Email marketing is an inexpensive yet effective method of generating leads for businesses. It’s a cost-effective way to reach out to your target audience and create awareness about your product. Email marketing has the advantage over other marketing campaigns in that it nurtures intimate relationships with the audience.
The best way to generate leads with email marketing is to create an email list of potential customers. You can do this by giving away a freebie or discount in exchange for the customer’s email address. The more you offer, the higher the conversion rate will be.
But probably every other business is doing it out there. So, there are a few email lead generation best practices you need to adopt in order to attract quality leads that can turn into conversions.
What’s email marketing?
Email marketing is a simple marketing strategy involving coercing your audience to subscribe to your email list, and walking them through the entire sales funnel until a conversion is done. Every business needs a constant flow of new clients while the existing ones are made aware of the business’ developments so they don’t consider the competition. That’s what email marketing aims to achieve.
Closing leads with email marketing is also an important part of generating leads and it’s not as difficult as you might think. You just need to send them a follow-up email about their purchase and offer them another freebie or discount to get them interested in buying from you again.
Why Should You Have a Lead Generation Strategy in Place?
Email leads are the most crucial part of developing any business’ client base and ensuring there’s a consistent sales conversion. With the right lead generation strategy in place, you can nurture your leads and guide them through your sales funnel to become the most trusted customers.
This claim is a research-proven fact as 80 percent of business owners and marketers believe email marketing is an effective strategy of consistent leads generation. With an effective lead generation strategy, you can target a specific audience and boost your brand’s popularity. with an increased lead, you’re more likely to drive more sales and eventually make conversions.
While there exist so many ways of generating leads, using email has proven to be the most cost-effective method for small, medium, and large enterprises.
7 Effective Email Lead Generation Best Practices to Drive Conversions
Just like with other forms of marketing, an effective strategy can do the magic of generating email leads that eventually make sales. But even with the best strategy, without consistency and fine-tuning, it can be difficult to achieve desired results because not every strategy will work the same for everyone.
Here are the 7 top email lead generation best practices you can implement and tweak to your business’ marketing model with emails.
Implement The Lead Scoring Technique
The determinant to whether a strategy will work or not is reaching the right customers at the right time, with the right message. It’s a tedious process to achieve all that, but with lead scoring, it shouldn’t be. What lead scoring does is it helps you filter and prioritise leads, ensuring that those clients or audiences that will most likely respond positively to your emails are given a higher priority.
Lead scoring can be done through email marketing automation. A past client who visited your site and signed up for your newsletter is more likely to purchase through an email if you coerce them with a discount on a product.
Your subject line should be more convincing
How you write a subject line dictates whether your email will be marked as read or the lead will open and read it. So, craft your email subjects appropriately to clearly address the leads’ issues. Don’t forget to personalise them and invoke an action out of them, such as “check out these latest trending phones” or “download our eBook to get a discount.”
Avoid spamming the leads
You probably do constantly receive some emails from a marketer and feel like they’re a nuisance. If you’re to send emails to your email list, don’t use that strategy of sending out emails almost every other hour; even if the content benefits the lead, it can turn into irritation.
Instead, plan your emails appropriately with a proper schedule. Determine the most appropriate number of emails on a subject that the client can tolerate – usually 2-3 emails a week. Another thing, brevity matters a lot. Make your email content precise, engaging, and convincing.
Make use of images a habit in your emails
Normally, humans prefer images to texts because they’re easier to comprehend. If you can, make the bigger part of your marketing emails an image for quick comprehension. Remember, most people usually have 2 to 3 seconds to determine if your email is relevant. And an image can deliver the message much faster than text.
If you’re to use texts in large portions, bear in mind the formatting. Embrace the use of simple plain fonts. They should be easy to view and read for every recipient. Make use of templates that clearly define your message to the readers’ eyes. Ensure important information is stressed by highlighting or bolding. Also, bear in mind the text spacing to make it easier for anyone to read and understand your message.
Make CTAs a norm in your emails
Call-to-action is very key in pushing the reader to take action after reading your emails. Don’t overdo it though. CTA should be just one per email. And should be compelling to make the readers act on your email.
Coming up with CTA requires incorporating a strong creative language to encourage readers to act. Your call-to-action should include the element of excitement, urgency, and mystery. Your CTA should employ action-oriented texts, be precise, and invoke urgency.
Employ gated content in your email campaigns
Gated content has proven to be very effective in taking clients through the sales funnel using emails. These are contents that are made available to the reader once they provide some information, such as their contact information, birthdays, etc.
Any email marketing campaign using gated content has a higher chance of turning conversions, subject to the message being attractive to the reader. They present a non-invasive style of convincing the readers to subscribe to your emails.
A simple way to use gated content is to suggest to the content reader to download your podcast, eBook, or article in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter.
Make use of social media in your email marketing strategy
Social media is also an effective way of growing your email list and getting people to subscribe to your newsletter. Be creative with your social media posts by including convincing CTA as well as schedule posts on autopilot.
Ensure you’ve also promoted your social profiles and account via your list. That way, you can quickly grow both your social media audience and email list without spending lots of resources on each. Make use of Twitter and Facebook marketing tools to improve your email marketing.
Final Thoughts
Email marketing is the most intimate way of reaching your audience and converting them to loyal customers. but it must be traded carefully, else you risk losing a client or prospect completely. Try your level best to avoid spamming clients but instead time their schedules to send them surprise emails during their birthdays or big events in their lives. This goes a long way in nurturing an intimate business relationship that can generate more sales revenue in the long run. Adopt these email lead generation best practices and see your results soar.
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