriber experience. By doing this we are performing what I like to call Holistic Email Marketing.

We're all aware of being able to utilise implicit data such as click behaviour, browsing behaviour and transactional behaviour to personal the email subscribers experience - but there is also a 4th form of implicit data that we can leverage - that of search data.

Using this data, we can not only understand what products or services they're interested in, but we can speak to them where they're at within the buying cycle.

Read the full post to see how this can work for you

Marketo have just released a Lead Management Success Center. It contains a mix of different types of content such as ebooks, webinars, reports and kits, as well as a load of external respurces and reports – certainly well worth a look for those who are needing to implement Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring or Lead Management programmes.

Here’s a sample of what lies within this resource centre:

NURTURE SALES LEADS

Once you have defined a sales-ready lead, it’s time to nurture your lead pool to generate as many sales-ready leads as possible. Lead nurturing is the process of delivering targeted, personalized resources and offers to your entire lead funnel to move prospects through the buying process.

We have found that companies with excellent lead nurturing programs generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.

How does a company nurture leads until they’re ready to buy?

First, determine your prospects’ unique preferences. What topics interest them the most? What challenges are they wrestling with today? Do they respond better to emails, social media, webinars, or a mix of communication methods?

Carefully evaluate which topics draw the most attention from individual prospects. An automated lead management tool will help track your customers’ likes and dislikes to coordinate the sophisticated communication strategy that lead nurturing requires.

"Lead nurturing is at its most powerful when messages to the prospects are triggered based upon their actions - thus enabling you to deliver more relevant content to them easily and cost effectively. Nurturing and nudging is crucial to relationship building as it gives the prospect an opportunity to evaluate your expertise as a company as well as psychologically making them feel somewhat indebted to you for providing such valuable information, so that when the time comes, they've already decided that you are the company they want to do business with".

- Kath Pay (@kathpay), eCRM & Email Marketing Consultant & Trainer, Plan to Engage

The most important characteristic of effective lead nurturing campaigns is to consistently deliver highly valuable, relevant (and branded) content.

"Give away content that people would pay for. Don't be stingy with the quality of content you share or the detail you provide. Give away your gold. You have a deep well; give away overflowing buckets of icy cool water, and people who are even remotely thirsty will come back to pay for the rest".

- Joanna Wiebe (@copyhackers), cofounder of Copy Hackers

You can find all of the resources here: http://www.marketo.com/lead-management/

When it comes to list building, the one thing you need to understand is that there are no shortcuts to building a huge AND responsive list.

1. Visibility

When people go to your website, is it easy for them to sign up to your list? Are you displaying the sign-up option prominently on the page? 

One way to give your list some visibility to people that visit your website, is by triggering a lightbox (or hover box) that pops up after someone's been on your website for a x seconds. Look at what the average time on site is for someone and trigger the lightbox around that time.

2. The incentive

The incentive that you offer for someone to sign up to your list is key - it has to be the right incentive for the right kind of audience. The more the incentive appeals to people outside your target audience, the less responsive the list will be.

Let's say you run a contest or a sweepstakes to build your list and everyone that signs up has a chance to win an iPad. You'll get a lot of people signing up to your list because they want a chance to win the iPad, not because they're interested in your stuff.

3. Build trust

What are the benefits of signing up to your list? How do I know you're not going to spam me or sell my address to someone else? Why are you requesting me to give you my email address if all I want is to see that video?

4. Testing

Spend enough time testing different incentives to find the one that converts best for you BEFORE you start spending big money to drive even more traffic to your opt-in pages.

I know all this sounds very straight-forward but you'd be surprised how many people forget the testing part.

Once you've optimized your sign-up page as well as you can and you tested everything that you can test, then you're ready to pull out the big guns and drive lots of traffic to your sign-up page.

Partnering with people or companies that target the same audience with different products or services could be a very good way to build your list. 

Other ways to drive traffic to your sign-up page could be:

• search engine marketing
• optimizing the page for organic traffic
• including a link to your sign-up page in your regular email signature 
• including a link to your sign-up page in your forum signature
• talking about your incentive on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, forums...
• publishing your newsletter to Twitter & Facebook and including a subscribe link in your newsletters

I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff here but the key is really to drive traffic to your sign-up page through proven ways of driving traffic to webpages.

Single vs double opt-in

When you use double opt-in, you may loose anywhere between 10 and 40% of the people that sign up but don't confirm. I usually recommend using double opt-in for sources that are not highly targeted or when the incentive is something that appeals to a much wider audience (eg list rental, co-registration, contests & sweepstakes) and use single opt-in for sources or incentives that are highly targeted.

Now it's your turn

I would love to hear which list building tactics you've tried and how well they worked for you!