Email marketing has been here since the start, is still relevant, and will continue to be effective for the foreseeable future.
It is the very framework of email marketing that allows it to be effective and cost-efficient.
The ability to reach the right person, with the right message is perhaps the best marketing combination there exists and no other form of digital marketing does it better.
Image Courtesy – Online Marketing Institute
If you’re a veteran digital marketer, you already know how potent and fruitful email marketing is when it’s done right.
If you’re new to digital marketing, here is a statistic that will give you an idea about the effectiveness of email marketing.
Email marketing generates $44 in revenue for every $1 invested. No, this is not some clickbait.
If you get things right for your email marketing campaign, you will generate leads that will translate into revenue in line with the stated statistic.
Wondering how to do email marketing the right way? Let’s start with the basics.
What is Email Marketing Lead Generation?
Email marketing can serve multiple purposes and generating leads is one of those.
Using the email marketing setup with the sole objective of generating leads effectively is known as email marketing lead generation.
An essential for running a successful email marketing lead generation campaign is to have a good mailing list. The objective here is to reach the right people.
This necessitates having a good mailing list that comprises individuals who’re interested in your offerings and have the financial capacity to make a purchase.
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While offering free eBooks and other rewards to get people to sign up for your newsletter list is an effective way to grow your mailing list, this approach isn’t as suitable for lead generation.
For effective lead generation via email marketing, you need to get the right kind of audience interested in your offerings.
This can be achieved with high-quality content that asserts your expertise in the field that you operate in.
Combine that with a well-designed opt-in form, and you will have a healthy mailing list that generates a good amount of revenue.
But that’s just one variable of the equation.
There are a lot of other things you need to pay attention to.
Let us find out what they are and how to get them right.
How to generate high-quality leads using Email Marketing?
A lot of digital marketing guides make claims that marketing, in general, is not a science and more of an art and hence there’s no sure way of getting things right.
We, however, disagree with this notion.
We believe the first prerequisite to being a good marketer is having the ability to understand human behavior and coming up with ways to influence outcomes using various marketing materials and strategies.
Combine all of this with the following practices and you will generate high-quality leads in no time with each email marketing campaign.
#1 Identify and understand your ideal customer -
Image Courtesy – The Smarketers
You can analyze their common traits and create an ideal customer profile.
An ideal customer profile (ICP) can be of tremendous help to your business as it helps you focus your marketing efforts and makes your lead generation function tremendously effective.
Having an accurate ICP improves the potency of your email marketing campaign as it allows you to focus your marketing efforts on the audience that are most likely to benefit from your offerings and hence will convert easily.
#2 Generate content relevant to your ICP -
High quality and relevant content is a powerful long-term asset for any digital business and can drive a large number of audiences to sign up for your newsletter, opt for a free trial, etc.
However, it is not a focused enough approach good for lead generation.
Image Courtesy – Smart Insights
Once you have created an ICP, you will understand who your ideal customers are, what their problems are, what might interest them and what they may be looking for.
You need to use the following insight to generate relevant content for them.
Such focused content will fill your mailing list with an audience that matches your ICP.
#3 Create Clean and well-designed emails -
The importance of a good functional email design cannot be understated.
A visually pleasing email design that is both clean and functional combined with all the right content is an effective combination for ensuring high-quality lead generation.
A marketer needs to ensure that the right content is paired up with the right email design, that the content is easy to read and understand and that the content is concise enough to not bore the audience but plentiful to keep them engaged.
#4 Entice, Educate and Entertain -
Your Email Marketing campaign should not entirely be about just marketing your offerings.
The key to a successful email lead generation function is to warm up all your potential leads.
This can be done by providing them with emails that help them improve in some way, teach them something that can help them in their business, or provide them with content that entertains them just to break the monotony of business and marketing emails that a potential lead has to go through on a daily basis.
Building a relationship with your audience instills trust and confidence in them necessary for converting them into loyal customers.
#5 Offer personalization -
Adapting a personalized approach to email marketing improves the effectiveness and output of an email marketing campaign to a large degree.
Segmentation, cohort analysis, and other techniques can be used to enable personalization.
Image Courtesy – CX Insights
Personalization not only raises your conversion rate but also creates a sense of affinity towards your brand among your audience, and adds positively to how your brand is perceived and to your brand value.
Thus, the benefits of offering personalization in your email lead generation campaign spill over to other areas of your business too.
#6 Use Storytelling -
People love stories and are very receptive to the ideas and conclusions conveyed in this manner.
You can use this to your advantage by adopting storytelling for your emails to raise engagement and conversion rates.
Through emails, you can adopt storytelling to convey how a customer benefited by using your offerings, highlight a case study that asserts the need for your products, or show your audience how their business can benefit from the solutions you offer.
In this manner, you will be engaging with your audience in an effective and more organic way which can result in a positive feedback loop.
#7 Powerful, simple, and effective CTAs -
The main purpose of a CTA is to encourage and ensure an audience performs the suggested action.
An effective CTA will move a lead further inside the sales funnel by having them opt for a demo, free trial, or consultation with the sales team.
Image Courtesy – Bluleadz
You will have to use creative language to instill a sense of excitement, encouragement, urgency, or need in the minds of your audience to have them perform the needed action.
Your placement of the CTA and the design of the email also affect how effective a certain CTA can be, so experiment properly before deploying.
#8 Have your emails linked to well-designed landing pages -
Effective emails must lead an audience to an equally effective landing page.
The purpose of this landing page can vary from extracting more information from a lead to leading him to opt for a demo, free trial, or sales appointment.
While a well-designed email will lead an audience to a landing page, it is only half the work involved in the process of lead generation.
In order to convert an audience into a lead, you will need them to perform a certain action.
Those actions can be any of the ones stated above.
Thus, you need to ensure that the design, content, placement, and CTAs of the landing page are effective too.
#9 Make use of email marketing automation -
Be it email marketing or lead generation, both functions generate maximum outputs when combined with automation.
Automating the entire run of an email lead generation campaign frees up a lot of time and resources for your firm.
Image Courtesy – Soffront
Those can be reallocated to other functions stated above with the objective of improving the potency of your emails and landing pages.
Automation also enables you to offer a higher degree of personalization with relative ease.
This also streamlines the functions of the email lead generation campaign.
#10 Follow all the best practices of email marketing -
Using email marketing for lead generation has its own set of different requirements necessary for fulfilling the objectives but you will still need to follow all the best email marketing practicesalong with those mentioned in this blog.
While the tips mentioned in this blog will help you generate leads effectively using email marketing, it all still heavily depends on how good you are at email marketing, to begin with.
So, catchy subject lines, multi-device, and platform optimization, CAN SPAM compliance, routinely updating mailing lists and other best email marketing practices need to be followed as well.
To sum it all up
Email Marketing is still one of the most effective ways of marketing in the online space.
You can effectively use Email Marketing for Lead Generation by following the tips mentioned in this blog.
Your business will not only register growth in leads generated but that will also translate into growth of revenue and profits.
At the same time, the efficiency of email marketing combined with automation will help you conserve a lot of business resources.
Are you ready to grow your business using Email Lead Generation?
