Lead generation is one of the most recession-proof businesses out there because every business needs leads to sustain itself. It is a type of business that allows you to make good money without having a product to sell. 

As with affiliate marketing, a lead generation business generates leads and sells existing services or products in return for a commission. 

A lot of work goes into lead generation; this is why many small businesses decide to outsource leads to companies specialising in turning potential prospects into paying customers.

There are a lot of marketing tactics and plenty of tools that lead generation agencies to use to attract customers.

Are you also interested in starting your own lead generation business? With this blog post, we will uncover everything you need to know about lead generation, and we will also share some tools that can make lead generation easier for you. Let’s begin.

Lead Generation: is it a viable business?

    What is a Lead?

    Types of Lead

        Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

        Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

        Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

        Service Qualified Lead

    How do you earn from leads?

        1st Option- Monthly Retainer

        2nd Option- Cost Per Lead (CPL)

    The Process of generating a lead

    Top Strategies in generating leads

        Ads and Retargeting

        Email Marketing

        Sales Funnels

        Value-driven Blogs

    Top 25 tools for Lead Generation

        Hunter.io

        Qualaroo

        Picreel

        Intercom

        Optinmonster

        Leadfeeder

        Mailchimp

        Growbots

        AeroLeads

        Datanyze

        Proof

        Mailshake

        Vyper

        HotJar

        Hull.io

        Sumo

        Overloop

        ProProfs Survey Maker

        Unbounce

        Instapage

        Acquire

        Sendinblue

        Callpage

        Drift

        Hootsuite

    How SME site builder can help you start your leads business

    FAQ

        Who needs Lead Generation?

        What is the goal of lead generation?

        Why are leads important?

        What is B2B lead generation?

        How much do companies pay for leads?

    Summing Up

A Lead Generation agency helps businesses become more profitable by providing them with warmed up and qualified leads. Such agencies usually work in partnership with numerous businesses or websites.

The best part about a lead generation business model is that you do not need to follow an affiliate model to make money. You could start earning by connecting with the local businesses in your area or from anywhere around the world.

Lead generation refers to all the processes that allow you to establish more or less qualified business contacts (commonly called potential customers). These leads may or may not be actual conversions.

A lead is someone who has provided us with their contact information through a form or survey interested in our product or service.

As a consequence, the person’s information gets added to our company’s database.

A lead is not a client but a potential customer: someone who wants to stay updated with your content, promotions, and offers. A Lead can also be referred to as a user in the initial phase of the purchase process.

These are the contacts who have engaged with the efforts made by your marketing team, but they are not yet ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is someone who fills out a form on a landing page in exchange for an offer.

These are the contacts who have taken certain actions that indicate that they are interested in becoming a paying customer. An example of SQL is someone who fills out a form to enquire about a product or service.

These contacts have used any of your free services and are now showing interest in a paid service. PQLs are ideal for businesses that offer a free trial.

Service Qualified leads are those who have asked your service team if they want to upgrade their product and become a paid customer.

It is possible to make a good amount of money from leads if you find the right margin between the cost you acquire leads for and the price you sell them for.

To build a lucrative lead generation agency and earn profits from day one, you need to understand about:

• The target audience you want to sell leads to
• The pricing model that suits you
  
• The marketing channels you wish to leverage

Let us first talk about two common pricing models for Lead generation companies.

A flat fee retainer model is a common way agencies charge their clients.

It is a simple model in which lead gen businesses send a set amount of leads every month in exchange for a fixed price. This price will vary depending on the industry and the quality of leads.

Since you deal in bulk, it can be challenging to charge a premium when choosing this model.

This is the method that most lead gen companies use to sell leads to clients. Depending on the client, you can usually charge anywhere from $10-$20 or potentially hundreds for every lead.

It is easier to work out your Profit margins using the CPL method. A simple way to find it out is:

Price client pays you for leads - Cost to acquire those leads = Profit.

Now that you are aware of the concept of lead generation and how businesses charge for it, let’s walk through the steps of the process of Lead generation.

1. Firstly, a visitor gets to know about your online business after coming across your marketing channels such as your website, social media, blogs, etc.
2. The visitor then proceeds to click on some CTA (call-to-action) set by you. A CTA can be an image or button that encourages the prospects to take some action.
3. The CTA then redirects the visitor to a landing page, designed to capture lead information in exchange for some offer. An offer can be anything that holds some value, like a free ebook, course, or template.
4. The landing page then asks the visitor to fill out a form to claim the offer. That’s it! The visitor then turns into a lead.

The following lead generation strategies will help you understand various promotional channels to drive traffic to your landing page.

The best way to get outbound traffic on your landing page is by running pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on platforms with huge active audiences like Google, Facebook, Bing, etc.

Marketers have been using Facebook ads to generate leads for a long time now. Similarly, Google ads also do well at bringing in new leads.

These platforms provide you with a variety of tools you can use to target your audience while setting up ad campaigns. You get to choose the targeted demographics, age, interests, etc.

Linkedin Ads are also popular in B2B Lead generation. You can also retarget your ad to visitors with new offers & discounts to increase conversions.

Email marketing is an amazing way of reaching out to customers who already know about your brand.

The people who have subscribed to your email list are more likely to take action, so you can use CTAs with compelling copy and lucrative design to grab your customer’s attention.

Sales funnels are known to be very effective at converting visitors into paying customers. They will surely get you better results than a website since they are built for a single purpose: Conversions.

You can use SME site builder to build high converting sales funnels for your lead generation business. Sign up for the 14- Day free trial from here.

Another effective method of getting leads is posting blog content that adds heaps of value to the readers. It is a cost-effective long term lead generation strategy to generate leads.

To write blog posts with value, you will have to understand what your target audience wants. It would be best if you also researched your competitors to find what they are covering on their blogs. Blogs also allow you to do SEO and rank higher on search engines.

Make sure to include a call-to-action in your blog posts tactfully.

If you want to succeed at generating leads for your clients, you need to use the right lead generation tools to help you with automation and marketing.

So what are the best lead generation tools?

We have provided a list of Top 25 Lead generation tools to help you become more efficient. Let’s begin.

Hunter is one of the most popular email marketing lead generation tools. It is a useful tool used by small and big businesses to find emails.

You can integrate hunter with many other applications, and it also provides you with 50 free searches every month. You can upgrade to a paid plan to get more searches which starts at $39 per month.

With Hunter, you will be able to find someone’s email address by just typing in their name and company details. There is also a chrome plugin of Hunter that will give you a list of email addresses associated with the domain of any website you visit.

Hunter can also be used to create cold mail campaigns, and you can also track the performance of your campaigns from its dashboard.

Qualaroo is a tool that helps you with customer research. It acts as a polling software to optimise CRO by collecting valuable feedback and customer behaviour insights. If you are not so familiar with the product, this tool will enable you to communicate with your visitors.

With Qualaroo, you can create feedback surveys and add a lead form to your sales funnel or website. It allows you to place its pop-up survey nudges at your preferred place to collect your customers' feedback and capture new leads.

It comes with many pre-built templates with more than 10 question types, branding options, and many more tools which can be used to create personalised surveys. Qualaroo uses its smart AI to generate reports on surveys and provide the host with recommendations to get more leads.

Such on-site surveys are said to be 10x more effective than regular email surveys. You can opt-in for the free demo of Qualaroo or choose a paid plan which starts at $80 per month.

Picreel is an exit-intent lead generation tool that you can use to increase engagement on your website by displaying well-timed and structured popups.

Pop-Ups help you reduce the card abandonment of your online store and promote discounts & offers. Picreel opens a world of possibilities with an intuitive pop-up editor which you can use to recommend specific products, offer surveys, and much more.

There are more than a hundred built-in customizable popup templates that you can edit without coding knowledge. The leads generated through these AI-powered pop-ups are updated in real-time.

There are many other features in Picreel, such as A/B testing, integration with over 700+ sales and marketing tools, and advanced analytics. There are many paid plans for different business types, starting at just $14 per month.

Intercom is a tool that comes in handy for businesses who want a communication platform where they can connect with their potential clients and build a relationship with them.

You can use Intercom for live chats, chatbots, self-serve support, etc. While setting up an on-site chat, you can set up rules of engagement where the live chat window won’t pop up until the visitor stays on the pricing page for at least X minutes or seconds.

This way, you can get more data about your targeted audience by directly connecting with them while increasing customer retention and answering their queries.

You can also automate the complete live chat with the use of chatbots. The most affordable starter package of Intercom starts at $39 per month.

Optinmonster is another advanced pop-up based tool built to help you with onsite popup marketing campaigns. It comes with a Drag & drop builder with over 50 highly customizable pop-up templates. 

The Drag & drop builder allows you to create different types of opt-in forms such as lightbox popups, fullscreen takeovers, slide-ins, and floating bars. You also get a powerful segmentation and targeting engine to help you display the right popup at perfect timing.

With Optinmonster, it becomes effortless to adjust and test forms or popups in real-time using A/B split testing options. The pricing for the most basic plan with unlimited campaigns starts at just $9 each month.

Leaderfeeder is a lead generation tool built to help decision-making through data collection. It allows you to know what companies visit your website, even if they never fill out a survey or form.

With Leadfeeder, you will be able to follow up with prospects who never even enquired about your product. It provides you with all the contact information for employees at the company that visits your website.

It is capable of keeping an eye on every visitor of your website as it gets directly connected to your Google analytics and provides you with real-time results.

It is a pretty easy to use tool for small businesses, but it can be a little slow at times. Leadfeeder comes with a 14-day free trial, and the paid plan starts at $79 a month.

Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing solution for lead generation agencies that comes with an easy-to-use email builder. 

The tool is free for small businesses who want to store up to 2,000 email contacts or roll out 12,000 emails a month. However, if you need to exceed these numbers and gain access to all the features, you will have to spend $10 a month. 

Mailchimp provides you with an intuitive drag and drop email builder that makes it easy to create high converting personalised email campaigns. 

Some other features of Mailchimp include A/B testing, contact segmenting, autoresponders, and time-zone-based email sending capabilities. Overall, it has everything that you need in an email marketing tool.

Growbots is a lead generation tool for B2B companies looking to know about the market they want to target. It offers the lead gen business with over 200 million existing contacts to search for new leads in any specific industry. 

You can choose the contacts from the existing database, and it will provide you with their social profiles, email addresses and phone numbers. You can then use this contact information to get in touch with the leads. This simplifies the lead qualification process as the leads are generated for your targeted industry.

Like any other email marketing tool, you can also create email campaigns in Growbots and monitor the analytics through the dashboard. The dashboard will also provide you with things like click-through rates, response rates and detailed reports. 

The paid package of Growbots starts at $49 per month.

AeroLeads is a lead generation tool suitable for small to big businesses looking to generate new leads from social networking platforms such as LinkedIn, AngelList, and Crunchbase. 

With AeroLeads, you can fetch public business information of prospects like full name, company name, job title, location, email address and phone number. It can also be integrated with many other CRM tools like Mailchimp, Zapier, Salesforce, etc. 

Once you have collected the leads, you can transfer them directly to your CRM tool of choice with just a single click. 

The tool comes with a free trial for anyone who wants to test it out and the paid plans start at $49 per month.

Datanyze is another popular tool that focuses on “technographics”. Basically, it helps you discover the other software tools used by your visitors. 

Lead generation businesses are unmatched if you have a way to personalise your website according to your visitors’ needs.

Imagine if you knew that a visitor was using the services of a direct competitor. You could make changes to the landing page copy or add an offer or discount as a pop-up.

Datanyze also provides you with accurate contact information of your prospects which can be imported to your CRM and sales tools. It offers a free demo, and the paid package starts at $39 per month.

Proof is another SaaS-based lead generation tool that you can use to display experience and social proof on your website. Displaying social proof instantly makes a brand more credible, and it can increase your leads and conversions by 15%. 

You can use Proof to display notifications to visitors about other customers making purchases on your website in real-time. It also allows you to put live visitor count, X customer purchased a product/service, recent activity, and more. 

If you aim to create a sense of urgency in your online store, you can use Proof to display a live visitor count, or purchases count. You can also use this tool to highlight how a specific product is more popular in your store, so more visitors purchase it. Proof’s analytics and A/B testing will help you test these elements' impact in a single click. 

The tool offers a free demo, and the plans start for as low as $79 per month.

Mailshake is a popular tool that helps with mail outreach and lead generation. You can use this tool for optimising, personalising, and automating the cold emailing process.

It has an easy-to-use interface with many additional features like read-made email templates. With Mailshake, you can send bulk emails to your contact list and generate qualified leads from the customer replies. 

You also get access to a single dashboard where you can manage your entire marketing campaign. Some other features include alerts, an inbuilt phone dialer, automated lead status management, and mail status monitoring. The tool can also be integrated with other CRM tools like Slack, Salesforce, etc. 

You also get a nifty feature in Milkshake that gives you real-time suggestions like words to delete, length of content and the probability of your email getting a response from the receiver. The basic plan starts at $59 per month.

Vyper is a social media marketing tool built to help you with lead generation. Primarily, it is used to create viral contests and giveaways. 

It is a great tool to engage with your target audience on social media platforms. It helps you with generating rewards, social followers, and referrals. 

With Vyper, you can create contests, promotions, and other social media buzz creating practices that are useful to get your lead generation campaign run smoothly. It allows your contest participants to earn additional entries by going through more actions set by the host, like filling out a form on the website, following the social media handles, or sharing the contest with a friend. 

You get eight high-converting giveaway templates and three different modes. You can also use Vyper to create widgets and forms and embed them quickly on your website. The price for the monthly plans starts at $29 per month.

Hotjar is one of the best behavioural and lead generation tools with many helpful features. It is a go-to solution for conversion optimization research. 

It provides you with an entire arsenal of features that you can use to map your customers' journey, collect their feedback, generate new leads, and understand your visitors' behaviour. 

It uses heatmaps and session recordings to analyse the behaviour of people who visit your website. This will allow you to understand what exactly attracts the visitors the most and what doesn’t. It can also help you know what causes people to bounce away from your landing page to optimise it for better conversions. 

You can also strategically use Hotjar to place surveys and feedback widgets on your website. The tool offers multi-device support so that you can access it through desktop, mobile or tablet. It also supports app integration with other CRM tools. The tool comes with a free version that you can use for up to 35 daily sessions.

The plus plan allows up to 100 daily sessions with unlimited surveys & feedback widgets at $31 a month.

Hull.io is a tool marketers use to collect and centralise the data collected from various marketing tools. It can help you push this data out to different marketing channels to put it to use and personalise it in real-time.

When you use multiple tools for marketing, the data collected can be a little fragmented. Especially if those tools don’t integrate with one another. Hull.io is built to solve this problem by bringing all the data you need within a single dashboard.

If all your campaign data is stored in a single place, it will be easier to get an accurate idea of how performance is collectively working. 

It will also be much simpler for your sales team to access any relevant information about each customer whenever they need it. The only problem with this tool is that it starts with a whopping $950 per month for the Team package.

Sumo is a lead generation company you should consider if you aim to grow your mailing list quickly. It comes with a user-friendly interface and popup builder that you can use to design popup forms, welcome mats, smart bars, and surveys in minutes. 

It helps in customer engagement by prompting the visitors to take action on your website using precise targeting rules set by you. Using Sumo, you can transfer the leads to any other CRM tool or email marketing app. It also comes with a free option for small businesses and individuals. 

You can also Sumo to add a floating social share bar on your website. It also comes with heat maps that will help you figure out where the visitors are most active on your website. The pricing for the paid plan starts at $29 per month.

Overloop is a popular email automation tool that focuses on outbound marketing strategies. It comes with an email finder tool that you can use to create lists for cold email campaigns. 

There is also an email verification tool that you can use to refine your cold email lists. You can then automate drip campaigns utilising the library of templates available on Overloop. 

The tool also has its chrome extension to help you find prospects with a single click and launch cold email campaigns directly from your browser in just seconds. It can also be integrated with other tools like Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc. 

The pricing for Overloop starts at $74 per month (if paid annually) or $99 per month.

ProProfs Survey Maker can be a useful tool to generate quality leads by building surveys. It is an easy-to-use tool that allows anyone to create delightful popup surveys that get you valuable insights and customer feedback. 

Besides lead generation, this tool also focuses on reducing the bounce rates and abandoned carts on your website. ProProfs Survey Maker can help you maximise your user engagement with the help of various survey templates that come with visual questions, NPS, scorecards, and much more. 

It is a single tool that you will need to make your surveys personalised, fun and interactive for anyone that visits your site. You can also share these surveys and polls with your customers through emails or social media websites. The free version of this tool will allow ten responses, and the essentials package will cost you $0.05 per response.

Unbounce is a tool that allows you to create landing pages with floating bars and popups. You can create and optimise good-looking landing pages using its drag & drop page builder. It offers a library of over a hundred templates made to increase visitor engagement and reduce bounce rates. The tool requires a bit of a learning curve before you get used to it. 

It provides real-time data in the dashboard with advanced features such as A/B testing, tool integration, etc. 

You can also collect visitor information on your leading page through Unbounce by adding lead forms, opt-in, popup, and sticky bars. The tool comes with a free trial, and the pricing starts at $80 per month.

Instapage is one of the leading landing page tools built to design dynamic landing pages for targeted lead generation. With Instapage, you get access to six services in one place- building landing pages, personalization, experimentation, heatmaps, Admaps, page speed optimization. 

The builder allows you to design mobile and desktop responsive landing pages without coding. It offers features like A/B testing, heatmaps, detailed analytics multivariate testing, which you can use to optimise your landing page. Thor render is an additional feature that allows you to improve the loading speed of your landing page. 

The best part is that the tool can be integrated with over a hundred workspace based apps to manage data flows, and it also lets you track the performance of your ad campaigns. The pricing starts at $199 per month, billed annually.

Acquire is an all-in-one customer engagement tool that you can use to generate leads for your online business. It makes it easy for online business owners to connect with their customers via multiple platforms. 

Using Acquire, you can engage with your visitors via SMS, call, email, and live chat. This will allow you to answer the queries of your customers in real-time. The tool also offers a lead bot which makes your job easier by automating some portion of the live chat, thus converting leads faster. 

The tool can also be integrated with a vast number of apps, and it has a clean user interface where you can find all the communication channels in a single dashboard. The pricing of Acquire starts at $90 per month.

Sendinblue is a cloud-hosted and mobile-friendly email marketing tool built for small to medium-sized businesses. It can help you with email optimization using workflow automation, audience segmentation, and intelligent scheduling features.

It comes with many tested email templates and an intuitive builder to create convincing emails and attractive newsletters without any code. You can also install a live chat widget for support on your website, 

It has an inbuilt CRM where you can manage all your contacts in one place. It also works as a project management tool because it offers functionality to create tasks, add deadlines, and assign them to team members. The basic plan comes free of cost, and the paid plan starts for as low as $25 per month.

Callpage is a callback automation tool that comes with a quick to set up user interface. You can directly connect with your visitors through this after they provide their contact details. 

Callpage claims that you will be able to generate 75% more call leads from your website by using their service. It encourages your visitors to connect with you on a call to get instant information and clarity about your product or service. 

You need to install the callpage widget on your website, and your visitors will simply be able to connect with your team on a call. The tool also allows you to add mobile and desktop responsive popups that prompt the potential leads to send you their number. You can also make calls directly from the Callpage dashboard. 

The basic plan of the tool comes free of cost, while the paid plan starts at $159 per month.

Drift is a cloud-based lead generation software that provides users with live chat and AI-driven chatbots. It can also be used for follow-up emails and relationship management. 

It comes with industry-standard conversational chatbots that help you engage with your customers and collect information, qualify leads, book appointments, and much more. 

The tool also has anonymous visitor intelligence that reveals the public data of your visitors, such as company name, location, revenue, etc. Drift also offers a mobile app that you can use to answer your visitors' inquiries on the go. 

Drift comes with a free version for basic use, and the paid plans start at $400 per month.

Hootsuite is a tool built to help you to boost your social media presence and gain leads using social posts and other activities. The tool integrates with all your social media accounts and gives you a single dashboard where you can monitor and manage all your social media activities. 

With Hootsuite, you can also set up scheduling of posts on social media. You can create a month’s worth of posts in advance, and it will automatically post the content on your desired dates. 

You can do a few other things with Hootsuite: analyse the latest trends, perform competitive research, etc. The tool's analytics will also provide you with performance information about the running social media campaigns. It has a free plan, and the paid plan starts at $29 per month.

Now, what if we share a tool that has everything you will need to start generating leads. It has the features of all the tools mentioned above, and it also comes at a more affordable cost.

Sounds too good to be true, right?

Not anymore.

SME Site builder is an excellent funnel and website builder built into one. It has all the marketing and automation tools you will need to turn your website visitors into paying customers.

It is a one-stop marketing solution to fulfil your hosting needs, lead generation tools, check out options, and more! 

You can create high converting funnels, websites, blogs, online stores, and membership websites without any coding. We offer you a fantastic drag & drop page builder with a template library filled with high-quality templates.

It takes minutes to create a funnel or website from scratch using SME Site builder. This is because we already provide you with the framework of high-quality and pre-tested funnels.

The Drag & drop page editor will allow you to make any desired changes with a few clicks. You can add multiple pop-ups, upsells, downsells to your website or funnel using the inbuilt templates. 

You also get an integrated CRM where you can manage all your leads and sales. The CRM is located in the admin interface, and it will display all the data of your customers like address, contact number, email, etc. 

There is also Inbuilt email marketing which you can use to nurture leads, close sales, and maintain a good customer retention rate. Using email marketing automation, you will be able to create a series of personalised emails triggered by customer actions.

SME Site builder will also help you increase the ROI (return on investment) through A/B Testing. A/B testing lets you test multiple funnels or landing pages to determine the best-performing ones.

All the features you get in our tool are more than enough for any Lead generation business. The best part is that all of this comes for as low as $27 per month, billed annually. 

We also have a 14-Day free trial that you can use to test the tool. (No Credit card required)

Now, we will be answering some of the most frequently asked questions about Lead generation.

There is not a single business in the world that does not benefit from leads. 

This is because leads are responsible for sales, and every business needs sales!

So, you can start providing your Online lead generation services to any business in the world.

The primary goal of lead generation campaigns is to generate revenue and increase awareness and interest in your market. 

Some businesses also use lead generation to gather feedback and provide customer service.

It is critical for any business to generate leads to succeed. Every business requires revenue to maintain itself. 

The revenue comes from customers.

The customers start as leads. 

Leads = customers = profits.

It stands for business to business lead generation. It refers to identifying the right customers for any product or service, then attracting them to make a purchase. 

It is an integral part of any business, and it is usually handled by the sales and marketing team.

The amount you get paid for a lead depends on the quality of leads desired by the company. To understand this better, let us divide companies into three tiers.

Tier 1: Low budget bulk lists

In this category typically resides companies with low budgets to spend, so they choose to go with low-quality bulk lists. Such low-quality leads can cause some problems, such as lowered domain health and getting blacklisted. 

Price- 1 to 3 USD per lead.

Tier 2: Mid-budget data sourcing

In this category comes the companies operating on a small to medium scale. Such companies choose to go for a manual and automated labour hybrid solution. 

Price- 4 to 6 USD per lead.

Tier 3: High budget quality data prospecting

Companies with a good budget to spend and large sales teams reside in this tier. Even though the price they pay for leads is higher, they get rewarded with better conversions in the long run. 

Price- 7 to 20 USD per lead.

There you have it, folks. Now you know more about how to generate leads for any business. You don’t need to spend crazy money to start a lead generation business. We recommend you try SME Site builder. It is an exceptional lead generation tool trusted by many. 

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