Capturing prospects details is one of the most important aspects of internet Marketing, without the ability to build a large list of interested parties your whole internet marketing strategy comes to nothing.

Simple Data Capture Box

This one captures just the First name, Last Name and email address, but you can put as many fields as you like.

It’s simply a numbers game, just the same as everything in marketing and sales, the more you can feed in the funnel at the top, the more sales you’ll get, it’s as simple as that. When I started in telesales, many years ago, my line manager said to me “if you make 100 cold calls and follow the script, I will guarantee you’ll get 7 sales. Do that every day for a week and you’ll hit your target”.

This concept has always stayed with me whenever I embark on any sales or marketing campaign, and it should stay with you as well.

The reason why you should keep this in mind, is simply because begin to adopt the right attitude to your internet marketing. If you try to please everyone then you get nowhere. You can’t sell to every person who views your site; however, you can, and will, sell to some of them.

“Some will, Some won’t, So what? NEXT”

So the first thing to do is to start to get some copy together which would appeal to the exact profile of the type of person you would want to attract.

Always have in mind that all you want to do is for them to enter their name and email address, you are not selling a product, just collecting information. So write your text or copy as it is also called, with that one thing in mind.

Why should they enter their details?
What’s in for them, what are you giving them for the information?

This is the time to think about what you can offer, what would induce you prospect to part with their details. Think about the times when you have entered your name, email address, maybe a phone number. Why did YOU do it? Was it the promise of something which you perceived as valuable?

The sort of inducements could be:
Free monthly newsletter
Free membership if you commit before a certain date.
Free audio or e-book downloads.
Entry into a competition.

Whatever the hook, for this to work it has to be perceived as good value, even better if it was perceived as MASSIVE VALUE!!

This is why one of the main inducements used to entice prospects to enter their details into data capture forms is the humble e-book.

The following example of an Internet Marketing Campaign can be carried out even if you already have a web site, and to be honest, it does not matter whether your website is optimised or written as a sales tool or not. In other words, it is designed to work without the web site in mind.

The Inducement
The first step of the process is to construct your inducement. An e-book, downloadable mp3, free software, anything which has perceived value. This, in itself could be a lot of work to get right, but will be worth it as hopefully, 100’s if not 1000’s of people will be downloading it and if done correctly will write about it in forums and sections (If it’s an e-book) may even be quoted by others. It’s the time to use every ounce of experience and skill in your chosen field.

Landing Page
With the inducement in place you can now set your sites on the delivery. There are 2 main skill sets in play here
1 Web design – The Landing page has to use every piece of search engine optimisation skill here, most important being keyword choice

2 Marketing – The copy or text and layout has to be spot on. Take a look at the section on landing pages on this site for more information.

Market the Landing Page
a) edit a few sections for submission to e-article sites and include your landing page URL at the bottom. You’ll notice I said direct them to your landing page as opposed to your website.
b) Start getting involved in Industry Forums and expertly answer queries and sign it off with your landing page URL.
c) In fact get into anything which will get in front of people, from facebook right through to including the landing page URL on any direct mail pieces and other traditional marketing

So, once you have optimised your landing page as best you can, and the fact that you have been directing traffic to it through printed and traditional marketing, you should be getting a decent amount of traffic to your site. A proportion of these visitors will be either entering their data or purchasing through the landing page.

If they are purchasing, then job done! You should now be looking to nurture these new customers with great service and contacting them on additional products and services.

They may have entered their details to get a copy of an ebook, once they hit the submit button they can be taken to another web page with a download here button which will enable them to download the ebook from your site.

however, they have just entered their details, then this shows they are interested but not as yet converted to a buying customer. So, how can we use the technology of Internet marketing to help make them customers?

Follow up campaign
Using simple technology included in the Internet Marketeers toolbox, we would now be looking at employing a specific tool called an autoresponder.

Once the landing page visitor has entered their details into your data capture form and hit the submit button, you can enable the software at the back end to do 3 initial tasks.

1 Send an email directly to the prospect, using the email address they have provided, which is personalised to them because the software can utilise the information on the form, such as First Name, Last name etc.
This email will be a welcome email from you or your company; it may well have a further call to action.

2 It will also send an email to you, or a designated email address to inform you that someone has filled in the form. Part of your follow up campaign could be to schedule a telephone call to the prospect the next day to personally say thanks and to start a sales dialogue.

3 The third task the software does is to place this information into a database. This is the list building part of the process. Have this set up for long enough and you will collect 100’s if not 1000’s of names, email address and telephone numbers.

Every single one of these can be followed up time and time again.

I hope you can see how using Internet Marketing can increase your marketing reach and more importantly increase sales.