Towards the end of 2014, I decided to experiment with a new method of securing subscribers to my websites main mailing list. I went back and forth thinking about the various ways I had achieved growth over 2014, however my plan would be to step this up to a whole different level; here’s a step by step approach to how I added 500 HOT leads from my target market in one week to my list using nothing more than a simple survey
1. The first step was sign up and create an account at www.typeform.com. Typeform is an amazing way to create beautiful surveys, however you could very well achieve the same thing with Survey Monkey or Google Forms
2. I then decided on a topic for the survey that would appeal to my target audience; In this case I choose to call mine “The World Tech & PE Survey” and began creating a series of questions that could only be completed by someone who actually was from my target audience. I ensure that one of the first questions was ’email’ address. With a description stating that results would be sent to this email following the survey close. This email would also be used to contact the winner.
3. After creating the survey, my next step was to decide on a prize that would entice people to click and complete the survey. Given that the responses required knowledge that only my target audience had, it ensured that people were not simply filling out the survey in the hopes of winning a prize. In my case I picked an iPad Mini a very hot item amongst my target audience.
4. I then crafted a blog post on my main site encouraging people to participate in the World Technology & PE Survey, with strong mention of the prize and the limited chance to enter via successful completion of the survey.
5. The next step was to create a Facebook advertisement using www.canva.com that stated “Win an iPad for your PE Program “. With a link to the survey as the entry requirement. The facebook advertisement was priced at $5 per day for 5 days, with a target audience of people in Facebook whom have Physical Education as an interest.
6. Prior to the advertisement going LIVE I visited the website www.zapier.com and created an automation between Typeform and My Infusionsoft Mailing List. While this is non essential step it did automate adding the email of a person who completed the survey, while also requiring them to confirm that they want to receive the results and be added to the mailing list.
Zapier also makes it possible to complete the exact same level of automation between any of the survey tools mentioned above and the most popular mailing list services. The alternative would be to simply manually add users who complete the survey into the mailing list provider you have, however the automation makes this incredibly slick.
7. Following the launch of the advertisement and some social media posts the responses began to flood in at around 100 per day. Automagically these people were being added to my mailing list. The survey closed 5 days after its opening, and within this time I didn’t send any emails to the people who had opted in.
8. On the completion of the survey, I simply sent all users who had opted in an email that including the results. In this case the results were valuable to not only myself, but enabled the users to gauge an understanding of their own skills in comparison with others. This data alone was valuable to the users and the analysis of this led to the creation of content for my website. This was also linked to in the email I sent out.
9. The final step was to choose a winner for the prize and email them to let them know. In this email I alerted to the fact that I would be sending subscribers a series of high value content over the next few weeks. At this stage I encouraged anyone who didn’t want to receive the best content via email to ‘unsubscribe’. This resulted in 3 unsubscribes.
10. Depending on your email service provider you could choose to use the results to segment those who responded into different lists. I achieved this by using device type of the teacher to add people to either an ‘iOS’ or ‘Android’ list. This ultimately meant that I could send more targeted emails to the users.
So there you have it, a very simple way to bring in subscribers to your email list. The best part about this process is that they’re highly engaged and highly qualified leads who become great potential follow ups to receive you best content.
Let me know if you’ve used a survey as a lead generation tool before. How did you do it? How effective was it?