How to Generate Leads With Email Marketing to Boost Revenues

Lead generation is the practice of initiating consumer interest in your products and/or services. In other words, a lead is any person or organization that develops an interest in your offerings. Companies inevitably cease to exist without the constant attention of consumers. So knowing how to generate leads for your business is extremely crucial. Fortunately, email marketing is the most effective method of lead generation and relatively easy to implement. This article provides tips on how to effectively run lead generation email campaigns.

Email marketing has a higher ROI than any other lead acquisition method. DMA’s Marketer Email Tracker revealed that email has an average ROI of 3228% or £32.28 return for every £1 spent. Also, worth noting before we proceed is that people don’t become leads just by interacting with company assets.

This is because consumers often interact with content to gain something. So they may not be interested in your products. For example, a person that downloads an eBook may have only been interested in its contents. Hence, your task is to turn that initial interaction into a real interest in your products via email campaigns. Here’s how to generate leads with email.

1. Leverage Existing Consumer Touchpoints

Every business starts at zero when building an email list but you can leverage existing consumer touchpoints. For example, a local electronics store can start asking prospects offline and online for their email addresses. However, people won’t always hand over their contact details without getting something in return.

So you’ll need an irresistible offer that entices consumers to give up their email addresses (e.g. a coupon or discount). This incentive is also called a lead magnet. Best to set up lead magnets in various known consumer touchpoints on your website and physical location.

However, you don’t want to appear forceful. Rather the goal is to be genuinely helpful. For instance, a clothing company that’s offering its visitors a free winter-ready checklist isn’t being pushy but helpful. After all, winter isn’t the best season to be missing a warm gear.

2. Nurture Potential Leads With Automation

Marketing automation software can enable businesses to nurture leads on autopilot. Email automation makes it possible to regularly deliver content specifically designed to meet the interest of prospects. Most email software offers automation features. For example, Benchmark is an email software that offers cart abandonment automation among others. That means email campaigns can be automatically sent to individuals that didn’t complete their transactions.

Leveraging automation for nurturing is important because as previously noted, just because someone exchanged details for an incentive doesn’t mean they’re interested. So this approach can focus your company’s resources on actual leads. For example, let’s assume a person exchanged their email to download one of your lead magnets. You can send them another offer in a few days using automation that requires the prospect to specify their product interest if any.

A simple question like, would you like one of our specialists to show you a free demo? Should do the trick. This approach qualifies prospects as leads before handing them off to the sales team, which improves lead quality. Furthermore, you lose nothing if the prospect decides to take the offer without trying out your product. This is because you can keep sending them free content periodically via automation for a chance to win them over someday.

3. Use Marketing Tracks

Marketing tracks come to mind concerning how to generate leads. A marketing track is an email series targeted at a specific kind of audience. Segment your list based on interests and deliver select email series to each group over time. You can have several marketing tracks running at the same time. Providing that you’re using email software that allows it like Constant Contact. That software supports the implementation of several marketing tracks simultaneously.

The purpose of a marketing track is to touch the potential lead consistently. Plus it keeps your brand top of mind. A marketing track can be long or short in terms of timeframe. However, emails must be tailored to suit the target audience. For example, a 7-day marketing track for consumers who are potentially interested in an online course may look like the following.

• Day 0: Welcome email and free PDF download link.
• Day 2: Company story.
• Day 4: Student testimonials.
• Day 5: Ask for the sale.
• Day 7: Offer a one-time discount with a time limit and ask for the sale again.

Leads can be moved to a general newsletter once they complete a marketing track without making a purchase. You can even move them to another marketing track with a different topic focus. But, make sure you occasionally revisit your marketing tracks to tweak or improve them.

4. Craft Good Emails

Your ability to convince or spark interest in the company’s products/services is critical. This is where great copywriting comes in. The email copy is the most important conversion factor concerning how to generate leads. Your copy needs to do the heavy lifting. Generally, there are four main aspects you need to get right and these are subject, clarity, engagement, and CTA (call-to-action). The subject line is what the prospect reads first before deciding whether they want to open your email. A good subject line is short and intriguing or in other words, it should pique their curiosity.

Clarity is about making sure your emails are easily understood and aren’t filled with industry jargon. Engagement is key to holding the prospect’s attention. A good way of increasing engagement is to use visuals such as images and videos. However, embedded videos may hurt email deliverability so make sure the content is hosted elsewhere like YouTube. Then use a clickable image to send prospects to the video.

Your CTA is super-important because it tells people what to do next (e.g. buy now, read the report, etc.). So make sure every email has one.

5. Advanced Behavior Triggers

You can probably already see how segmentation can enhance lead generation and overall ROI after our tip about marketing tracks. However, email automation enables businesses to use even more advanced behavior triggers. For example, you can automatically send out emails based on the links people click on.

Similarly, a company that sells a variety of products can have emails ready to go for each offer. The emails can go out whenever someone clicks through to certain links. But do not convert or buy anything. Other advanced behavioral triggers include the following. Though not a limited list.

• Send emails to prospects with zero behavior on record after a certain time frame.
• Email triggers based on demographic data such as age, income level, job type, etc.
• Emails sent based on survey results.
• Activity or engagement based triggers such as coupon usage, open rates, CTR (click-through rate), and more.
• Past purchase data such as amount spent, items bought, time of last purchase, and so on.
• Website behavior such as pages visited the most, content consumed, etc.

Now You Know How to Generate Leads

Any person that visits your website or physical store/office location is a potential lead or customer. So make sure you’re leveraging existing touchpoints and using automation to streamline workflow. Also, implement marketing tracks, set advanced behavior triggers, and craft great emails. Remember that the ultimate goal is to efficiently move leads down your sales funnel or pipeline so they can become paying customers. That means moving leads from awareness to interest to decision to action. Furthermore, consider integrating social media shareability in your emails so people can share them. This can increase brand reach and help you gain even more subscribers. Acquiring leads is important and running lead generation email campaigns are the most effective way of doing so.