- April 15, 2022
- Posted by: Christina Milian
- Category: blog
Several strategies can help you grow your business faster, including e-mail lead generation. Sending personalized commercial messages to individuals is common practice. We all know that today, e-mail marketing is undoubtedly the most effective and profitable marketing channel.
However, technology and regulations are increasingly limiting intrusive prospecting practices. If you are here, you know it, getting a response to a prospecting e-mail is not an easy exercise. According to a Hubspot survey, getting traffic and lead generation is the largest difficulty for 61 percent of marketers. To help you make e-mail an effective means of lead generation, we have gathered 10 tactics to know about e-mail lead generation in order to give you a reference and areas for improvement for your campaigns.
What is E-mail Lead Generation?
E-mail lead generation is the set of marketing actions and techniques implemented to generate leads or prospects through e-mail. Simply put, a lead generation strategy is a targeted plan to attract new leads and convert them into customers. Here are the main essential steps for your e-mail lead generation strategy to have optimal results:
- Create quality content to seduce your visitors
- Regularly send e-mails to your potential customers to stay in touch with them.
- Promote your content and brand on social media
- Invite your visitors to give you their e-mail addresses in return for an eBook, a newsletter, or a free trial.
- Post guest posts on other websites to drive traffic to yours
It is called Inbound Marketing. It is quite simple, and yet, many companies do not try it!
Why is e-mail lead generation effective?
E-mailing is still an effective channel! The more leads you have in your database, the greater your chances of increasing your customers and sales.
Suppose you have 500 prospects in your subscriber base, with an average conversion rate of 5% for your e-mail campaigns. This means that you will be able to convert 25 people into customers. But if you have 10,000 prospects in your database. With the same conversion rate, you will convert 500 prospects into customers. So you can sell 500 products instead of 25.
Email is considered as one of the most significant lead generating methods by 42% of businesses. Hence it is important to implement an e-mail lead generation strategy. That is why you need to build a list of qualified prospects who are ready to engage with you.
Top 10 Tactics to Double Response Rate in Email Lead Generation
Double your response rate with more personalization
Personalizing your e-mails is very important. This shows your prospects that you care about their response and that you intend to write to them specifically. In addition, personalization influences deliverability. By enriching your e-mail with variable data like thier name or their company name, you make each of your copies unique. This reduces the risk of your e-mail being blocked by spam filters.
If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you. – Zig Ziglar
With that in mind, try to include around three personalized snippets that contain unique information about the leads that you have come across during your research. You can complement their work, congratulate them on something, or urge them to consider what you discovered.
Short objects work best.
Shane Snow, co-founder of Contently, and Jon Youshaei, founder of EveryVowel, conducted an experiment to determine which types of objects work best for prospecting.
Two types of objects were used:
- A short and vague: “Quick question.”
- A longer but specific one: “15s question for an e-mail search”
The open rates for these two objects were similar. However, interestingly, the response rate for the short object is significantly higher. Thus, 66.7% of the overall responses come from this object. If the message subject is too long, it will be cut off, and your reader won’t know what it is and might ignore it. This is especially important on mobile, as the subject character length is even shorter. This is why more than 85% of objects have less than 90 characters!
Integrate a clear and precise call-to-action on all your e-mails
To increase the conversion rate, work on your CTA to make it as unique and clear as possible! Use creative language to grab your prospects’ attention and convince them to follow through.
Offer freemium content to collect contact information.
To collect contact information, gated content and content upgrades are particularly effective. For example, you have created an eBook of about 10,000 words, full of important images and data. Take advantage of it by revealing only the introduction! In other words, if your readers want to continue reading, they must give you their contact information and therefore join your mailing list.
Clever, no?
Encourage your readers to forward your e-mails to reach more prospects.
Want to recruit more leads? Use a good old method that has proven itself! Indeed, today, word-of-mouth is no longer necessarily oral. In many cases, the e-mail forwarding is sufficient. So, at the end of each e-mail, insert a sentence like: “Did you like this e-mail? Do not hesitate to pass it on to your colleagues!”
Few of your subscribers will. On the other hand, those who do can generate many new leads for your business without you having to lift a finger. It’s just a good way to do marketing!
You can triple your response rate with follow-up e-mails.
Your potential customers process a lot of e-mails every day and very often miss your proposal even if it might interest them. Campaigns with 1 to 3 e-mails in a series have a response rate of approximately 9%, while campaigns with 4 to 7 e-mails in a row have a response rate of about 27 percent, which is three times higher.
Follow-ups are there to remind your prospects that you have tried contacting them before, but they may have been too busy to get back to you the first time. That doesn’t imply you should bombard your prospects’ inboxes with as many follow-ups as possible until they give up and contact you.
Watch the competitors
Since your competitors also started with an empty e-mail database, take inspiration from their practices. The goal is not to copy them but to do better! Pay particular attention to their visuals, their writing style, and their presence on social networks. If one of your competitors offers, for example, an ebook as a customer magnet to collect contact information, offer much more interesting content, such as a video course.
Make sure that the e-mail is easy to read.
To generate more leads, prefer a clean design for your e-mails. Make them nice and easy to read regardless of their screen, desktop, tablet, or mobile. Deliver your prospecting e-mails in plain text, with links relevant to the content of the e-mail.
Fuel your mailing list with engaging content
To further set yourself apart from the competition, provide the best possible user experience at every touchpoint. Remember that if you send high-value content every time, your subscribers are more likely to respond to your e-mails. This may be :
- A little-known trick that will help your prospects with a specific problem,
- Or a step-by-step video that guides them to achieve a goal.
In short, make sure the content is attractive!
Approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service. — Brian Tracy
Set up lead scoring to qualify your prospects
It is important to identify who is ready to be converted into future customers among your prospects. For this, setting up a lead scoring is a must! The goal is to prioritize your leads in order to reach the right people at the right time. With a good scoring system, you will predict over time which prospects are most likely to become customers.
Wrapping Up
Setting up an e-mail lead generation strategy is essential if you want to increase your turnover and rapidly develop your business. Each of these ten techniques described above has been demonstrated to be useful in the long run, especially for small and medium-sized firms. Start using them in your e-mail marketing today to expand your customer base.
