Lead generation shouldn’t just be consigned to online businesses, increasingly technology has become more accessible and affordable that micro businesses can leverage technology to help drive sales for their business.
You may have come across business card bowls in many leisure based businesses such as bars, arcades, bowling pins and ice rinks who encourage customers to drop their business cards for the chance of winning a prize.
This has been successful for many businesses who have the training and manpower to adequately promote the service and also spend time to record the details electronically into their emailing system.
However, a lot of businesses have often neglected this manual marketing vehicle after launch and failed to maintain the system to keep it working.
A much more user friendly, cost effective and self-managed method is to use an iPad display stand with a kiosk app to allow your customers to enter their contact details into the iPad directly.
The advantage of doing lead capture electronically using an iPad is that it requires no staff involvement to manually type in the details into a database.
The biggest advantage though is that the customer will begin receiving newsletters instantly, there’s no lag between handing your card and then receiving an email a few weeks and months later. An iPad lead capture system can link to your newsletter service and be set up to send an email instantly.
I once did this for a client where we incentivised customers to join our newsletter and they’d receive a QR code with a discount within minutes of signing up. This would have been quite difficult to achieve using a manual system.
Many apps like quick tap survey can actually run random lucky dip type competitions for the entrants. Which can be used in conjunction with your call to actions and signage to promote a competition to incentive visitors to enter their user information.
You don’t have to invest large amounts of money on a kiosk solution either, if you’re not sure whether the system will benefit your business you can hire an iPad and iPad stand for a short term event, this is handy for events like trade fairs and exhibitions where they are just run once a year. Tablet hire services are available all over the world and can deliver and pick up equipment from your event.
Once you have the hardware setup and software configured. Place your kiosk prominently in high footfall areas. If you have a waiting area such as a lobby or ordering stand of some sort you may want to situation the kiosk around that area.
Signage should also be used to push your incentive and present your call to action to get visitors to perform the registration. You can have a small sign on the kiosk itself. But what works the best is to have an overhanging sign from the ceiling pointing down directly to the kiosk. This will get more attention to the kiosk and during busy times make it visible amongst the crowd.
Adapting to a post pandemic world
Kiosks which allow users to self-enter their data directly onto a device is useful to prevent the spread of germs. Protecting employees if your business is important. Additionally customers need to be protected as well. When using a self-serve data entry stand it would be prudent to provide self-dispensing hand sanitisers attached to a stand. IPad stands can be adapted to have hand sanitisers attached them as well.
You can go one step further with this approach and instead of allowing users to touch your tablet, you can use the tablet to display a QR code which the user can scan on the phone to launch the data entry page on their own mobile device without having to touch the iPad.
Why data capture matters so much
In the post pandemic world, there will be a global recession, businesses will be competing for the same dwindling numbers of customers. It will probably mean that businesses who can reach customers the loudest will be heard amongst all the other businesses.
The benefit of lead capture means that you can send daily or weekly newsletters out to your customer base and inform them of your latest offers.
A good lead capture system will allow you to get new leads into your database and send our more offers to gain more revenue.