Effective lead generation is crucial for any business’ success. Lead generation helps businesses find potential clients that are interested in their products or services. Potential clients will turn into paying clients by the time they trusted the brand and product.
There are several marketing strategies that work effectively for lead generation such as paid ads, social media, SEO and email marketing. However, out of all the strategies, email marketing seems to be the best method for lead gen.
What is email marketing for lead generation?
Email marketing is a combination of marketing strategies that utilize emails. Email marketing includes cold emailing, email newsletters, and email automation.
1. Cold emailing
Cold emailing is simply sending emails to people that have the highest probability of becoming interested in your product (prospects). It’s called cold emailing because the majority of these people haven’t known about your brand and product yet.
Successful cold emailing relies heavily on how you generate prospects. The more relevant and up-to-date the prospects and data about them are, the better the chance your cold emailing campaigns are going to perform.
Cold emailing is relatively simple to start with, however, it can become a challenging and complex task when running on a large scale.
2. Email newsletters
Email newsletters are news, information, or promotions about your brand and product in form of emails. Email newsletters can be sent automatically or manually by businesses to a large number of newsletter subscribers.
Newsletter subscribers are people that have signed up for your newsletters. They agreed and are interested in receiving more information and offers from you.
Sending email newsletters is a great way to generate leads and sales. Many businesses around the world are relying on this strategy for their success. This strategy requires time and effort to build up a good number of subscribers, however, it’s quite affordable for many businesses.
3. Email automation
While cold emailing and email newsletters can be run and managed automatically using email automation software, it doesn’t end there. Email automation can help businesses significantly in some other ways such as:
- Sending automated email sequences based on visitors’ or users’ activities with the websites or apps.
- Sending automated email follow-ups based on how recipients interacted with the first emails.
- Email automation software collects and presents performance metrics in an intuitive way to help businesses optimize their campaigns for optimal results.
For large companies, email automation plays a huge part in their success. Email automation software is becoming more powerful with the help of AI.
However, not all email automation tools are helpful. Some of the software may house malware and malicious entities that can harm your computer and leak your data.
Email marketing pros and cons
Every digital marketing strategy has its own pros and cons, and so does email marketing. Let’s mention some of the most common email marketing pros and cons below. Please note that the following email marketing pros and cons are not accurate for all niches.
Email marketing pros
- Email is the preferred way of communication for professionals
- Email marketing is affordable for most businesses, especially when comparing it to other methods such as paid ads.
- Email marketing automation is powerful
- Cold emailing and email newsletters are relatively easy to go about
- Email marketing can reach a huge number of people fast at an affordable price
Email marketing cons
- Email marketing can be a complex task, this is especially true with email automation
- If not done properly, it can harm your domain and business image (your domain can be blacklisted)
Email marketing for lead generation best tips
Without applying the tips below, you’re very likely missing out on huge potential.
1. Cold emailing best tips
- Using a reliable prospect database to generate excellent contacts fast can boost your lead generation performance significantly
- Use 2 or 3 email addresses to send cold emailing campaigns. In the beginning, each email address should not be used to send more than 50 emails/day.
- Warm up your sending email addresses properly
- Set up DKIM, SPF and DMARC properly for deliverability.
- Email content should be concise and presented well in bullet points for readability
- Avoid spam-triggering words such as free, $, buy now, etc in the email subject
- Avoid sending too many emails too often
- Utilize email automation software
- Personalize your emails as much as possible
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2. Email newsletters
- Use email automation tools or features to schedule your sequence of emails based on your subscribers’ activities
- Do not send too many emails too often
- Email newsletters should be concise and clear. Quality over quantity, take time to make them beautiful and impressive.
- Use CTAs to motivate clicks
- Different email newsletters should be created and sent to different groups of subscribers.
- Monitor performance closely and make necessary adjustments
3. Email automation
- Relevant and personalized emails are crucial
- Segment your audience for optimal emails such as segment 1: people added items to cart, segment 2: people completed their purchases, etc
- Take time to test your email automation settings to make sure they are working perfectly
- Set goals for as many campaigns as possible
- Constantly analyze the performance metrics and optimize your campaigns
- Take time to learn and test new features and updates.
Conclusion
Email marketing is incredibly valuable not only for lead generation but also for other essential tasks such as lead nurturing as well.
Email marketing can do harm to your business if not done right and watched closely. Make sure you keep an eye on everything in your email marketing campaigns. Every email software will let you send test emails, you should definitely do that before setting your campaigns live.
Also, checking the emails on different devices is also recommended. This is done because the email design may appear wrong when being displayed on different screen sizes and resolutions.
Fast and effective lead generation relies on how fast you generate high-quality prospects. Ads are welcomed, however, using a reputable B2B contact database is way faster and more affordable for your business.
If you need expert advice and guidance for email marketing, don’t hesitate to send us a message at [email protected] or via our live chat support. Our support is available on any given day including weekends and holidays.