The digital era is thriving and has completely changed the way we do business. New tools, strategies, and ways are being introduced every day to generate business and boost revenue. The whole purpose of introducing these strategies is lead generation and then converting them to sales.

A successful marketing strategy is one that brings more leads to the table. Many marketers use major lead generation software that helps them boost their sales. The choice of lead generation software entirely depends upon the marketing strategy one has in place.

This article discusses how you can use lead generation software according to your requirements but first, let’s take a look at what lead generation is and how you can utilize it.

Lead Generation

In marketing terms, a “lead” is a prospect interested in knowing about your product or service and buying it. “Lead generation” is a whole process that attracts such prospects through compact strategies. Leads are then nurtured and convinced about all the benefits of the product or service in the hope of turning them into paying customers.

Digital marketing suggests different ways to get quality leads. These steps are generally taken to ensure the whole process from generating leads to turning them into customers:

• Acquiring leads by building meaningful content directed towards a certain audience
• Nurturing the leads once they are part of your system or email list
• Profiling each lead so you can know how qualified they are to make a purchase
• Passing the lead to sales once they are ready to buy

Lead Generation Software

Generating leads is a frustrating task if done manually. According to recent stats, 65% of businesses find this their biggest marketing challenge. To ease the process for the marketers, lead generation software and automated lead generation platforms are employed. These platforms are built to reduce hassle on your part. Some of these software are doing a lot more than just generating leads. Lead acquisition and other email marketing tasks are also a part of these software. There are different abilities that these software provide today. They include features like:

Lead collection

Lead collection or lead capturing is the major feature of every lead generation software. It makes use of opt-in forms, pop-ups, or landing pages to gather information about the user. It helps in making a contact list of people interested in the product or service.

Remember, the prospect will only give you contact details if he sees any potential in your content. Most businesses use Content Upgrade in exchange for their email address. Content Upgrade is the additional content in PDF, journals, videos, and ebooks, e.t.c; that is valuable for the prospect. Lead capturing tools that are most common in the lead generation software can be:

Popup form building

Pop-up forms are on-site messages that “pop up” on the web pages and are used to increase engagement and, ultimately, more customers. They are designed to encourage a particular action, such as subscribing to a newsletter or completing a purchase. The user sees them when he visits that website and provides their data with their’s permission.

Pop-up builders are embedded in lead generation software and allow non-technical users to build and deploy pop-up forms messages on their website. A good pop up builder usually has these features:

• Allow the creation of different types of pop-ups
• Allow customization of pop-up messages’ design and content
• Provide predesigned templates
• Can create targeted or triggered pop-ups
• Allow customization of pop-up messages’ design and content
• Allow integration with existing CRM software, email marketing software, web content management systems, or e-commerce platforms

Good lead generation software provides the opportunity of using different options such as scheduling pop-ups, advanced display rules, and A/B testing.

Landing Page Design and Hosting

Landing pages are one way of capturing leads. They are more focused on one piece of information and are an outstanding way of keeping the prospects engaged mid-funnel.

Many lead generation software provide the feature of easily building landing pages and capturing leads from them. Some of these software provide the ability to create landing pages with ready-made templates. A good landing page builder by a lead generation software has these features:

• Easy-to-use and responsive builder
• Ready-made templates
• Easy integration with ESPs
• A/B testing
• Analytics for landing page

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is often misunderstood as lead generation software which is not true. It is a feature of lead generation software that may or may not be a part of every lead generation software. Industry-leading software provide this feature to ease the marketing process for non-technical marketers and align sales and marketing processes.

The marketing tasks that are usually managed manually have the potential of showing an inherent risk. They are time consuming, costly, and have increased chance of human error. Marketing automation through lead generation software tools reduces this risk of error or missing details and automates your whole strategy. It helps in providing a more personalized experience for the customers.

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are the most commonly used tool in email marketing. They allow automated responses of the emails from prospects and can send sequences of emails automatically too.

Many lead generation software are using autoresponders to welcome prospects and to entertain queries. The marketing world has become quite competitive, and autoresponders give a competitive edge to marketers. Generally, autoresponder tool of lead generation software includes:

• Advanced timing settings
• Cycle management tools
• Day-of-week selection
• Quick edits
• Drag-and-drop editor
• Sequence messages

Modern autoresponders allow segmenting the users and sending them automated emails separately. You can welcome, upsell, and target individuals by predefined categories.

Broadcasts

Broadcast messages play a vital role in reaching your goal. You can promote new offers and keep a relationship with your subscribers by giving them valuable information they’re interested in without manually contacting each one of them. These emails are written once and are sent to a large number of contacts in one go. They are instrumental in getting the announcements out in seconds.

Due to their vast and easy use, most lead generation software make use of this tool. The most common broadcast emails created and sent with these lead generation software are

• Newsletters
• Important Updates
• Digests
• Sales and promotions
• Seasonal Messages
• Other Date- and Time-Specific Mailings

These broadcast messages are action-oriented, measurable, and device-independent. Email Broadcast Marketing can also be personalized using effective lead generation tools for the best effect.

Drip Campaigns

Drip campaigns make use of autoresponders and broadcast emails to send out automated messages. These campaigns are sent out based on specific actions. For example, a contact form can send out autoresponder emails to the user to inform him of the next steps, or a certain date can trigger broadcast messages that are to be sent out.

Efficient lead generation software runs drip campaigns flawlessly. These software help build a brand image by building a familiarity with the brand automatically. Lead generation software that have the ability to run drip campaigns allow sending:

• Welcome emails
• Onboarding email campaigns
• Educational and awareness drip campaigns
• Transactional email campaigns
• Event-based automated Drip marketing campaigns
• Promotional Drips
• Cart Abandonment & Re-engagement Drip Campaigns
• Automated Drip Marketing for Sales
• Unsubscribe Drip Campaigns

Email templates

Emails are designed and strategized before they are sent out to the users. Email templates are an easy way of creating those emails. Templates have the design and the content for the emails.

Lead generation software include this feature to make running email campaigns easier. According to stats, 63% of marketers spend around 2 hours designing and creating emails. Lead generation software save this time every time a new campaign is to be run. Dynamic software offer consistency with email templates and help in delivering personalized experiences. Effective lead generation tools offer templates that are

• easy to customize
• have visual elements
• allow image and video insertion
• allow writing copy over banners
• drag and drop building

Cart Abandonment solutions

According to reports, $18 Billion is lost to cart abandonment annually in the e-commerce industry. Cart abandonment solutions are used to reduce this loss to the minimum.

Lead generation software play an important role in reducing these losses with embedded cart abandonment tools. These software run a campaign when a prospect adds items to the cart and leaves without checking out. Marketers can send reminder emails to all such users in one go using this tool. The emails help prospects in making the decision of buying.

Reporting and Analytics

Analytics play a major role in increasing traffic, generating leads, and improving engagement. Measuring the performance of your lead generation software and marketing strategies helps determine the output and improve future strategies.

Most lead generation software provide analytics and reporting of the campaigns they are running. Profound insights into customer preferences and trends are the basic feature of these tools. Some software in the market are also providing the feature of predictive analytics, which helps in making decisions in the future.

Data scientists are helping many companies do the same using their analysis, but good lead generation software have this feature embedded.

Which Lead Generation Software to Use?

You have gotten the idea of what you can achieve using lead generation software. Are you still confused which software will be perfect for you? Before you choose one, write down answers to these questions:

1. Why do you need the software?
2. What is your priority?
3. What is your budget?
4. What is your business industry?

Once you have answered these questions, take a look at the list below of all the software that we think will be suitable for you segmented on the basis of their highlighted features.

SleekNote- Responsive Pop-up builder

Sleeknote is a great lead generation software with one of the best pop-up builders around. The pop-ups are responsive and easy to customize. The tool makes it really easy to personalize the pop-ups and some great targeting abilities that let you determine where and when your popup or slide-in appears.

Tools

• Lead Collection
• Analytics
• Popup builder
• Form builder

Price

£339/month

Leads API – Tool for Finding Emails and Leads

The Leads API is a powerful tool for finding leads and their contact information. It can be used to find potential customers and keep track of your current customers. The Leads API can search for emails by typing in the company domain. It can get more information about a lead, such as their title, company size, or industry.

Tools

• Lead Collection
• Lead Enrichment
• Company emails and social profiles
• Advanced search by position, industry, company
• Search from 400+ million business contacts using our Leads Finder

Pricing: 

$29/mo

 

SumoMe- Easy-to-use List Builder

SumoMe is a lead generation software that offers various tools. Its list-building tool converts one-time visitors into lifelong readers and customers. With elegant ready-made pop-up templates, List Builder is declared to be the easiest-to-use email capture tool on the internet. It provides forms and pop-ups that can be customized to match your brand.

Tools

• Lead Collection
• Popup builder
• Form builder
• Analytics
• Contact forms

Price

$39/month

Bloom by Elegant themes-Opt-in form generator

Bloom is a plug-in by Elegant Themes. It allows the creation of opt-in forms as pop-ups, fly-ins, inline forms, below content forms, widget area forms, and require Opt-In To unlock content forms. The plug-in comes with a range of templates that you can choose from and then can customize its colors, text, and fonts. The forms have a targeting ability and advanced options that trigger the forms at a certain action or a certain time.

Tools

• Opt-in form builder
• Lead Collection
• Analytics

Price

$ 249 for lifetime access

Thrive Leads-leading analytics software

Customers of this lead generation software have witnessed a boost of up to 238% ever since they switched to this. The tool provides actionable reporting & insights along with designing opt-in forms. This tool helps in finding out exactly which opt-in forms are performing best, which pages and posts your leads are coming from, and much more. The analytics work like a charm.

Tools

• Lead Collection
• Targeted opt-in form builder
• Analytics

Price

$19/month

LeadPages- Landing page builder

LeadPages is a lead generation software with hundreds of landing page templates. Lead collection from these landing pages is made easier by making the building easier. The designs of these templates help in instantly creating compelling pages and choosing your target audience. It helps in making responsive pages using the drag-and-drop builder. The templates are customizable and give options for adding your content in banners, pictures, and on the page.

Tools

• Lead Collection
• Landing Pages
• Ready-made easy to customize templates
• Analytics
• Popup builder

Price:

$239/month

Mailmunch- The all-in-one software

Mailmunch is considered the jacks of all trades. From lead collecting to email marketing, it can do everything. Mailmunch helps in collecting emails and boosting revenue using email marketing tools. Automated emails, broadcasts, auto-responses, drip campaigns, and much more is available with this software. We call Mailmunch a complete solution for running an effective email campaign. The software is cost-effective and has a lot to offer. 

Tools

• Lead collection
• Landing page creation & capture
• Popup form building
• Complete marketing automation
• Reporting and Analytics
• Autoresponders
• Broadcasts
• Drip Campaigns
• Email templates
• Cart Abandonment solutions
• Integrations with leading eCommerce solutions like Shopify to increase sales

Price

Basic functionalities$13.99/month( +$13.99/month for email marketing)

OptinMonster 

OptinMonster provides the necessary tools to convert visitors into customers. It optimizes the conversion, grows your email list, gets more leads, and increases sales with an efficient toolkit. It does not provide email marketing tools but has cart abandonment features that are triggered onsite. The software provides pre-built templates designed for maximum conversions. The marketer also has the option of starting from scratch with a blank canvas.

Tools

• Popup form building
• Landing page builder
• Cart abandonment solution
• Reporting and Analytics
• Email templates
• Cart Abandonment solutions

Price

$29/month

Summing it all up

These are some of the best lead generation software in the market today that can help you boost revenue. You can choose your desired tool that is comprehensive so you don’t have to look for more. We suggest going for a tool that gives solutions to all your needs at an affordable price. You can easily compare all the tools using the table above and choose for yourself.

Author Bio

Eman-e-Zahra is a Content Strategist and Marketer at Mailmunch. She’s an IT graduate and has helped many businesses especially software development companies with their content marketing. Eman has managed to achieve a global clientele with her work by lending them a hand in the marketing strategy department