Nowadays, it is widely acknowledged that email marketing is an essential part of the lead generation. It is still one of the best sales-channel and a significant aspect of digital marketing. Out of the different marketing strategies which we have mentioned in previous articles ( hopefully, you have employed some of them), email marketing remains the king.

It can be done to improve relationships with current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business. It also helps in acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately.

Benefits of email marketing

First of all, email marketing provides unlimited opportunities for your business and helps you to achieve a bigger ROI. Moreover, it helps you to find common ground with new customers and maintain relation with already existed ones. At first glance …Nothing more needed. But above all, email marketing is cost-effective, thus you do not have to worry about wasting money and spending thousands of dollars on marketing in social media/SEO, etc. 

According to the Direct Marketing Association, “Email marketing brings in $40 for every $1 spend, outperforming search, display, and social marketing”.

Besides these benefits, email marketing campaigns are easy to share and easy to measure. When you want to know if your marketing efforts are working, emails can quickly tell you what you are doing wrong or correct. Moreover, it produces an instant impact while reaching out to people globally. With its unrivaled return of investment, it goes to say you need email marketing in your campaign.

Basically, lead generation is a process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Lead generation is the way that you attract and get people to give you their contact information to you. It is the method you use to collect leads. There are plenty of ways to generate leads. According to Ascend2 in 2018 the most effective solution is email marketing, then website or landing pages, content marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, webinars or virtual events, paid search or online advertising, and finally testing and optimization. Email marketing has long been a tried-and-true method for generating leads. This approach continues to enjoy a strong track record in spite of the rise of social media platforms. Email marketing is still an efficient way to generate leads at a reasonable cost.

To generate leads, you need to utilize a wide range of techniques. That’s where digital marketing plays a huge role. Remember that more it does not mean better. I would like to indicate some of the tips and tricks:

Focus on quality rather than on quantity

Most marketers tend to look favorably on collecting a large number of leads to pass on to the sales team since more leads ideally equate to more opportunities and sales. But, it doesn’t always work this way. Quality depends on finding ideal prospects, as well as an ideal amount of clients for the business to be prosperous. It is work remembering that it is better to collect less contact than more, in fact, you spend approximately 8 h a day at work and you have to divide your time effectively. So what is the best approach? Try to define your ideal prospects, then act. Build your business on quality leads! 

Match content to your audience

It’s a basic principle of modern marketing that different groups of customers respond to different approaches. One of the biggest mistakes that budding personal branders make is trying to appeal to everyone. First, we need to determine whether our audience is at the crawl, walk or run stage. Once we know what stage our audience is in, we need to help them navigate through the content and we need to ensure we are in synch with our audience’s needs. Before sending an email campaign you can ask them questions, get to know them better. 

Send regular, consistent emails

Proper email marketing is important to your business sales for a variety of reasons, including educating your customers and prospects, boosting sales while saving time and money and relationship building. While you may understand your product or service, customers and prospects may take some time to gain a full understanding, then you have to educate them first, then send sales messages. When you consistently send email marketing messages that contain relevant and useful information about your company, customers and prospects begin to gain a full understanding of how your business, product or service can benefit them. Furthermore, you need to remember about timing. You might work in a different time zone than the majority of your customers. 

 Keep track of your emails

Keep a keen eye on your data, like how many email addresses were undeliverable, how many were never opened, and what time of day people did open your message. The tiny details in your data can tell you an awful lot about your campaign’s performance, then you could implement some changes after a couple of tests and monitoring your daily campaign, e.i. open rates, bounce rate, conversion rate, Click-through Rates and may more. 

Secure your sender reputation

Basically, sender reputation is the method mailbox providers use to measure the trustworthiness of a sender’s email.  Mailbox providers place a high priority on a sender’s reputation when determining inbox or spam folder placement of emails. Unfortunately, it happens when you send emails and then your emails bounce because in your email list are undeliverable ones. How to prevent it? Simply, just by verifying your email list and regardless of the circumstances always remember about it. “It email verification also necessary in my sign up form? “ Of course it is. Nowadays more and more people provide fake email addresses in sign up process because they do not want to be spammed. In fact, they contribute to your messy email list. Without verifying you will add them to a particular email campaign as well. 

Test and analyze your results

There’s still a lot of power in A/B split testing. Testing emails reduces bounce rates, tells you more about your customers, increases conversions and is cost-effective. The best marketing campaigns use several forms simultaneously, do not hesitate to introduce changes while your email campaign is running. Firstly, you have to decide what you will change, then what you will test. While you may want to test more than one thing, it’s important to only test one thing at a time to get accurate results. Things you might consider testing include:

-CTA,

-images,

-body text,

-headline,

-closing text,

-special offer

-the layout of the message,

If you can not see that improvement with the first set of A/B tests, you might want to run another test. Remember to look in the historical open rate, and decide what kind of improvements you want to see.

 

Wrapping up

To sum up, email marketing is a powerful channel for generating new leads and engaging your target audience. However, if you want to get a return on investment, you’ll need to use the specific email lead generation tactics that are proven to maximize conversions over time. Test your new solutions and improvements, follow your customers and their needs and above that, all verify their email addresses. Build credibility and trust, it is obvious that it takes time but it is worth it. Introduce your improvements day by day and you will see significant changes. This way you will know methods and strategies will have more impact on them in the short and long term.