At Follow “we make it easy to follow everything your competition does online,” and sometimes even more. Find below a very simple, yet clever strategy to collect email addresses from Twitter using Follow.

How Follow Can Help You Gather More Email Subscribers

If you are reading this article right now, it means you have a good idea of how important building a large email list really is.

There are many email-marketing tactics you can use to grow the number of email subscribers: Pop-ups, sidebar sign-up forms, giveaways, etc. The post you are reading now does not deal with any of the previous common techniques. The strategy you are going to explore in a few minutes is a little more exotic.

In this post today, you are going to learn:

1. How to exploit one of Follow’s features to find people that Tweet the content you publish on your website.
2. How to engage with those people on Twitter, and ask them if they would like to share their email address with you.

A Brief Introduction to Follow for the Uninitiated

Let’s quickly dive into some details of what Follow can do for those who use it. After that, we will jump straight into the simple, clever strategy that will help you gather email addresses.

Follow was specifically engineered to aid companies, large or small, monitor everything their competitors do online. We provide web statistics: Traffic data, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), display and text advertising, social media information, and more — all of which assist our customers monitor their online competition.

All the statistics we provide come from our data partners: Compete, SimilarWeb, iSpionage, Quantcast, etc. Read more details on how Follow can help you monitor your online competitors.

Let’s now get to the strategy that will help you gathering more emails from Twitter with the help of Follow.

See Who Mentioned Your Content: The News Feed in Follow

One of the best features we have developed at Follow is called News Feed. As visible in the screenshot below, News Feed is basically a tool to give you numerous web mentions. In this example below, for instance, you can see how many entities on the web, including people, mentioned Amazon.com.

From News Feed you can choose to display All Activity, or perhaps look at only Web Mentions, Twitter Mentions, or Blog Posts. Every element below is clickable, and, when clicked, it will bring you to the page where that web mention has happened.

With this specific feature, you basically can see who is talking about whom, and try to reach out to these people, to see if they would like to connect with you and your brand, as well. Moreover, News Feed is not limited in the number of mentions it provides. It goes on and on back in time. You only need to keep scrolling to see older and older mentions.

News Feed in Follow Showing Tweets

As clearly visible in the image below (same as the previous), the News Feed feature within Follow also provides Twitter Mentions. This is where you want to concentrate your attention to apply the strategy we are going to explore shortly.

By clicking on the legenda on the right that reads Twitter Mentions, you will get exclusively those entities that tweeted about the brand you are analyzing. Let’s try with Amazon.com. As you can see in the image below, Follow easily retrieves chunks of data with only Tweets. These sections are all titled in the same way, and they read: Amazon.com has been tweeted about.

If you click on any of those Tweets, a new tab will open in your browser, and you will be redirected in Twitter itself, showing the single Tweet you clicked on while you were in Follow. This is a great strategy to spot tweets sharing your brand or content across the Web.

Note: Follow shows Tweets and Retweets. You can only see Retweets within the Twitter ecosystem, but not actual Tweets from outside Twitter for a specific brand, in our example Amazon.com.

OK, great. So what do you do with this information? Let’s move to the second part of the strategy.

A Brief Introduction to Twitter Lead Generation Card

Twitter has launched Twitter Lead Generation Card (TLGC) only last year. TLGC simply allows users to advertise on Twitter. It makes easy for people to express interest in what your business offers. There are many different cards that Twitter allows users to exploit, but in this example, we are going to see the one for email marketing.

To know even more about all cards, visit this document showing all Twitter cards available.

To give you a hint of what we are going to see together, see this image below. This is typically how a TLGC looks like. A Twitter user needs only a click on a button to share the email address with you.

The big advantage of this technique is that when people expand the Tweet containing the TLGC, they see a description of the offer and a call to action (CTA). Moreover, the card is already pre-filled with the user’s details, which are @username and email address associated with the Twitter handle — as visible in the above image. Thus, if the user click on the CTA button — in this case reading “AWESOME, I’M IN” — the information is sent directly to your account (be it MailChimp, AWeber, etc).

The Only 2 Things You Need for the Strategy to Work

Although this whole strategy does not involve spending a single cent to work, you need the following two things up and running to be ready to collect emails:

1. A privacy policy on your website: To allow users to see how you use their email addresses and sensitive data.
2. An account with Twitter Ads platform: You can easily open an account on ads.twitter.com. A credit card is required though.

Blending the Power of Follow’s News Feed With TLGC

We have included further down a step-by-step guide on how to create your first TLGC, but let’s first jump into the strategy that involves using Follow in conjunction with Twitter. For the sake of this article, we will use screenshots example from our friends at Writeca, who have been using TLGC for a while now, with some excellent results.

The team at Writeca is exploiting Follow and the TLGC to gather emails in a two-step process that revolves around applying the following six steps:

• Open Follow, and type the name of your own website
• Click on News Feed

• Click on Twitter Mentions (as shown above) from the right menu

• Click on a single Tweet

• Reply with a nice thank you note to the Twitterer (from the box highlighted above)

• Send a follow up note, immediately or after a day, to see if that person is interested in signing up for your newsletter, as shown in this last image below

One important thing to mention is that many of Writeca’s followers on Twitter may not know that the site has also a weekly newsletter. However, by tweeting Writeca’s articles, these people on Twitter clearly show an interest in what Writeca publishes. Thus, why not to ask?

The use of Follow is essential here, as the Tweets shown above are not Retweets. The Tweets in Follow will never appear in Writeca’s Twitter stream, as a Retweet would.

The conversion rate that the Writeca team has seen so far is around 30-35%, which is not bad. However, Product Hunt’s founder Ryan Hoover is having even better results (50-60%), as explained in this interesting post on Zapier.

A Few Important Considerations to Never Forget

Two very, very important considerations:

1. DO NOT use this strategy to spam people around the Twitter ecosystem. Only reach out to those that are engaging with your content, and that are tweeting about it.
2. Keep track of whom you invite to sign up for your newsletter via TLGC, as you really do not want to bother these people more than once if they Tweet your content again.

How to Set Up Your First TLGC

As we mentioned earlier, to get access to the TLGC, you need to open an account with Twitter Ads. Once again, to exploit the strategy we are seeing here, you don’t need to spend any money, but the card itself can only be sent from the Twitter Ads platform.

Let’s see how to create your first TLGC.

• Go to ads.twitter.com, and log in with your Twitter handle (@username).

• Click on Creatives, and then click on Cards. This image below is what you will basically see.

• Click on Create Lead Generation Card.

• Choose the type of card you would like to use, in this case Lead Generation.

• Provide a Short description of the offer or promotion that the user will sign up for. It is quite vital here to communicate the benefit users will receive by providing you with their email address.

• Select an image to go with the card. The second screenshot below shows the details of how the image should be. The image that you will update will be shown to users as part of your card. Accepted image file formats are JPG, JPEG, PNG, and even GIF.

• Decide in regards to your Call to Action (CTA). The call to action text is displayed on the button within the card.

• As indicated earlier, you need to have a privacy policy. This policy must be on your website, and you need to include the link in the box named Privacy policy URL. The second space, reading Card Details (Fallback) URL, should instead be filled with a page explaining the offer you are promoting with your card. If you are promoting a newsletter, you may perhaps redirect to your homepage. Even better, if you have a dedicated landing page for your newsletter, you may perhaps redirect over there.

• Although you may or may not fill Destination URL settings (optional), it is wise to fill this area, as well. Destination URL can be filled with your thank-you page on your website, or perhaps a highly educational and interesting blog post (if you have a blog of course). The second field, Post-submit message, is the little message that the subscribing user will see when clicking on the CTA button. Make it nice, and welcoming.

• Data settings (optional) is essential if you would like to allow the email subscriber to be imported immediately into your email-marketing service provider, such as MailChimp, or AWeber. This article will help you with MailChimp. You may find something similar for AWeber (or other providers) by searching the Web.

Note: Linking your TLGC to your email-marketing provider, such as MailChimp, is quite an important step of the process. When a Twitter user signs up to your newsletter, MailChimp will show you the sign up source. If you don’t link the account properly, MailChimp won’t be able to tell you where the subscriber came from.

• In the last box, as highlighted below, you need only to choose a name for your card — for internal purposes.

• Finally, agree with the term and conditions (always image above), and click on Create card.

How to Send Out Your Newly Created TLGC

Now that you have created your TLGC, it’s time to use it. However, before you use it publicly, it would be good to test it with a friend’s or colleague’s Twitter account, to see if the card actually works, and properly collects emails.

Do the following to send the TLGC:

• Once more, click on Creatives, and then click on Cards, as shown previously. If this is your first TLGC, you will only see one card on the screen that follows.

• Just beside the card, you have a series of buttons. Click on the one that has the small feather (see image below).

• Clicking on the above button will open a new window (similar to the one below) to create a new Tweet. Choose Standard (free standard tweet) and not Promoted-only (paid service). Compose your Tweet, and then send it out.

That’s it! Now your Tweet is on its way to meet users in the Twitter ecosystem.

Tip: Another great resource to learn more regarding how to set up TLGC is this quite helpful guide compiled by Vero.

To Summarize the Whole Strategy

To summarize for one last time how to use this strategy:

1. Create the TLGC form the Twitter Ads platform
2. Open Follow and monitor who tweets your content around the web
3. Send a sincere thank you note when someone tweets about you
4. Wait for the user to get back to you with a reply to your thank you note
5. If the time is right, send the TLGC with a polite offer to subscribe to your newsletter