Imagine you have a website with a sign-up page. Someone (or something) signs up on your site and expresses interest in your product.
What next?
In old way of doing things, you would look at the information, perhaps drop them an email and, if they were interested, follow up from there.
There are so many problems with that, not least the problem with ‘spambots’ automatically signing up to anything they can find. More junk to deal with.
So, the next line in your armoury is to put on a reCAPTCHA onto your form. You know, one of those unreadable things that proves you are a human being. Problem is, some of the spambots CAN read those things and some human beings cannot. I know that after I have mis-read one of those a few times I give up trying.
There must be a better way!
Fortunately there is. There are ‘auto-responders’. What one of these does is when someone signs up it sends a welcome message and asks them to confirm that they intended to sign up. This has two benefits:
- It stops spambots dead
- It stops people signing up (fraudulently or for a joke) for other people.
If the person does not respond then they do not end up on your list. No reCAPTCHA, and a significant reduction in fake leads. Better still, you do not end up bothering people who are not interested in your product.
Additional benefit: if you are offering advice/information you can set up a sequence of emails that follow up on the lead… AND you can automatically import the lead information into your Salesforce leads.
Our preferred autoresponder is aWeber. (Warning: this is an affiliate link.) There are others, but aWeber has a rock-solid reputation and an extremely high ‘deliverability’ rate. In other words, their emails are rarely blocked as spam (because they are sending information from companies that leads have actually signed up to and those leads really want the information). Pricing starts at just $19 per month.
We have been setting up some other clever things with this service… but more of that next time.
