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Considering Twitter’s Lead Generation Card for Email List Growth? CONSIDER THIS.

A few weeks ago, Twitter unveiled the Lead Generation Card, a useful digital marketing tool that allows its users to solicit email subscribers straight from their Twitter feeds.

lead-generation-card

As email marketers, we’re all fighting – I’ve even heard tales of scratching and clawing – for the same online impressions. And Twitter, the 11th most visited website in the world according to Alexa, has been what you could describe as an underutilized resource in the email marketing game.

Sure, you could always tweet links to your email sign-up forms, but those calls to action were limited, both in length and in visibility. The Lead Generation Card was a way for Twitter to solve both of those problems – longer posts and more screen real estate.

But as much as the Lead Generation Card seems like in a win-win for all involved, it’s not quite a one-size-fits-all digital marketing solution.

One variable is cost. Which isn’t to say implementing the Lead Generation Card is expensive – that’s a pretty relative factor. But it hints at cost per acquisition, and that’s where you need to make a critical decision. Is this feature going to drive your acquisition costs up or down? If it’s up, to what benefit? Your average corporate Twitter account has a couple hundred Twitter followers. So unless you have an “above-average” Twitter following, this resource might not make that much monetary sense.

A second variable is internal resources. Let’s say you’ve got the money to run this campaign. Do you have the resources? Is your email marketing solution equipped to handle the potential influx of subscribers. Do you have enough new content to go around? Have you set up an autoresponder campaign specifically tailored to this new audience? All of these questions need to be addressed before you invest resources in creating an effective Lead Generation Card, which is going to require creative, analytic, and technical resources on your end.

If you’ve done the research and necessary due diligence to ensure that a Twitter Lead Generation Card is a viable solution to grow your email marketing list, there are few tools out there that have as much potential. And, quite frankly, I envy your Twitter following and internal resources.

About the Author: Harry Kaplowitz is the Deliverability Product Manager for Vocus, an email marketing platform for small-to-midsized businesses. You can follow him on Twitter (@Inboxygen), or visit inboxygen.com.

Scott Hardigree
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3 Comments

  • by Pam Neely
    Posted June 21, 2013 11:41 am 0Likes

    Twitter’s managed advertising clients are the only ones who can use these Lead Gen Cards right now. Hopefully the rest of us will get to test them soon.

    It’s so interesting to watch social media technologies incorporate email features, and vice versa. This Lead Gen Card functionality reminds me of the newish AdWords extensions – one of which adds an email capture box right in the ad.

    What’s next… a Pinterest email opt-in feature? An Instagram email capture widget?

  • by Harry Kaplowitz
    Posted June 24, 2013 9:24 am 0Likes

    You’re right, Pam. And I don’t think you’re too far off in your ideas of “what’s next.” There already are easy ways to integrate an email sign-up form into a Facebook page. I don’t doubt that Pinterest isn’t too far behind! I saw the AdWords extensions recently and I feel like that blew my mind more than this Twitter solution. Mostly because the frame of mind you’re in when you’re Googling is far different from when you’re scanning Twitter.

  • by Jose Argudo
    Posted October 3, 2013 10:49 am 0Likes

    This continues to add to my perception that email marketing is as alive as has always been, if not, why all those efforts to cath email accounts?

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