A good email lead generation strategy is the foundation of any company. Your ROIs will go up and down based on how well you planned the strategies for generating leads.
Now, there are outbound tactics (where you reach the prospects) & there are inbound tactics (where the prospects find you). Combining both, you have cold calling, SMS, blog, YouTube videos, etc., and many other methods of generating leads.
But, I suggest you try emailing for lead generation. Wait, wait, hear me out.
As many as 99% of consumers check inboxes at least once daily. On top of that, if your audience is millennials, you’re more likely to increase the conversion rate via emails.
Don’t believe me?
Check out the below data to see why emailing is the best medium for lead generation.
Now that you know why I suggested emailing, read ahead to find the most effective email lead-generation tactics in 2023. Apply the below strategies and skyrocket your ROI within a couple of months, as I did.
Email Lead Generation – Everything You Need to Know
Definition of Lead Generation
Lead generation is the process of generating potential leads by attracting them to your brand via relevant content and events.
How to use Email for Generating Leads
There are 2 ways that you can use email to generate leads.
- 1. Inbound Marketing
- 2. Outbound Marketing
For inbound marketing lead generation
- Send emails related to content: Inbound lead generation is mainly based on content marketing. It can be written content such as a blog, audio content like a podcast, and video content like YouTube videos. A marketer sends emails, as newsletters, notifying an inbound lead about new or relevant content.
- Keep existing leads in the loop: In terms of sales, keeping existing customers is highly important. They are the ones who help you with a steady ROI. One can use emails to send relevant messages to keep existing customers in contact and ready for conversation.
- Send product launch emails: Sending product launch emails to existing leads is crucial to inbound lead generation strategies. To successfully launch a product, marketers can keep sending product launch emails to generate curiosity amongst their audience and make them pre-order the product.
- Send trigger emails: What do you do every time there’s a new visitor on your website, blog, or YouTube channel? Do you keep waiting for the new audience to send an email, or do you send the necessary email when you finally see there’s a new visitor?
Either way, it’s time-consuming and impossible to reach out to more than a dozen visitors. This is why you need to send trigger emails using various tools.
For outbound lead generation
- Send cold emails: A study by Hubspot says email marketing was a fruitful strategy for almost 64% of B2B marketers in 2021. It helped them achieve their business goals, increase ROI, and expand their business. This is why sending cold emails is such a popular outbound strategy, especially for businesses who don’t have the necessary content that can bring 15k visitors every month.
- Make follow-ups easier: Unlike cold calling and DMs, emailing makes follow-ups smooth for marketers. They can send one email to thousands of targets and automate different follow-ups based on their response using AI-based tools. Knowing how to craft a follow up email is a skill. Some marketers may use AI whilst others want to give it a more personal feel and do it themselves.
- Create drip campaigns: Emailing is the only medium where you can create a drip campaign by automating up to five or more emails to be sent within a pre-decided interval.
11 Effective Strategies to Ace Email Lead Generation in 2023
Target Consensual Leads
In email marketing, consensual leads are the audience members who have subscribed to your newsletters, YouTube channel, or blog. People who have responded positively to opt-in forms are more likely to convert from a visitor to a customer. You can go one step ahead and use double opt-ins to find high-quality leads.
Remember, consent goes a long way when it comes to audience engagement. For someone who wasn’t sure while subscribing to your content, your emails might appear spam.
However, for visitors who want to receive your content, your emails might be something they look forward to. So, it all boils down to finding niche customers and willing recipients among them.
Figure out your ICP
ICP or ideal customer profile includes characteristics of your potential valuable customers. For B2B email marketing, the ICP is created based on demographics, psychographics, business sector, company size, annual Revenue, buying pattern, etc.
The first step for creating ICP is creating a customer profile. The goal is to figure out your targeted audience–who they are, their background, what they like, when they buy, etc. One way to create a customer profile is to buy b2b data. From this data, you can then identify consumer patterns and find out the qualities or attributes that can make some of them your most valuable customers in the future.
Track Data on CRM
CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a feature on various tools where you can track all the interactions between your sales team and customers.
CRM can boost your lead generation process in many ways, from building long-lasting relationships with customers to creating the ideal customer profile (ICP). If you aren’t using a CRM, it’s time to do so. It will help you shortlist valuable customers and build a customer retention strategy, streaming your sales effort in the right direction.
Zendesk, Zoho, Hubspot, MailChimp, Nimble, Salesforce, etc., provide the most popular CRMs in the market. Some of them also provide free trials. So, you can easily give it a try and check out the results.
Here are some other ways in which you can benefit from a CRM.
- Find potential customers
- Improve customer support
- Understand customer’s behavioral pattern
- Show the reviews of the product or service
- Understand buying pattern
- Track the performance of your email campaigns
Organize Contact Data via ESPs
Many marketers overlook this point–ESPs provide effective methods to organize data about your contacts (customers). One can use those methods to organize contact data and improve marketing strategies.
You can do that by using tags or virtual sticky notes to mark a set of audiences in a particular category or tag.
Another way to organize contact data via ESPs is custom fields that store specific structured data, such as Instagram handles and birthday details.
The third most popular way to do the same is custom objects. It’s a custom record set that includes standard contact and account records.
Segment your Email List
Segmenting (email list) is the process of dividing your audience base into subcategories. The popular parameters for making these subcategories are common interests, customer needs, behavioral patterns, buying patterns, demographics, etc.
Segmentation in email lead generation can streamline your campaigns and significantly increase response and conversion rates.
Some of the other ways in which segmentation stands beneficial to email marketers are:
- Creating ICP
- Improve buying experience
- Send hyper-personalized email
- Generate high-quality leads
- Make the sales process user-friendly
- Find your niche audience
Send Trigger Emails
Trigger emails are emails that get automatically sent as a reaction to a user’s certain actions. For instance, a customer left some items in the cart, and they left the website without buying anything. You can automate an email that will reach their inbox minutes after they do this. Such emails are called trigger emails.
But, the above instance is not the only example. The common events that you can automate a trigger email are:
- New user sign-up
- Subscribing for newsletter
- New app or resources download
- A new webinar sign-up
- Reading blog
- Help in operating the product
- Help in purchasing the product
- Watching videos
Personalize the Email Content
Personalized marketing content is the ultimate trend of this new year and the most successful one of the previous year. Around 74% of marketers said they saw a significant increase in customer engagement by sending personalized content to their targeted customers.
There are various ways of personalizing an email. Some of the popular ways are:
- Use the “first name” of the recipient in the subject line, For example: Mark, you need to see this
- Talk about the recipient’s achievement in the subject line or the opening line, “Congratulations! You totally deserved the {recognition}“
- Mention the recipient’s pain point, “What do you think about {pain point}? Do you have any plans to address it in the near future?“
- Mention the recipient’s recent business changes in the email body, “Hey, I saw you have recently started email marketing. Did you know using a list-building tool can increase your open rates significantly?“
- You can send relevant content, such as audio, video, images, articles, etc., that the recipient will find interesting.
- You can also add games in the body of the email based on the recipient’s taste to make it personalized.
- Sending trigger emails is another method of personalized content.
- Automate personalized follow-ups to increase the feel of a one-to-one conversation between you and the receiver.
Design Carefully
Although the design is the last thing you will hear about in lead generation tips, it’s the first thing that catches the recipient’s attention. So, always design the email carefully. There are many email marketing tools that will provide custom email designs. You can either pick one or do it manually.
Either way, you must be very careful about the font you’re using, images, the CTA, the text format, etc. Highlight words you want your audience to see immediately, but don’t overdo them.
Recommended: 21+ Best Lead Magnet Templates to Boost Your Marketing Campaigns
Use Strong CTA
CTA or call-to-action is the button you put on an email so that your customer can take the action you are convincing them to take. Here are a few things you need to keep in mind while creating effective CTAs for lead-generating emails:
- Easily visible CTAs
- Clear and compelling language
- Create a sense of urgency
- Generate curiosity and a sense of mystery
- Improve conversion rates
- Use text that tells about an action, such as “Claim the offer“, “Seal the deal“, “Make your dream come true“, “Finish what you started“, etc.
- Keep the CTA as short as you can
- It must be catchy
Using Interesting Content
The first and last piece of advice that any marketer will give you is “Use better content“. Believe it or not, the most effective email lead generation tactic is using the right content. Your response rate, opening rate, and spam rate; everything will change based on what type of content you are sending. Here’s a brief summary of what can happen.
- Using sales-y words such as “100% free“, “100% satisfaction“, “best price“, etc. might increase your spam rate dramatically
- Personalized content will increase customer engagement
- Email content with interactivity, such as games & polls, will increase the response rate
- Good quality content can enhance the customer-brand relationship
- Inbound marketing content, such as blogs and YouTube videos, can establish a brand image for a larger audience
Use AI
It’s 2023, and more than ever, we are in an AI-dependent world. From asking Siri to dial a number to making a list (of email addresses) of your website visitors, we need AI-based tools. And there’s no shame in accepting it.
Dear fellow marketers, I recommend adding an AI-driven tool as the first thing you need this new year. Come on; it will save valuable time and energy for your team and let them do the work that needs their intelligence. Let the AI do the manual job.
If you are targeting more than 100 people in email campaigns, I recommend using software like Smartlead. Such tools not only create active leads and warm up the email but also provide multiple, high-quality senders’ addresses. Using multiple addresses helps you send emails in various lots without getting caught in spam filters.
Some other things you can AI-based tools are:
- Write email body
- Collect prospects’ personalized information
- Email templates
- To build an email list
- To send follow-ups automatically
- Centralized master inbox
- CRM
- To send triggered emails
Recommended: Best Practices for Generating Business Leads
Final Thoughts!
Dear fellow marketers, the above email lead generation tactics have helped me establish a seven-figure business in one year from scratch. I suggest you try the strategies that specifically match your recent plans and check the results.
I have seen profitable results, and I hope you will see them too. With this, I end the write-up here.
All the best for the new year! Let’s aim big!
