Email outreach remains, in most industries and especially for B2B sales, one of the most effective marketing tactics out there. Since its performance can be tracked through email analytics and the cost per lead is easy to calculate, you can also determine the ROI (Return On Investment) for email marketing campaigns very accurately. Where, though, do these leads come from in the first place? How do you go about building a list of prospects?
In this guide, we’ll talk about:
Learn what email leads are, their different types, and why they are vital for lead generation. Discover the strategies and benefits of email lead generation and the best practices for a successful campaign.
There’s a whole world of potential customers out there; the hard part of the sales process is often just getting in touch with them. This is where email leads come in: basically, these are just addresses and other contact information for businesses that are likely to become customers.
There are various ways to collect this data, such as email search engines. For best results, though, you’ll want to go a step further. The most valuable email lists also incorporate:
Clearly, simply compiling a mass of email addresses isn’t enough. In particular, any kind of mass outreach campaign relies on having authentic, legitimate addresses for the people you wish to target. This is why BookYourData, unlike its competitors, prides itself on a guaranteed 97% accuracy rate and real-time address verification as standard.
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Depending on your business model, generating email leads could well form the bedrock of your marketing strategy. In fact, compared to other sales channels, lead generation produces 50% more conversions, a statistic that can be further improved by carefully building on each prospect’s existing engagement level.
In particular, here’s why directing more effort to lead generation bears fruit:
Of course, there is an art and science to email marketing. To start with, instead of simply spamming all potential prospects, each message must be personalized for better response rates. A good starting point for this task is qualifying leads in terms of their conversion potential. The following categories are often used:
These prospects have not even made a start on their customer journey. In fact, they may never have heard of your company or the solution you offer. These may be nurtured over time in order to increase their conversion potential.
If a potential customer has seen some of your ads or perhaps interacted with your brand on social media, they’re considered warm leads. They may even have expressed a degree of interest in your products, but aren’t very close to making a buying decision.
These prospects are on the verge of taking action and should be followed up promptly. They may have approached you with specific questions or even requested a demo of your services.
Clearly, a different sales approach is needed in each of these cases. Often, these kinds of scoring systems are integrated into CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, allowing your sales team to prioritize prospects with the highest levels of interest and engagement.
In a marketers’ perfect world, your entire target audience would consist of hot leads and some basic follow-up would be all that’s needed to convert them. In real life, sourcing high-quality email leads is often the most difficult part of email outreach.
This is why you need a game plan to follow; very often, this will include several of the following strategies:
Creating content that sells becomes much easier when you know who you’re speaking to. While much of email outreach can be automated through workflows that take advantage of email marketing software, personalization remains key to engaging your audience.
With a little research, your email list can be segmented by interest based on demographic information like age, location, interest area, and other factors, allowing you to cater to different content preferences. In theory, every group of prospects sharing such characteristics forms a new segmentation category.
Chances are that your top customers all have certain things in common. By incorporating their common factors into an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), your communication can be optimized for higher conversion rates by actively targeting similar prospects.
In a large-scale digital marketing environment, you’ll typically divide customers according to things like their purchase history (how much and how often they spend money with you) and campaign interaction history (by, for example, tracking email open rates and click-through rates). This data can then be combined with information from lead-generation tools to improve your marketing efficiency.
If you have something of value to offer visitors to your website – a newsletter, white papers, free trial subscriptions, etc. – you can turn these into lead magnets by asking readers to leave their names and other information before downloading this content. Subscribers’ details are captured through forms, after which they’re integrated into CRM software along with other analytics data.
Email leads that are solicited through opt-in campaigns in exchange for something a prospect can use in their own business are typically of high quality. Their interest in particular industry pain points, for instance, can tell you something about how far down the sales funnel they find themselves. Of course, even if they unsubscribe at a later date, their contact details will remain in your database.
Hot leads are often acquired via landing pages: by visiting your website, they’ve already indicated a willingness to learn more about your company and its products. Naturally, this works best when the “front page” of your website is visually appealing and easy to navigate.
Often, the best advice is to get to the point as soon as possible. Highlight your brand’s USP (Unique Selling Point), quickly build social proof, and don’t neglect to include a CTA (Call To Action). Ideally, you’ll provide visitors with an easy way to contact you and ask for help with their buyer journey; this also lets you capture their contact information.
The amount of interest and motivation of someone visiting your website can be measured by engagement metrics like time on page, session duration, and pages per session. These numbers tie directly into lead scoring and can be used to determine a lead’s qualification status.
When these records are enriched with additional data for targeting, you’re well-placed to direct more of your sales efforts to the most valuable prospects that need to be responded to quickly. When doing email outreach, for instance, this means that you should carefully track figures like each person’s open rate and click-through rate.
Whether you’re looking for a new mechanic or a cutting-edge SaaS package, word-of-mouth referrals carry an enormous amount of weight – over 90% of buyers rely on it. Given how likely sales leads obtained in this way are to convert, it makes sense to reward existing customers with a small discount or similar incentive every time they send potential sales your way.
Attracting exactly the type of people who are likely to need your services is always a challenge. There is one powerful tool at your disposal for doing precisely that, though: host a webinar covering a topic your company just happens to be uniquely capable of addressing.
This can be somewhat complicated to set up: you’ll need to identify a trending issue to talk about, design an engaging talk, and offer information that’s not generally available. Once everything is in place and you can get a sufficient number of individuals to attend, though, you have a good opportunity to start a productive conversation with a large proportion of them. Email finder tools, like BookYourData’s pay-as-you-go service, can be used to provide valid email addresses for all participants.
While the kind of super-influencers you see on YouTube and Instagram may not be useful additions to your marketing efforts, you’d be surprised at how many people are influential within certain communities. Providing either them or their friends with gift cards, loyalty program points, and other tokens of appreciation encourages them to spread the word.
More highly motivated prospects are more likely to supply you with their email addresses in exchange for information pertinent to their industry. On your blog, for instance, you may offer relevant tips on applying automation in their business, then require visitors to opt in to your mailing list to view that article.
This kind of premium content has to be promoted – on your website, using paid ads, etc. – in order to ensure a wide reach. You may also find that many people use throwaway addresses for these kinds of subscriptions; it’s best to vet leads obtained in this way using an email verification tool.
By now, it should go without saying that websites, online forms, and email templates should all be responsive, i.e. display correctly on both large and small screens. Unfortunately, this aspect of email lead generation still sometimes falls through the cracks. When users of different kinds of devices are analyzed for campaign effectiveness, people who use mobile phones to view content often lag behind.
Ideally, you’ll store information on typical device usage patterns in your CRM software, along with items like acquisition date, opt-in status, and overall lead score. Even better, certain lead generation services, including BookYourData, provide an indication of each lead’s preferred device type.
Using email lead generation to acquire and nurture new customers can yield impressive results: almost 90% of marketers report using it effectively. However, if done poorly, it won’t work well and may even backfire. The following principles can often spell the difference between success and failure:
1. Customer-First Approach
However eager you are to tell your audience about your company, this needs to be done from the perspective of what matters to them: what value you can provide and how you can solve their problems.
2. Craft Compelling Subject Lines
A concise headline that conveys a sense of urgency captures readers’ attention and significantly increases email open rates.
3. Hyper-Personalize Your Emails
When cold emails are targeted based on demographics and interests, recipients are more likely to relate to their content and act on their recommendations.
4. Keep It Short and Sweet
Busy people have limited attention spans, so get to the point as quickly as possible. When drafting an email, try to draw a straight line between the subject and the call to action.
5. Avoid No-Reply Emails
Imagine an email that leaves prospects wanting to know more…but without providing any way to ask follow-up questions or get in touch with a salesperson! Customer journeys become much smoother, and unsubscribe rates lower, when they can simply reply to a message.
At the most basic level, the role of email outreach is simply to generate sales. Along the way, though, you’ll find that this approach comes with numerous other advantages.
Whereas some forms of advertising are restricted to a certain region or niche, email campaigns can broaden your sales team’s reach significantly.
Even if some interaction with a prospect doesn’t result in a sale, you can take the time to sow the seeds of a new relationship that may bear fruit in the future.
Personalized emails that recipients find worth reading help to keep your company at the forefront of potential customers’ minds, increasing the impact of other marketing efforts.
When you automate your email marketing, you can reach thousands of prospects almost at the touch of a button. Even at a low conversion rate, this translates into a very effective ROI.
The goal of email lead generation is not only to solicit new business but also to increase the amount spent by each customer by fostering greater loyalty.
In the world of email marketing, quantity is good but quality is better. Optimizing your campaign around conversion rates is generally the way to go – you can always strive for greater volume once you’ve seen that prospects respond to your messaging.
Curating and expanding your email list is an important and ongoing part of this process. You will need to invest in an email lookup tool and cold emailing software, as well as implement ways to track results and analyze your successes. With a little bit of effort, though, email lead generation significantly outperforms comparable marketing tactics.
Purchasing an email list from a reputable company isn’t in any way prohibited. However, you do need to ensure that you comply with other laws, particularly anti-spam legislation.
While one email per week is easily forgotten, too many can overwhelm and frustrate recipients. In general, two or three messages per week seems to be the sweet spot.
This figure depends entirely on your marketing goals and the nature of your audience. Keep in mind that a consistent stream of high-quality messages is less intrusive than a sudden flurry of emails that have no value to the recipient.
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