Leads are the lifeblood of any online business. It’s crucial for both B2B and B2C marketers to develop an effective lead generation strategy to ensure that they’re feeding enough leads into their sales funnel.
Unfortunately, investing in multiple channels and spending a lot of money isn’t enough to guarantee optimal results. When it comes to generating leads, the average conversion rate is around 2.4%, and many campaigns convert at around 1.8%.
How can you solve this problem of dismal conversion rates without breaking the bank?
We highly recommend using automated lead generation software.
There are a lot of lead generation automation tools on the market, and this article is designed to help you understand your options. We’ll also take a look at proven lead generation software that can improve your marketing efforts right away.
Let’s start with a general overview of automated lead generation!
What is automated lead generation?
Automated lead generation is the process of automatically collecting leads from various marketing channels without manually sourcing them.
Instead of putting your sales team in charge of finding high-quality leads, you can automate processes that generate leads for you.
In 2023, good lead generation strategies can result in a steady stream of new leads. Once you’ve set up a few tools for lead generation automation, it’s easy to create new campaigns in just a few clicks.
Why do you need lead generation automation?
Although it takes some time and effort to get your lead generation automation tools up and running, it’s more than worth it in the end.
When you automate lead generation, you’ll see the following benefits:
- More leads: Automated tools are running constantly in the background, even when your office is closed. That means you’ll have leads flowing in constantly.
- Increased revenue: There’s a direct connection between the leads you collect and your revenue. Collecting more high-quality leads allows you to tap into your target audience, deliver personalized offers, and convert them into (best case scenario) loyal customers. All of which will help you to drive more sales and revenue.
- Cost effective: Lead generation is much more cost effective than both traditional and online advertising. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars on ads, but this money is wasted if your lead generation landing pages and forms aren’t optimized.
- Better targeting: A crucial part of your lead generation efforts is attracting the right visitors. A carefully planned and implemented lead generation program helps you target relevant customers who will be interested in your products and receptive to your messaging.
- Collect information: Optimized lead generation features such as popups, forms, and sticky bars can help you collect additional information to build out a proper customer profile. This information can then help your marketing team create personalized offers for every visitor.
- Brand awareness: Many lead generation efforts such as email outreach and social media ads can help get the word out about your brand. This enables you to establish visibility with customers that may have never heard of you. These customer interactions are how you start to nurture leads and build relationships with them.
How to automate your lead generation efforts?
Luckily, you have an astounding amount of options that can help you generate leads.
According to the software review website Capterra, there are over 700 lead generation software products.
Different products focus on different things: some of them are built specifically for lead nurturing, lead scoring, or lead segmentation, while others are best described as contact databases, pipeline management platforms, or prospecting tools.
There are also many CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation platforms that include lead generation features.
The type of lead generation software you need varies based on your industry, use case, budget, and marketing channel(s). It’s not uncommon to see businesses use multiple lead generation tools.
What's the best software to generate leads?
Now that you have a better idea of what’s available in terms of lead generation software, it’s time to look at your options for building a winning automated lead generation system.
Email signup-focused software
Email marketing continues to be one of the most profitable marketing channels. You need to continuously build your email list and target that list with the right messages.
Let’s look at two lead generation tools that help you boost your lead generation efforts through email marketing.
1. OptiMonk
OptiMonk is a conversion optimization platform that also helps you build your email lists using forms, popups, and custom messages. More than 30,000 websites use OptiMonk to collect email subscribers and phone numbers, display personalized offers, and boost revenues.
Key feature #1: Easy-to-use editor
Building beautiful lead capture forms has never been easier. OptiMonk allows you to easily drag and drop new elements to your lead capture popup, side message, sticky bar, or embedded form.
All the new elements you add are automatically optimized for mobile, but you can also hide elements on mobile or edit elements separately for mobile and desktop.
Some of the customization options in OptiMonk’s drag and drop builder include:
- Size, layout, and position
- Colors
- Images
- Form fields and copy
Key feature #2: Multi-step opt-in forms & custom form fields
Multi-step opt-in forms help to collect more information about your new leads. This means that you’ll end up with qualified leads that are easier to market to, rather than email addresses without any context.
You can grab your website visitors’ attention with a teaser. Then, you can show a multi-step popup that asks for contact details only in the second step. This helps you create more engaging opt-in forms.
You can also use custom form fields to collect any additional information you need besides first name and email address. You can gather info like date of birth, gender, address, and more.
If you’d like to get started with a multi-step form, check out one of these templates:
You can also gather valuable zero-party data about your customers’ needs and preferences.
Quiz funnels are an increasingly popular way of generating information about qualified leads that can be used to personalize various touch points along the sales pipeline:
Key feature #3: Intelligent targeting and triggering options
Using OptiMonk’s many targeting and triggering features, you can personalize your messages for each visitor segment based on their behavior. This will help you display the right message to the right visitor at just the right time.
The advanced targeting rules allow you to use all sorts of customer data, including country, URL, cart value, and more.
You can combine several targeting rules to create very specific customer segments, which means you can make sure the messages you’re displaying are relevant to each customer.
Other key features:
- Access to a huge template library: 300+ beautiful, mobile-optimized templates at no additional cost.
- Google, AdBlock & GDPR safe: OptiMonk campaigns are fully GDPR compliant and Google-friendly. Both you and your customers are safe and secure.
- Detailed analytics & insights: Get in-depth insights into how your campaigns are performing and why.
- 30+ email, CMS, and ecommerce integrations: Including popular solutions like MailChimp, Klaviyo, and HubSpot.
- A/B testing: Test alternative versions of your marketing campaigns to find out which brings in the most qualified leads.
- Smart tags: Create 1:1 personalized messages that make your visitors feel like your offers are talking directly to them.
OptiMonk has a freemium pricing model. Pricing for paid plans starts at $39/month. Plans vary based on page views and additional features.
2. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a lead generation and email marketing platform that allows you to send automated email campaigns to your subscribers and customers. ConvertKit also allows you to build simple landing pages and forms to collect email addresses.
ConvertKit integrates with a wide array of marketing tools and platforms ranging from payment gateways to course platforms to CRMs.
ConverKit has a freemium pricing model. Pricing for the paid plans starts at $15/month for 300 email subscribers. Plans vary based on the size of your email list, additional features, and support options.
All-in-one lead generation software
As you grow and scale your business, it becomes challenging to maintain multiple lead generation tools. Hence, most mid-market and enterprise companies invest in an all-in-one lead generation platform.
These platforms cover a plethora of tasks in addition to collecting email addresses. Some of these platforms help you handle just about everything, like lead generation, lead segmentation, lead scoring, sending marketing campaigns, content creation, customer relationships, and much more. Let’s look at three all-in-one lead generation platforms.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one CMS and marketing software that helps you grow your business with its suite of growth tools. HubSpot allows you to create websites, landing pages, email marketing campaigns, and social ads. The wide array of tools and features help generate more leads, sell more, and build stronger customer relationships. HubSpot is used by over 95,000+ customers worldwide.
HubSpot has a freemium pricing model. Pricing varies based on features and the number of marketing contacts in your database.
4. MailChimp
MailChimp is an all-in-one email marketing software in USA that also has lead generation automation features. You can collect emails on your website with their sign up form popups, and you can also build landing pages on MailChimp. Then, you can send automated emails to these leads using MailChimp’s email marketing tools.
MailChimp includes hundreds of pre-made templates that can be customized and personalized based on your campaign needs.
MailChimp has a freemium pricing model. Pricing plans vary based on the number of users in your database and the features you want to take advantage of.
5. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one lead generation software and customer experience platform. Over 100,000 customers use the platform in many different industries.
ActiveCampaign allows you to collect leads and also send out email campaigns. The marketing automation features allow you to personalize your campaigns based on triggers and customer segmentation. Finally, you can nurture and strengthen your customer relationships via chat, email, or social media.
ActiveCampaign pricing starts at $29/month.
Landing page-focused software
Lead generation automation often relies on landing pages to capture information from early funnel visitors. A typical customer journey moves from an ad click to a landing page, making this a great place to focus if you want to collect more leads.
Let’s look at three lead generation tools that help you build high-converting landing pages.
6. Unbounce
Unbounce is a lead generation software that helps you create and customize landing pages and convert website visitors into leads. Unbounce has a drag-and-drop landing page builder that allows you to quickly launch your pages without any technical knowledge. Over 15,000 companies use Unbounce.
Unbounce also allows you to build mobile-responsive, AMP-supported landing pages that meet Google’s Pagespeed standards.
Unbounce’s pricing starts at $99/month. Pricing varies based on the number of conversions your pages generate.
7. Instapage
Instapage is a lead generation solution that allows you to build custom landing pages for all your digital ad campaigns. You’ll get access to over 500 customizable landing page templates categorized by industry or use case. To date, over four million landing pages have been created using Instapage.
Instapage allows you to create personalized landing pages consistent with your brand guidelines. Moreover, the landing pages are mobile friendly and AMP optimized.
Instapage pricing starts at $299/month and includes a wide array of features, integrations and support options.
8. Leadpages
Leadpages is a lead generation software that helps small businesses create webpages and landing pages to collect leads. Their drag-and-drop page builder allows you to create professional, conversion-focused pages. Over 40,000 websites use Leadpages.
Leadpages includes hundreds of templates categorized by industry, style, and page type. Moreover, Leadpages integrates with major email marketing, CRM, and marketing automation platforms.
Leadpage’s pricing starts at $99/month. Pricing varies based on the number of websites you need to support, additional integrations, enhanced features.
More than 90 percent of businesses use social media to target, attract, and connect with potential customers.
Let’s look at 4 lead capture tools that help you capture leads from your organic and paid social media traffic.
9. Expandi
Expandi is one of the best automation tools for LinkedIn lead generation. This tool can easily automate almost every engagement and interaction you can do on LinkedIn to reach more people in less time.
The main premise of this tool is to automate campaigns where you send bulk messages to a large set of individuals. To maintain constant contact with these potential leads, you can easily set up auto-responses.
With this tool, you get a dedicated country-based IP address so that you can keep everything anonymous. Moreover, it delays actions, helping it to appear more like a human. This makes it one of the safest tools for LinkedIn automation. And because Expandi is cloud based, you don’t need to download and run anything on your computer.
Expandi charges $99/month per account. Considering the features and functionalities it offers, the price is totally worth it.
10. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
With its more than 722 million worldwide users, LinkedIn is a treasure trove of data about companies, contacts, events, and partnerships.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a lead generation tool that allows you to identify, segment, and target the right companies and contacts you want to prospect.
The Advanced Search feature allows you to apply detailed search attributes to find the right contacts to target. The InMail feature enables you to send messages directly to them via the LinkedIn platform.
Pricing starts at $79.99/month per user. Pricing varies based on enhanced features, deeper integrations, and reporting capabilities.
11. LinkedIn Prospecting tool from Wiza
While LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool to help you find prospects, it doesn’t always live up to expectations. Indeed, it gives you access to millions of LinkedIn users, but you don’t always get relevant information about them. For example, the profiles you get might contain an outdated email or phone number, or a person may no longer be a part of the company listed.
You can try using Wiza as an alternative. It scrapes your LinkedIn prospect search and provides you with the most up-to-date information.
Wiza’s LinkedIn Prospecting tool does prospecting at scale, putting together lists of more than 2.5K contacts. You get access to over 500 million emails, which you can export as a single document in one click and use for cold outreach.
You can give Wiza a try with a Micro plan that costs $30/month.
12. Facebook Lead Ads
Facebook Lead Ads allow you to collect emails and unique customer information plus deliver custom offers through the Facebook Ads platform. You’ll use the same Facebook for Business platform to create your lead ads.
Small businesses have used Facebook Lead Ads to collect email signups, connect with prospective customers, drive event signups, provide price quotes, and book demos.
For pricing information on Facebook Lead Ads, log in to your Facebook for Business portal to learn more.
13. Jotform Sign
Jotform Sign is a tool you can use to automate your workflow. Its most important feature allows you to create secure online documents with e-sign capabilities. By embedding your documents directly on your website, your leads will come to you.
The advanced designer and 600+ ready-made templates allow you to start building documents immediately, and you can import your collected data to a spreadsheet in Jotform Tables.
You can also convert that data into reports to gain insight into your leads and your business. Add signers to an approval flow and get notified whenever someone signs your document.
Jotform Sign also gives you the necessary tools when it comes to legal work. Never worry about whether a document might be seen by prying eyes thanks to their CCPA, GDPR, and PCI compliances, along with HIPAA compliance for sensitive medical data.
Wrapping up
As you can see, marketing automation is a crucial part of running a healthy online business today. Without the right tools, you’ll struggle to capture high-quality leads and bring new customers into your sales funnel.
There are a lot of different ways to go about capturing leads, but you shouldn’t necessarily start trying all of them at once. Instead, think about which marketing channels your target audience tends to use, and then try out a tool that fits your needs.
If you want to build your email marketing list, there’s no better option than OptiMonk. The software combines ease of use with powerful functionality, allowing you to create high-converting lead generation campaigns in a matter of minutes. Plus, the ability to personalize your messaging for individual customers is valuable both while generating leads and afterward.
And since it’s free to use, there’s no reason not to give it a try!
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