Sixteen Ventures – 3 Keys to Capture More Email Leads

Am I the only one that finds this sort of thing rage-inducing? Hooray, the art of filling my inbox with spam has been advanced. I know the standard defense: "Oh, but my SAAS startup is totally different. People want my product, they just don't know it until they're part of our sales funnel" or "Yeah, but we only send out emails to people that signed up and then stopped using the service". The simple fact is that these types of "lead capture" strategies are just more effective spamming techniques. That's what your emails are. They're spam. If your business relies on emails to generate leads, then guess what? You're a spammer.

>some folks like to hide behind GMail or Yahoo addresses rather than using their work/professional address.

Gee, I wonder why? Is it perhaps because their work/professional address is used to get things done and maybe they don't want a bunch of marketing bullshit impeding their productivity?

People like this are the exact reason disposable email services like slopsbox exist.

>I put some code in my forms that grabbed the email address when focus left the email input box – even if part of a larger form – and sent it back to the server. [...] Once I have that email address, I can backfill info to build a customer profile [...] This little hack is super-awesome because even if they don’t complete the entire form, as long as they fill in the email address, I get the data.

Holy shit.

It's really cool to see how these forms (looking like a terminal) can actually act as a tailored signup form for a specific audience.

An example, there are people to whom a facebook connect/login doesn't look scary, but to many hackers that's an instant "no thanks". A terminal-style signup? That may resonate better with hackers.

Providing immediate value for signing up is very important, especially for products that require some sort of integration or onboarding process. These sorts of capture pages are great for that.