Every business wants to get more email marketing leads right? We all need more exposure to potential and more customers to grow our businesses. One idea to get more leads in the door is to give something away for free. Businesses that are marketing to other businesses might do this in the form of a white paper or a free ‘how-to’ guide and businesses that advertise to consumers might offer free samples or free coupons for their products.

So the question is, do you want your “offer” to be in front of more eyeballs OR do you want to put up a “form” to collect leads and work them?

Reasons Why You Should Include a Sign Up Form

• You want to qualify leads – If the purpose of you giving away your coupon or your how-to guide is to solely get leads, then you should get something from your lead for giving them something of value. For instance, at VerticalResponse in some cases we offer free marketing guides; the purpose is for them to get as widespread as possible. For this reason we don’t require people to fill out forms.
• You want to weed people out – Some businesses might want to “weed out” Looky Lous. You want to give value to someone who is willing to give you proper information so you can market to them in the future.

Reasons Why You Should NOT Include a Sign Up Form

• Fraud – You might get people inputting fake information just to get what you’re giving.  The only way around this is to send the actual coupon in an email. If that’s the case, your prospects will have to input the proper email address in order to get what you’re offering for free.
• Can you handle the truth? –  It could get “social” with Twitter and Facebook which can lead to a lot of people visiting your website. You might end up getting a ton of people seeing your offer that might slow down your site so make sure you can handle the traffic.

How to Properly Collect Info From Your Visitors

1.    Use a Salesforce web-to-lead forms if you’re a Salesforce customer. This way all leads will go into your Salesforce account for you to be able to market to. You can also use this Salesforce data with VerticalResponse for AppExchange.

2.    Use VR forms – You can get as many VerticalResponse opt-in forms as you want, they’re free to anyone and you can include a link in the double opt in form that directs them to your free offer page or your PDF of your guide or your coupon.

So make sure you know what you want out of your free offer and market it accordingly!

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