Hello and welcome to episode two of the Digital Download from Jellybean Creative, your weekly shop of all things digital marketing, digital design and digital development. This week we're focusing on lead generation using email and live chat. Story one. At Jellybean we find that one of the most underused aspects of digital marketing is automation. Its businesses will engage to a greater or lesser extent with eMarketing. But so far very few have applied the same sales funnel methodology they apply offline to email marketing. Marketing automation allows you to create a set of rules based on interactions within your emails and deploy extremely intelligent e-marketing campaigns without lifting so much as a finger. Story two. I know, I know. You hoped you'd never have to hear of GDPR again after May of last year. But it appears that a great many businesses still have a way to go to get their email sign up to compliant. The fact is to be properly compliant you need to employ a double opt-in to ensure people aren't being unwittingly signed up and to ensure that there is a proper digital paper trail of consent. Most eMarketing tools will provide this facility so get it enabled today. Story three. Live chat is everywhere these days. Whether it be a human at the end of the line or a chatbot, research from HubSpot shows that people demand instant answers to questions if the website cannot provide it. Furthermore, Live chat is the most popular method of conversation online over email and social media. Recent research from ICMI said that visitors who engage via Live chat are worth 4.8 times more than visitors who don't. The average spend is higher, they're more likely to become a repeat customer and their levels of satisfaction are the highest out of all methods of contact. Story four. So as we're focusing on lead generation here, let's talk about sign up forms and most importantly, how we build sign up forms that succeed. If we take us red what we've already discussed about being GDPR compliant, how do we create sign up forms that people are happy to complete? Let's not forget that our audience knows that their email address has value. Here's some great advice from the mighty pullback of buyagworld.com. First focus on benefits. Explain to users why they need your newsletter or your subscription and explain what content you will serve and how it will help them. Address users concerns. They don't want to get spammed so explain how often they will receive your contact and exactly how they can unsubscribe should they wish to do so. Pick your moment to ask people to subscribe as well. You probably hate it if a salesman pounced on you the minute you walk into a shop so why plaster your home page with sign up overlays the moment it loads. Place the form at the bottom of a page or a post or load it after 4 page views when you hope your visitor has formed a positive opinion about you. So there you have it. Don't forget to send us in any items you'd like us to add to the digital download. Send those into info at jellybeancreative.co.uk. And if it makes the cut we'll feature it in the next episode. Until then, thanks for listening.