Digital-age marketers have many different options to choose from when it comes to staying in touch with both existing and potential customers these days.
But it’s still the simplest, most familiar method that yields the best results — good, old-fashioned email marketing.
The versatility and approachability of email make it an ideal fit for establishing and strengthening relationships with your customers.
It’s excellent for boosting credibility and fattening your bottom line. And yes, it’s terrific for generating high-quality leads your company can grow with when you leverage fundamental email lead generation techniques like the following.
Keep reading to learn more!
1. Know your target audience
Successful email lead generation starts with a deep understanding of the people you’re looking to reach — your target audience.
If you haven’t already done so, crafting some detailed buyer personas to represent critical portions of your audience can help you zero in on what they’re like as people and as consumers.
- Where do your ideal customers live?
- In what industries do they work, and how much do they earn?
- What do they like to do in their spare time?
- Where do they prefer to get their information, and how do they go about making buying decisions?
- What worries do they have, and what problems are they looking to solve? How can your products and services help with that?
Figure out the answers to questions like these in regards to your customers.
Then think about how and where your products fit into their lifestyles, as this will be the basis of your best outreach emails.
2. Build an opt-in email list
Although buying an email list may seem like the easiest, quickest way to get a solid email marketing lead generation strategy moving, don’t go that route.
You have no way of knowing the people on the receiving end of your emails will actually be interested in them, so they don’t truly help generate high-quality leads.
Instead, build your email list honestly via avenues like free resource offers, newsletter sign-ups, special offer pop-ups, social media, and other methods that allow users to opt-in voluntarily.
You want people who not only want to receive your email but who will be expecting to see it in their inboxes.
3. Organize your list into segments
Email that’s generic, cookie-cutter, and exactly the same for every recipient don’t inspire people even to open it, let alone read it and click through when they’re done.
However, personalized mailings based on customer behavior, sales funnel position, and sales history generate actual results.
Segmenting your email list according to criteria like these is the key to email marketing lead generation that works.
Create email series designed to nurture different types of leads and build lasting relationships with paying customers.
4. Craft irresistible subject lines
It’s estimated that the average person receives between 100 and 120 emails every single day.
Many of those emails come from brands they’ve chosen to receive mail from, but they’re naturally not going to have the time or inclination to open every single one.
That’s why the right subject line is an absolute must. Great subject lines are concise but informative, letting the recipient know exactly what they can expect to see if they decide to open it.
However, the most compelling examples are also witty, clever, funny, or personal enough to pique the person’s curiosity.
5. Keep your content clean and easy to read
Getting your email recipient to open your email is only part of what it takes to generate a successful lead.
The content of your email also needs to hold their attention now that you’ve got it. The best way to do this is to keep things clean, concise, and easy to scan at a glance.
Most of your contacts aren’t going to read every single word of your email. They’re going to skim it in an effort to get the gist of what you’re saying and zero in on the most important parts.
Short content, eye-friendly fonts, simple designs, and well-formatted text all help to accomplish this.
6. Close with a strong call-to-action
At the end of the day, your customers want to be told exactly what you’d like them to do next once they’ve finished reading your marketing emails.
That’s why every email should close with a strong, clear, compelling call-to-action (CTA).
Many effective CTAs convey a sense of urgency or excitement via action-oriented text to encourage a clickthrough.
Others use creative language to get the reader curious about what might be on the other side of that link. The idea is to convince the reader that they need to act now to avoid missing out on something incredible.
7. Provide your recipients with real value
Digital-age consumers are busy and have a lot vying for their attention on any given day.
They’re not going to waste their time on fluffy, empty email content that doesn’t leave them feeling appropriately enriched, informed, or entertained. Send one too many messages like that, and they just might unsubscribe altogether.
Never send out an email just for the sake of doing so, either. Always make adding value to your customers’ lives a top priority.
Know their pain points, understand their goals, and familiarize yourself with any questions they might have.
Craft intent-based emails that speak directly to the recipient’s immediate needs. Address longer or deeper topics across a series of emails to avoid overloading people with too much info all at once.
8. Use personal email IDs
Remember, successful email lead generation efforts feel relevant, timely, and personal.
People are highly protective of their privacy these days, so their brains eventually learn not to “see” non-personalized branded email when it appears in their inboxes.
One way to help your email make that connection with a recipient is to use personal email IDs when and where you can.
When a recipient sees their name in the subject line, it feels much more like there’s a personal relationship there — something substantial they can trust.
9. Encourage your audience to engage
Successful email marketing lead generation should always aim to establish and nurture a genuine relationship with the customer on the other end at some point.
In a day and age that finds consumers used to engaging directly with brands via social media and similar avenues, emails that encourage a two-way conversation are highly effective.
Try closing some of your email messages with CTAs that request direct feedback or encourage your recipients to join an ongoing conversation across your social media profiles.
Not only does this help your customers learn to trust you, but you could gain valuable insight into how they think.
10. Use lead scoring to strengthen your efforts
Genuinely successful marketing is about more than simply coming up with the right messages to send.
It’s also about sending them to the right people at opportune times — preferably when they’re primed and ready to make a specific decision. Lead scoring can help with that.
Lead scoring is the process of ranking your leads according to their perceived value as potential customers, the better to help you zero on those most likely to convert.
It’s also an effective way to kick your email marketing lead generation efforts into high gear.
Automation is a great way to get started. For example, let’s say a visitor to your website took a long look at a particular purple blouse before leaving.
If you’ve captured their email, you can try converting them by emailing them a unique automatic discount opportunity on the same blouse.
11. Embrace gated content
Gated content is an incredibly effective way to encourage a lead to hand over their personal contact information.
For one thing, it’s a non-invasive way to make that connection. It’s also a way to offer that person something of great perceived value — a terrific way to build trust and show them what your brand is all about right off the bat.
Great gated content can take many different forms. It can be a free ebook, special report, or super-timely video.
The only rule is that it be something valuable that feels like a genuine bargain to receive in exchange for a simple email address.
Gated content is also a great way to further prime that leads to convert at some point in the future, as they’ll be getting a fantastic sampling of what your brand and products bring to the table.
Make it snappy, make it irresistible, and make it count.
12. Use A/B testing
Effective email marketing lead generation isn’t just something you accomplish once.
The idea is to keep improving your content, targeting, and delivery methods, so each campaign is more effective than the last.
A/B testing (also known as split testing) is a great way to accomplish this.
It involves testing two or more versions of the same email message to determine which language, designs, offers, and content concepts are the most effective.
You can also use split testing to optimize details like send times, subject lines, personalization tags, CTA types, colors, fonts, and more.
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When it comes to email marketing lead generation campaigns that yield tangible results you can take into the future with you, it’s all about implementing the right techniques at the right times.
It’s also about getting all the little details just right — details like color, font, spacing, and formatting — and the right email resources can be a massive help in that regard.
Get started with our dynamic email template kit for a stunning collection of Rock Content’s very own custom email templates.
They take the guesswork out of crafting beautiful, effective first-touch emails, conversion emails, nurturing emails, and so much more!
