Growing a Text List

How to collect phone numbers online

Peter Daggett

Without a doubt, the most difficult part of text message marketing is collecting phone numbers from leads and customers. People sometimes have a hard time giving up their phone numbers, especially if they're not getting anything in return. 

However, there are a number of strategies that you start utilizing today to help you capture phone numbers all over the web and start turning leads into customers, and customers into advocates!

1) Pop-Up Forms  

Pop-up forms on your website are one of the best ways to capture phone numbers on your website. BUT, before you go and set one up, there are a few key things you need to consider.

Customers and prospects don't want to give their phone numbers out unless you give them something in return! What you're giving customers in exchange for that information is a lot of times more important for collecting numbers than the means you're using to collect it.  

If you're using a pop-up form to collect phone numbers on your website, the best practice is to provide a discount to your product or service. Additionally, you can use an engaging piece of content, but we recommend using a landing page for this strategy over a pop-up.

By providing a significant discount to your product or services, it's clear as day for a lead to see the value that they'll get when they enter their phone number. And with a pop-up form, leads are even more likely to enter their info, given that once they exit the pop-up, the opportunity is gone!

If you're going to use a pop-up on your website, you should also make sure to keep the form simple, and only ask for the minimum amount of information necessary for your tool. By keeping your pop-up form fields at a maximum of two (First name and Phone number), you're far more likely to see form submissions than if you were to include three or four different fields. Here's a good example of how you can use pop-up forms on your website to capture, engage, and convert leads.

2) Lead-Magnet Landing Page

Have a super engaging piece of content that you've spent hours upon hours putting together? Why not trade it for a phone number!

Lead-Magnet content is one of the most effective ways to capture phone numbers online. With lead-magnet content and a good looking landing page, you'll be able to capture tons of phone numbers from interested prospects. Make sure that your content is robust, will provide a lot of value, and is something that your audience is struggling with. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to capture these phone numbers!

Once again, make sure that you keep your form fields to the minimum. However, a landing page with more than two fields is a lot more likely to convert than a pop-up. For a landing page, it's okay to have three fields to capture a name, email, and phone number, as this content should be engaging enough that leads are willing to put in more information to receive it. However, keeping your forms to a maximum of three fields is always the best practice.  

3) Capture Phone Numbers on Instagram

Instagram? For capturing lead information? Sounds pretty crazy, right?

Well, it's not as crazy as you might think! What many Instagrammers don't know is that you can actually allow people to text you, straight off of Instagram. 

See that little button right there? When leads click on it, Instagram does the one thing that Instagram DOESN'T DO...

It opens another app!

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