10 Pro Tips for Email Marketing Lead Generation

Mar 8, 2022
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It is hard to deny the power of email marketing as one of the most effective ways to generate leads and convert them into customers in many industries.

Email marketing is not only cost-effective, but it is also extremely useful as the third most influential source of information for many B2B audiences alongside industry thought leaders and colleague recommendations. Email marketing is not showing any signs of slowing down and should be a key aspect of any company’s lead generation strategy.

How to Generate Leads from Email Marketing

The first step towards using email marketing for generating leads is to get people to sign up to your email list.

You shouldn’t buy an email list, no matter how tempting this might be, as in all likelihood, the emails and other data contained on that list are going to belong to people who might not be interested in your company, may not be a part of your target audience, and have not given your company permission to contact them via email, which can lead to problems for you down the line.

Email Lead Generation

There are several things that you can do to generate leads from email marketing once you have a solid email list in place. Don’t think that you have to wait until you have built up a large list to start generating emails from email marketing.

In fact, starting with a small number of subscribers will help you build up your sender reputation and avoid being mistaken for a spammer, which is a risk that comes with sending out a large number of emails at once.

Email Marketing and Lead Generation: Choose the Right Email Marketing Platform

It’s important to consider how sales and email marketing work together in your business. Chances are that your sales team use email for some of their outreach and follow-up communications, so it’s crucial that they have an insight into your email marketing plans and activities.

Doing this will allow the sales team to tailor their efforts to get better results with subscribers who are already actively engaging with emails and avoid sending sales emails to recipients who have already received a similar message from an email marketing campaign.

One of the best ways to do this is by choosing an email marketing platform that integrates well with your CRM.

Lead Generation Using Buyer Personas

One good strategy to use is to create email marketing campaigns while keeping specific buyer personas in mind. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer that you create based on both real data on existing customers and some market research.

Using buyer personas allows you to craft highly targeted marketing emails. This can lead to higher open and click rates, which results in more leads for your business.

When creating your campaign, it’s a wise idea to get as personalised as possible by considering many different factors about your buyer persona including demographics, buying stage, past activity, and more.

Using Personalisation in Lead Generation Campaigns

Email personalisation can also help you generate more leads from email marketing by building better relationships with your prospects.

Email personalisation can be done in many different forms, including something as simple as referencing the recipient’s name or company name in the content of the email, or simply noting their interest in a product or service that your business offers.

You can make marketing emails more personalised by tracking user behaviour and engagement and using this to personalise messages further to ensure that they are highly relevant to the recipient.

Lead Generation Through Email Marketing Signatures

Your email signature can be easy to forget about when it comes to generating leads through an email marketing campaign. However, this is a crucial space in every single email that offers a lot of opportunity to provide further information or further promote your company.

You can improve your chance of generating more leads with the email signature that you include in several different ways including adding an invitation to a webinar, an invitation to an in-person event, a link to download an eBook, a link to a coupon that the customer can use on your site or in your store, and more.

In fact, the options are endless when it comes to what you feature in your email signature. Just make sure that it follows design best practices and is correctly formatted.

Lead Generation Email List Cleaning

Keeping your email list clean and up to date is crucial for good lead generation from email marketing. If you are sending emails to people who are not interested and likely never will be interested in what you have to offer, then you’re not going to generate very many leads.

Along with this, sending emails to addresses that are no longer in use can also harm your ability to generate leads from email marketing by negatively impacting your sender score with an increased hard bounce rate.

Good email list hygiene should involve cleaning up your email list around twice per year to remove any unengaged subscribers or email addresses that are misspelled or no longer active.

Nurture Leads

Lead nurturing campaigns involve using data that you have gathered from user behaviour to deliver targeted, timed information with the main aim of guiding the prospect through the buying process.

These are automated campaigns that require little to no effort to maintain, allowing your sales team to consistently stay ahead of prospects and nurture them through the sales funnel without having to put in a huge amount of additional effort.

Ideally, you should have lead nurturing campaigns set up for the different products or services that you offer, allowing you to include relevant and valuable content in the campaign that will encourage them to sign up or make the purchase.

Design Emails That Convert

Focusing on the design and aesthetics of your marketing emails is also crucial if you want to generate more leads by sending out emails that convert.

A successful email should be designed in a way that encourages the recipient to click from the moment that they see the subject line, draws them in, and provides them with information on the next steps to take to get them closer to converting.

An effective email should be made up of various elements that all work together to create the complete message.

You should always include an effective subject line, high-quality images and media that reinforces your copy, social media sharing links, a call to action, and easy-to-understand, to-the-point written content.

Send Valuable Content

Sending valued or interesting offers such as educational content, free downloads, or discounts and offers means that subscribers are unlikely to unsubscribe from your emails and are more likely to share your brand with their friends, family and colleagues to spread the word about all the good stuff that they are receiving from you.

To make sure that the content you are sending remains valuable, you should conduct extensive market research so that you really get to know your audience. It’s also important to segment your audience, as different things will hold different value, to different people and groups.

Finally, focus on quality over quantity – it’s always better to send fewer high-quality offers compared to a high quantity of low-quality ones.

Include Strong Calls to Action

Without a call to action in a marketing email, your prospects are not going to know what they need to do in order to convert and become leads.

A call to action can be included when you have a valuable offer, are giving away something for free, or want your prospects to check out your social media page or website for something that they might be interested in.

Make sure that calls to action in your emails always lead to something that offers value to the reader to encourage them to continue clicking in future emails. Before starting your email marketing campaign, it is crucial to first define your goals and then design your calls to action with these in mind.

Provide Subscribers with the Tools to Share

When you follow the above tips and are sending highly relevant, valuable, and interesting email content to subscribers who have opted-in and want to hear from you, you’re not only more likely to have an engaged email list, but also a better chance of growing your email list through word of mouth marketing as your subscribers talk to others about the value that you offer and encourage them to sign up and get the same.

The better the content that you offer, the more likely your subscribers will want to share it, so make sure that this is easy for them by adding forward links that are easy to find in the email and adding social media sharing buttons to the email and any web page that it links to.

Email marketing can be one of the best methods to generate leads for your business. However, it is important to create and send quality, valuable email content to people who want to hear from you.

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