Once you have killer content that will intrigue and attract leads towards your business, you’ve got to capture them. See, you can have all the traffic in the world, but if you’re not advancing them closer to your business, you’re really wasting it. In this post, I’ll show you how to capture leads with Infusionsoft so you can complete your second stage of Lifecycle Marketing.

Every week, we’ll share useful tips on how you can implement the Lifecycle Marketing strategy in your business with an emphasis on Infusionsoft.

Capturing Leads: Why & What

The Capturing Leads stage of the Lifecycle Marketing strategy is the step that enables you to retain a visitor’s attention into your business. It’s the difference between, “Cool story, bro,” and “Tell me more!” There are times when you don’t need to bother with capturing leads … oh that’s right, there isn’t.

When you capture leads, you want to be intentional. See, no one wants to subscribe to yet another newsletter. By having stellar content on your site, you should maximize the business benefits for your business.

Capturing leads typically involves a few key steps inside of Infusionsoft. But the important step here is to carry out the lead capture devices such as Web Forms and Landing Pages on your website. For many users, this step is one in the same, but if you haven’t yet added your Infusionsoft Web Forms on your website, now is the time to do it.

For some entrepreneurs, it might feel strange to capture leads on a great piece of content because it’s “salesy.” You need to shift your perspective. If you send insincere, uninspiring messages, then yes, asking for contact information could be salesy. If you intend to take that develop a long-term relationship with visitors and deliver them even more value, they expect you to stay in touch. Think about how many times you came across a great piece of content, but there was no way to get more of it from that source? Capturing leads is how you can solve for that problem. If your content is high quality, people will be happy to offer you their contact information.

Why do you want to capture leads? At the end of the day, it’s so you can educate them and nurture them towards the sale. More on this later. The point you want to focus on here is to have the lead capture device strongly support your content. If someone reads a blog post about Camaros, don’t suggest they sign up for information on Mustangs. Got it?

How to Capture Leads with Infusionsoft

Many users tend to seamlessly deploy Infusionsoft Web Forms and Landing Pages at the same time as they complete the Attract Interest stage of their Lifecycle Marketing strategy. If this sounds foreign to you, read this blog post to catch up.

Here are nine different ways you can capture leads so they go into your Infusionsoft account:

• Embedded Web Form - There are a couple of ways on how you do this for your specific site, but copy the provided HTML code and paste it where you want your Web Form to display. This will collect visitors’ information without taking them off your website. If you can easily create pages on your site, I recommend sending visitors to a thank-you page affirming they filled out your form. If not, Infusionsoft can take care of that for you easily. 
• Hosted (Linked) Web Form – If you are using social media and want to share a quick update for people to opt into your lead magnet, then using the direct link will be best. This is also great if you’re at a live event like a speaking engagement and want to direct the audience to fill out your customized Web Form, shorten the link with a Bitly and point the link to your Hosted Infusionsoft Web Form.
• Pop-ups (or ‘Pop-overs’) - It’s controversial, but you can increase lead capture by up to 50 percent or more by using a time-delayed pop-up to appear on your site. Within that pop-up, you can use your Infusionsoft Web Form code so it can quickly and easily capture leads while their interest is at its highest. (Here are few different tutorials on how to implement this.)
• CustomerHub – If you use the membership site software like CustomerHub, you’re already capturing leads in Infusionsoft.
• Point of Sale – If you work with clients in-person or at the point of sale, you should use that opportunity to capture leads. Think about it: if someone hands you money, they probably will hand over their email address and phone number. Explain that you want to send them valuable information and affirm how often you intend to contact them. Internal Web Forms are excellent for this purpose!
• Direct Mail Response – Say you ventured into using a tactic to deliver a coupon to your target audience via postal mail.  In order to redeem the coupon (and any related content), send them to a URL on your site and require they enter a “discount code.” Not only do you get closed-loop tracking on your lead generation, but you also build your list ethically and legally.
• Refer-a-Friend – Be warned, this is risky, which is why we don’t natively offer this functionality, but you can still do it. If you have happy customers already, reach out to them and ask them if they know of a friend who would benefit from your products and services. If so, send them to your Web Form or a specific landing page. As a thank you, you can send them a gift card or similar. For your referrals, always proceed with caution, such as using a confirmed opt-in model. Consider sending them a message that their friend suggested that you contact them — and if they are interested, have them click your email opt-in confirmation. Again, for all the work this requires and the limited benefit it yields, you’re better off using Infusionsoft’s robust affiliate tracking features.
• Tradeshows & Live Events – Collecting business cards is a hassle. Instead, follow-up and easily add people to your database by using a Hosted Web Form. The best part? Handing over an iPad for your lead to enter their own information so you know it’s up to date and current. Always set expectations and explain to them how you intend to follow-up to their request.
• QR Codes – For the right audience and offer, QR codes can work great. QR, or Quick Response, codes are special bar codes that can contain data that directs someone’s browser to a specified website. Simply generate a code that contain the Hosted Web Form link. Here’s a free QR code generator.

Be sure to thoughtfully balance the need to collect leads while providing valuable information prior to capturing the lead. If your content quality is poor, you’ll notice that the quality of your leads won’t be that great. If you want killer leads, then you need to put in the work to develop some killer content. For some guidance on how you can create content to generate leads, download our free e-book titled Magnetic Appeal to get started with content marketing.

As you can see, Infusionsoft is a great service capture leads for small businesses.

Next week, we’ll progress further along the Lifecycle Marketing strategy into Nurturing Leads with Infusionsoft. Nurturing leads is a fun and creative process that I’m sure you’ll enjoy. It can be as simple as you want or as sophisticated you need to fit the sales process of your business. Stay tuned! 

Photo credit:. SantiMB .

We’re introducing a new feature on our blog — Fun Fact Friday — that gives you to quick and easy insight on some of the cool numbers and metrics about our company.

This week, we’ll share some interesting stats about the email marketing features of Infusionsoft. If you have any suggestions or ideas for stats that might intrigue you, be sure to let us know in the comments. (more…)

A common need that entrepreneurs share is the need to attract interest to their products and services. In this post, I’ll show you how to raise awareness of your business with Infusionsoft.

Every week, we’ll share useful tips on how you can implement the Lifecycle Marketing strategy in your business with an emphasis on Infusionsoft.

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A few weeks ago, I sent a survey to email subscribers of our blog and we learned a lot from your responses. Based on the results, we will be making enhancements to the content we publish and improving how we get it to you. (more…)

As you might know, we house our helpful content tailored for small businesses on our Big Ideas Blog. Here are highlights from last month that were a hit among entrepreneurs like you. (more…)

Creating and customizing Web Forms within Infusionsoft is easy, but for those who are familiar with the older style of our Web Forms might not know how cool and easy it is to visually create forms to capture contact information from visitors to your website.

In the past, you had to create a Web Form, setup a follow-up sequence, setup your tags and then, when you felt ready, then customize the Web Form to reflect your brand and styles. Not anymore! (more…)

We’ve all been there at some point. You know, that fight or flight moment when you’re using a product and you suddenly get stuck and need to decide whether you’ll figure it out yourself or ‘give in’ and contact customer support. We understand this dilemma.

As entrepreneurs, we know that asking for help isn’t always easy. This is why we invest many resources into our customer service and want to make sure that you fully leverage them while using Infusionsoft. (more…)

By now, you might already know that Casey Graham and Michael Lukaszewski from The Rocket Company won the 2013 Ultimate Marketer title at InfusionCon. If not, you will on this free webinar on how they were able to grow from $0 to $2M with the help of an all-in-one sales and marketing software and a powerful Lifecycle Marketing strategy.

They worked closely with their Success Coach and figured out how to automate and scale their sales and marketing processes so they could grow from 832%. With impressive numbers and a killer story, you’re probably wondering about how you could experience some of their ideas into your business.

Wonder no more. Next week, we’re hosting an educational webinar with Casey and Michael to share the steps they took to grow their business. On the webinar, you’ll learn:

• How The Rocket Company grew revenue 832%
• Effective strategies for building your lead list
• How to deliver happiness to your customers
• Best practices to engage your customers for life and boost referrals

This webinar will be on Thursday, April 25, 2013 at 10AM PDT (1PM EDT). Register now to attend the presentation that won The Rocket Company the coveted title of the 2013 Ultimate Marketer of the Year. If you can’t make it, register to be notified of the replay when it is available after the live presentation.

We’d like to thank SixthDivision for their support of the Ultimate Marketer contest.

InfusionCon 2013 was arguably the best conference that we’ve ever put on! I asked our two Social Media VIPs who were on the front lines and covering the event live with you to share what they thought of InfusionCon.
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Over the next month, we will introduce a change for all users so it’s even easier to sign into Infusionsoft accounts. Infusionsoft ID is a long-term solution that you will use to sign into Infusionsoft accounts, CustomerHub and future products and services that we have in our family. To get comfortable with this transition, here’s a tutorial on how to setup and use your Infusionsoft ID. (more…)