The chances are, in your journey to becoming an Entrepreneur, you have come across the word “lead” a number of times. If you still ask yourself “what is a lead?”, then this article will help you to understand everything you need to know.

While researching how to start your business, you will have found out that it is very important to know your buyer’s persona. This is a fictional representation of who needs your products or services, ie. your target audience.

Your marketing strategy should be designed in order to get the attention of your ‘Buyer Persona’, to get them informed about your business and how your products or services can help them.

This should include forming a relationship with with your potential buyer or client, nurturing that relationship and eventually having them make a purchase. That is not the end. Ideally, you want to turn your buyers into loyal customers and brand advocates.

What is a Lead?

While your buyer persona is fictional, a lead is a real person … a potential customer. A lead is a person or an organisation interested in your products or services.

Lead vs Email list

As explained earlier, a lead is a prospective client or customer. They have a tendency to buy from you, because of how carefully you had targeted them.

An email list is a list of all the leads that you generate.

How many leads should you generate?

As a business owner, you want to generate as many leads as possible, because you want to sell as much / many as possible of your products or services. How many leads you need is dependent on the nature of your business.

For example, if you do one-on-one coaching, you only need as many clients as you can accept within a specific period of time. For someone who has a digital product, they need as many leads as they can get.

Types of Lead

Depending on what stage of the sales funnel you acquire them, a lead is categorized into cold, warm or hot.

A cold lead is a lead generated at the top of the sales funnel. They are just beginning their journey with your business. These leads are not ready to make any purchases yet.

In exchange for their contact information, you should offer helpful information or free resources that solve a problem which they may hitherto have had, or add extra value to them. It is at this stage that trust is built.

Warm leads are those that are interested in how you solve certain problems they might have identified for themselves. They have developed an interest in your business and have a level of trust in your status as a problem solver.

These leads are generated in the middle of the sales funnel.

Hot leads are those who are ready to make a purchase of your products or services. They are at the bottom of the sales funnel. They trust that your products or services will deliver the desired results and solve their problems.

Why do you need an Email list?

Someone can stumble across your website once, get the information they need and leave. The probability of these visitors returning is usually very slim. This factor also drastically reduces your chance of making any form of sale.

In order to ensure that these visitors come back, you need to get their email address and contact them, when you have quality content that they might also like to check out or be made aware of.

Let’s assume that everyone on your email list had willingly given you their email addresses, in exchange for a type of value or an offer. This means that, if you have another offer (a paid one this time), these people are more likely to also purchase them from you.

The bottom line is that your email list is your market place.

Your email list are your prospective customers, whom you had gathered, because they showed interest in what you offer.

What better place is there to make sales?

How do you generate leads?

There is no shortcut to building your email list or generating leads. You read that right.

You might ask, “but what about the email list that you could buy from somewhere?”

The truth is that that isn’t going to make you any money.

How can we be so sure?

If you received a random email asking you to purchase an umbrella on a random day, for example, would you even bother?

The likely answer is no … at least, not unless you had already had it in mind to buy an umbrella. But what are the odds? You don’t know this seller, you aren’t even looking to buy an umbrella.

Click here to take the 5 Day Lead Challenge by Russell Brunson.
In this challenge, he takes you through a step by step process
on how to build a quality email list from scratch.

Well, that is how the majority of people on the purchased email list feel. It would, therefore, not take long before you might be reported for sending spam and eventually nobody would receive your mail anymore.

So how do you build a legitimate, successful email list?

Know your target audience

You already have a business idea, and you know those whom you want to serve.

Look deeper.

Who are these people?

What would they want to know about?

What would they consider valuable?

What is their pain point?

Knowing your target audience properly would give you an insight into what they want, when they want it and how they want it.

Automatically, your audience would find you if you address them the right way on the right platform.

Engage them with valuable content

Create quality content that is helpful to your audience. Tell them what they need to know, help them make informed decisions. You will be invariably building trust and your reputation by doing so.

Create a lead magnet

Offer your audience something they cannot resist, in exchange for their contact information – such as an email address.

The above steps will help you to generate leads, with which to build your email list over time.

However, if you would not mind investing some cash into lead generation, you could run targeted ads.

These ads would allow you to input the demographic information of your target audience and your offer would be placed right in front of them. If it is irresistible enough, they will give you their email address in exchange for that offer.

It is as simple as that.

Register for the free 5-day Lead Challenge here
and learn how to generate high quality leads for your business.

Nurture your relationship with the list

While building an email list is relatively easy, you want to ensure that you nurture your leads by providing them with useful content and sending them emails routinely.

You do not want to bug them by sending emails every day and you do not want to send once in 6 months either. You have to find a balance.

The majority of entrepreneurs send important, useful emails weekly. They might send emails more frequently whenever they have a product or service for sale.

Nurturing your list helps you to convert lead into buyers.

As you form a relationship with your leads, you take them along the buyer’s journey – from simply being aware of your brand, to where they become advocates.

Register for the free 5-Day Lead Challenge here
and learn how to generate high quality leads for your business.