What is email lead generation?
Experts would agree, the ultimate goal for email is lead generation. According to MarketingProfs, email marketing remains the highest performing digital tactic for building awareness, boosting acquisition and increasing conversion. Marketing automation allows marketers to improve their email lead generation by creating nurture campaigns, testing and tweaking each email sent and monitoring and measuring email results at a more granular level.
Is email the only way for quality lead generation?
An astounding 72% of all adults in the U.S. still prefer to receive communication from businesses via email. This means that email lead generation should and will always take priority. However, many modern lead generation campaigns today live online. No matter your company or industry, you must implement content, social and email strategies in order to educate and attract new customers.
Lead generation marketing itself is the process of stimulating buyers and getting them interested in your products or services. This interest will add them to your sales pipeline as a qualified lead. The best online lead generation companies however, perform most of this action through email campaigns.
What processes should companies using email lead generation follow?
- Publish digital content on websites and social networks to educate potential leads.
- Have multiple calls to action and landing pages available to interested leads.
- Capture leads’ email addresses on lead capture forms, along with additional information like name, industry, job title, and needs from your company.
- Drop leads into email nurture campaigns based on their answers from the lead capture form.
- Continue education through email, event, and content promotion (often implementing a lead scoring model) until they’re ready to be passed to sales.
A few basic email lead generation fundamentals
Every effective email lead generation campaign pays attention to the following elements:
- Catchy Subject Line – An effective subject line should be intriguing and catchy without coming off as too spammy. Rising above the noise in someone’s inbox can be challenging, but starting with a good email subject line will spike just enough interest to get your subscribers to open your email.
- Clean Design – There’s always a great debate between sending HTML vs. Text emails. We feel there’s a time and a place for both. It’s important to be mindful in which you choose. HTML typically has more of a marketing feel (think newsletters, event invitations, etc.) while text only emails can feel a lot more personalized.
- Engaging Content – We’re living in the micro-moment. Even if someone may have the time to read your email, they surely don’t have the attention span. If you want your email lead generation campaign to work, get your most important message across quickly and make it easy to read. Use bold fonts and bulleted lists so your content is easy to scan (especially on mobile devices). You should also add an intriguing call-to-action to drive your reader to more detailed content on your website.
So where do I start?
Email still retains the highest ROI per $1 spend of all lead generation tools (Quick Sprout) and according to B2B Magazine, 64% of marketers say email is their most effective lead generation channel when targeting new customers. If you removed email lead generation campaigns from your marketing strategy, then your leads wouldn’t have scheduled and reliable content at their fingertips. Instead, they would have to go digging for it themselves.
In today’s lead generation business we have to hand our leads a variety of interaction options – whether it be webinar invites, event registrations, asset downloads or links to your latest blog post. In fact, don’t ever make content an afterthought. When you’re executing an email lead generation campaign, it’s common (and a best practice) to dedicate a lot of your focus on planning your campaign, segmenting your list and building out the emails. Content – especially in nurture campaigns and newsletters – is a crucial component of your emails Pay attention to the content that you’ll want to share in these emails and strategically map each piece of content to your email marketing efforts. Aligning content creation with campaign planning is critical to your overall success.
Finally, there are many lead generation firms available to small companies whose main concern is keeping their website up and running rather than worrying about what to do with the people on it. However, investing in a marketing automation platform can segment email recipients, include calls to action within your campaigns, design and send your email messages, track engagement and tie in scoring models. Marketing automation not only helps your email lead generation strategy, it streamlines your processes and automates your overall lead generation and scoring efforts.