Rohit Prasanna / 5 Mins Read
Updated: September 30, 2023
Email channel is the most effective tactics used to generate better quality leads. Learn these 8 practices to make it happen.
There is hardly a business that does not depend on lead generation. According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their #1 goal. Why not? Lead generation is where your sales cycle starts, and if you focus right on the initial stage, the rest of your cycle remains intact with qualified leads.
Every marketer is focused on getting more leads. While there are many ways to get them, some may give successful results instantly, while others may cost a little more to get those results. With so many brands competing for the same customers, finding those revenue-generating leads has become a challenge to marketers.
If you have a successful lead generation strategy in place, your sales funnel will be filled with quality leads and the path from awareness to the action of sales cycle becomes easy.
Email marketing is the ‘most effective’ as well as ‘most easy’ way to generate more qualified leads. Ascend2 iterates this in their Lead Generation Survey stating that creating content and marketing it via the email channel is the most effective tactics used to generate better quality leads.
Most Easy Lead Generation Strategy:
To plan a successful email marketing strategy, you need to consider various factors like marketing, trends, technologies, data, new methods etc. Now that you know what to do, let’s look at how to do it.
A newsletter is a traditional way of promoting your brand and staying on top of the mind of your customers. But what most of marketers miss is making them more relevant and informative to the customers. Most of the newsletters are overtly self-promotional when in fact, they should be quite the opposite.
When you craft a message, it is necessary to keep the audience and their interests in mind. Build the content of newsletters based on customers pain points, their interests, and frequently asked questions. You can also refer to most resonating newsletters (based on web analytics and social media metrics), which you’ve sent in the past and design accordingly.
Triggered emails are automatically activated when someone takes a specific action, like filling a form, downloading a whitepaper, or place an order. These emails should be tailored to a segmented audience based on the action.
But over time, these subscribed audiences tend to unsubscribe from the list. That is a warning to correct your email marketing strategy. While autoresponders (or drip emails) remind customers that they have subscribed to the email list, too many emails a week might persuade them to unsubscribe.
It is imperative to keep well-timed autoresponders that remind customers of your brand but do not displease them. Weekly once sounds good, but it would depend on your business and industry. Test your emails and unsubscribe rate to decide on the frequency of emails. Also, test the time and day of these autoresponders for better open rates.
Once you have your content ready, you need to decide if you would place it in the email or add additional steps for the user to access this content. Gating your content can provide you with a list of better-qualified leads. It goes back to the pre-internet era when magazines published ads urging readers to write a free report or request a product sample.
Today, we use a link in emails to landing pages where people should enter their information, usually name and email address, in exchange for a white paper, PDF, report, link to a free webinar etc. You might think that gated content like this can decrease leads, but research has shown that people perceive this content to be more valuable than if they had received it without registration.
Gated content results in more qualified leads, and you can also gauge what interests them based on the PDF or report that they downloaded. So now, with leads’ contact details and interests, you can follow a better lead nurturing program.
B2B magazine states that 64% of marketers say email is their most effective lead-generation channel when targeting new customers. Because a good email helps customers to share it on their social network which in turn increases your brand visibility.
So how do you make your emails sharable? Below are few ways to do this (but not restricted to):
Segmenting your audience is very important for building up unique conversations. It allows businesses to precisely reach customers with specific needs and wants. Segmentation increases relevance, thus affecting open and click rates.
There are multiple ways you segment your audience. Based on:
Or based on actions, like, when customers:
Based on the above segmentation, you can either re-send your emails, send follow-up emails or remove them from the list.
CTAs are used to increase the engagement of your readers and perform actions that you would want them to. It’s either included as a button, a link or a text line. When a reader clicks through any of the calls to action, they lead to a landing page that has more information for the reader to furnish to get access to the offer mentioned in the email.
When you include multiple CTAs in your email, make sure you set up that CTA on the top, prioritizing your desired course of action from the readers. If your main call-to-action falls way below, you might lose as many as 70% of readers.
Also, multiple CTAs should either lead to a single landing page or should divert readers based on the prioritized actions. For instance, you have an upcoming event and want to increase the audience. So, you put the event CTA on the top of the email and your social page CTA below.
The content in your email should match the content on the landing page in terms of headline, copy, look and feel etc. If your email is about your upcoming event and you want readers to click through and register themselves for the event, but your CTAs lead them to a social network landing page - that’s a total mismatch.
Based on your goals, ensure you match the content with the landing page to make the reader's journey as simple as possible to receive what they expect. Having your reader complete the action is a crucial step for your email marketing success. It’s essential to follow a few steps:
Every time you send an email, remember that most of your audience will open your message on their phones or tablets - not their desktop computers or laptops. Many studies indicate this - 51 percent according to Litmus, 66 percent according to Movable Ink. So, to overlook a mobile-friendly email is a big mistake.
Make sure you compose short subject lines because most mobile phones in portrait mode only show 40-60 characters of the subject line, including spaces. Many readers open the email based on who it is coming from and the subject line, so it’s imperative to use catchy subject lines.
Keep your emails under 600 pixels wide and use a large font to make them more visible on mobile phones. And before going live with the email, make sure you test it on multiple devices.
Let us know your email marketing best practices to get better-qualified leads.
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Rohit Prasanna brings in about 14 years of digital marketing experience and has been an advisor to software start-ups in the mobile and SaaS areas. Before getting into startups, Rohit worked in various marketing, and product management roles at Unisys, Dell, and IBM. Specialties: Digital marketing, building and growing companies, marketing, business development, M&A.
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