10 Foolproof Ways to Generate Leads Fast

Struggling to generate enough leads?

Leads are crucial for your business to succeed, but there’s no single trick to boom your business with leads. If you want to reduce your customer acquisition cost and looking for certain ways to generate leads, then you are at the right place.

Here, you’ll learn 10 foolproof ways to generate leads that’ll help you turn your website into a lead generation machine. Before you dive into lead generation ways, first understand some basics.

What is a lead?

A lead is your potential customer who fits into your ideal buyer persona and shows interest in your offerings by taking any action.

Here’s an example, let’s say a person is looking for a WordPress plugin that helps get more email subscribers and landed to OptinMonster and posted an enquiry using the share a question button. That person can be a lead to OptinMonster.

What is lead generation?

Irrespective of the size, location or age of your business, you need a buyer to sell your product. Converting a stranger into a buyer takes some effort and that strategy and process to generate leads is lead generation.

For example, let’s say you are a blogger, and you want people to subscribe to your blog. You use OptinMonster’s scroll trigger feature to show the scroll trigger slide-in box when your website visitors scroll the defined percentage of the page to prompt them to subscribe to your blog.

It is a great way to increase your subscriber list.

In simple terms, lead generation is the process of bringing prospects to your business and nurturing their interest in order to convert them to customers.

You always require a hook to attract a visitor to convert them into a lead, and here I’m sharing various ways to create those hooks to help you generate leads.

Why do you need to generate leads?

As a business owner, what you want is to sell your product. And to sell your product, you want people who like your product.

Why? Because it usually takes a long time to convert a lead into a customer. Most businesses lack sales due to insufficient leads. Using tested and planned lead generation strategies helps businesses collect qualified leads. When people come to you organically after visiting your website or reading a blog, it means they are already convinced and interested in your offering. Then you only need to assist them in buying your offer.

In a straight way, to keep up the sales, it’s important to generate new leads regularly.

For example, suppose you have a fashion eCommerce store, and nobody knows that. Would you make any sales?

Obviously not.

You need to try different ways to convince people to make purchases from your store.

Now, since you understand the importance of lead generation, you may be wondering to know how to generate leads.

10 Foolproof Ways to Generate Leads

Most of the following ways include generating leads by collecting visitors’ emails.

Ready to try different ways to generate leads? Let’s dive into the 10 foolproof lead generation ways to increase your sales.

1. Build Sidebar Forms

Let’s start with widely used sidebar forms.

Sidebar forms are one of the most common ways to grow your email list. Instead of wasting the sidebar space of your website, you can use them to generate leads.

Sidebar forms allow you to prompt visitors from anywhere on your site to opt-in to your offering. You can add sidebar forms to any page of your website.

Here’s an example of a sidebar form on the RafflePress blog page.

When a visitor comes to read a RafflePress blog and finds the blog helpful, this easily accessible sidebar form will prompt the visitor to sign-up for the newsletter, and the likelihood of subscribing to this newsletter is very high.

You can use various tools to create effective sidebar tools. There are tools that also allow you to create custom forms.

2. Create a Floating Header and Footer Bars

Floating bars are one of the attention-grabbing techniques.

It’s sticky and gets attached to the top or bottom of your website page, and is highly noticeable. It scrolls along with the screen without disturbing the visitors.

You can use floating bars to show time-sensitive offers, highlight sales, promote exclusive offers, ask for newsletter subscriptions or redirect to social handles.

3. Try Exit-Intent Popups

Mostly your website visitors leave after reading your content. Here exit-intent popups help.

Exit-Intent popups help you get back the abandoning website visitors. It allows you to make one last effort to recover from leaving visitors.

How Exit-Intent technology works?

It detects users’ mouse behavior and allows you to display popups with a targeted message when they are close to leaving.

You can use exit-intent technology to increase subscribers, reduce cart abandonment or grow sales and revenue.

Here’s an example of exit-intent popups from WPBeginner. WPBeginner uses this toolkit to retrieve leaving visitors. There’s a high likelihood that the visitor will get back to the website to download this free toolkit.

It’s a win-win situation for both.

With exit-intent popups, you can display the user with targeted campaigns such as:

• Download a free toolkit
• Sign up for a free trial
• Sign up for your workshop
• Get a free ebook
• Schedule a free call
• Get a 50% off coupon
• Claim your reward

There are tons of exit-intent popup ideas you can use to generate leads fast.

4. Embed Inline Forms

Inline forms are the most effective way to turn your engaged users into subscribers. It is quite helpful, especially for blogging sites or websites with a large content base.

They are generally embedded within the content your website visitors are reading, allowing you to easily convert those engaged readers into leads and clients.

You can use inline forms within the content to prompt readers for content upgrades or before and after optin forms placing before or after the content on a page across the website. You can also use inline popups to show lead magnets to your engaged readers, which can help you generate more leads by encouraging them to take action.

5. Use the 2-Step Optin Process

Wouldn’t it be nice if people will be more willing to subscribe to your email list?

There’s a principle in psychology called the Zeigarnik effect. This 2-step optin technology is based on the same principle. According to the principle, people who initiate an action are more likely to finish that.

Leveraging this principle, you can make your visitors take any action. You only need to make their first step easy. And you can turn any image or link into a 2-step optin campaign.

Once the visitors click the image or link, they’ve already started an action, and according to the Zeigarnik effect, they are more likely to finish this action by filling out your subscribe form.

Once they click the link, an optin form pops up. And since they committed an action, they finished it. This 2-step optin converted nicely.

6. Integrate Social Media Links

In today’s time, people are highly active on social media. According to statista.com, as of 2022, the global daily average social media usage is 147 minutes per day. It is true that people spend more time on social media than on any single website.

And getting your target audience on social media and engaging them is another great technique of lead generation.

You can create campaigns to encourage your website visitors to follow you on social media.

Here’s an example of how one of your campaigns might look:

There are many ways to integrate your social media links, such as:

• with lead magnets
• with your giveaway campaigns
• using 2-step optin
• in your exit-intent popups
• in your floating bars

You can integrate your campaigns with popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.

Your website users already like your content, and just a single redirection can turn them into your followers.

Once you get them on your social platform, they become easily accessible, and you can use them as a great tool for further social media marketing campaigns, such as social media giveaways and contests.

7. Practice Targeted Campaigns

One of the reasons for the low conversion rate is using generic, non-targeted offers. Your time and efforts might go in vain if you don’t understand your visitor’s intent.

What can you do to avoid this?

Practice targeted campaigns instead of generic offers. Show your users personalized messages and relevant offers at the right time and place.

Using targeting campaigns can skyrocket your sales in no time.

But how?

There are multiple different ways to run targeted campaigns by analyzing users’ behavior, location, traffic sources and more.

Here are some of the ways you can run targeted campaigns:

• Catering to Visitors’ needs: You can display relevant offers based on the interest and interaction of visitors with your website. There are various tools that allow you to show targeted campaigns based on the page they’re visiting and the source they’re coming from.
• Interpreting Conversion Analytics: By interpreting conversion analytics, you can understand how and which of your campaigns are performing better and what things you can improve in your next campaigns. You can use various tools that provide you with relevant stats that you can understand and use those analytical data to optimize your lead generation strategies.
• Targeting Visitors’ Location: You can use targeted campaigns like region-specific language, requirements and culture based on users’ location. You can use tools that allow geo-location targeting to display relevant campaigns based on users’ location.
• Identifying Users’ Intent: Targeting content based on users’ behavior and understanding their real-time needs is the next-level technique to boost conversion and keep your users engaged, which will also improve your SEO. For example, you can use the Yes/No form to trigger casual visitors to take action, exit-intent popups for those who were about to leave and other targeted popups as breadcrumb prompts to redirect visitors to their next step.

8. Build Targeted Mobile Popups

According to statista.com, as of 2022, there are around 7.26 billion mobile phone users worldwide.

Imagine by what amount you can boost your leads and conversions if you target mobile-phone users.

User experience is the key to keeping your users happy, and if your campaign, optins or popups are not mobile optimized, that might annoy your users and force them to leave your website.

You can use tools that allow device-based targeting to optimize floating bars, sidebar forms, popups and inline campaigns to load on both phones and tablets or on either phones or tablets.

9. Create a Viral Refer-a-Friend Giveaway

Human brains are hard-wired to love surprises and unexpected gifts. The same is also true for your audience.

Online contests and giveaways are some of the quickest and easiest ways to increase traffic to your website, grow your email list, and boost engagement. Sure sounds like a fantastic lead generation tool to us! You can try viral refer a friend giveaway on your site to attract your audience, increase website traffic, sales and conversion, grow social media followers and encourage social sharing.

It is one of the easiest and shortest ways to generate leads. Refer a friend giveaway has another great advantage, it involves trust. When a person asks their friend to follow you on social media, the likelihood of that person following you is very high since there’s trust between them. Since this campaign involves rewards, it encourages referral and word of mouth, allowing more people to know your brand and increasing the chances of generating quality leads.

And if you’re using WordPress, then there’s no better plugin than RafflePress for online contests and giveaways.

With RafflePress, you can create exciting giveaway campaigns to encourage referrals. It is highly user-friendly, and responsive and helps you design a viral refer-a-friend giveaway within a few minutes.

10. Run a Social Media Contest

There’s nothing wrong with saying that the world is on social media today.

Then why not leverage this?

Social media platforms are a great place to guide your target audience to take specific actions like sharing your post, signing up for your newsletter, promoting you on Facebook and Instagram stories, and more. And most importantly, it’s a super engaging and easy way of lead generation.

Running a social media contest also gives you access to lots of user-generated content that you can use to promote your brand.

Some of the great social media contest ideas you can consider:

• Tag a friend and share the post in stories to win
• Post a video or photo using our product to get featured
• Show your creativity using our product
• Tweet this blog using the share as tweet button
• Like our Facebook and Instagram page
• Vote to become today’s lucky winner
• Refer-a-friend to win
• Write the craziest caption for this post
• Share this photo on your Instagram post and get the highest likes to win

Now, if you’re thinking that running a social media contest might be difficult, no, it’s so easy if you have a WordPress site. Here are the basic steps to set up a social media contest:

• Set your specific goals for the contest
• Pick a relevant prize for your audience
• Define entry criteria for the contest
• Design the contest
• Run the contest
• Announce the winner
• Follow up with contest participants
• Analyze the contest results for further improvement

And that’s all for today! Now it’s your turn.

Go ahead and try these highly efficient ways to generate leads and boom your sales and conversions.

I hope you enjoyed this article!