Customers are the very foundation upon which a business is built. Not only are they the exclusive source of revenue for a business, but they’re also the drivers of brand recognition. As a business, one of your primary goals should be to retain your current customers as well as attract new ones.
One of the most commonly used and effective ways of attracting new customers, whether you are a B2C (business to customer) or B2B (business to business) company, is through email marketing, a method as old as digital marketing itself.
In this article, we’ll go through how you can generate leads (and potential clients!) through email marketing, mainly focusing on some key strategic points that you should follow in order to succeed.
What is email marketing lead generation?
Email lead generation refers to generating leads by using opt-in email forms. Through these forms, you gather important bits of information about potential clients, such as their names, emails addresses, and more.
Having a lead generation strategy in place is essential since businesses depend on it to grow their customer base. If a business does not have a functional system for generating leads, it will struggle.
However, if you play your cards right, then not only will you be able to generate more leads, but you will also successfully convert those leads into paying customers. Let’s show you how.
How to properly do email marketing lead generation
The process of email marketing lead generation can be a straightforward one. But there are some points that you should pay close attention to for it to work properly, or else you won’t be getting any more customer engagement or revenue.
1. Identify your audience
The first and perhaps most important step in launching a successful email marketing lead generation campaign is identifying your target audience.
A target audience is based on what you consider to be your ideal clients. In other words, you want to create a target demographic that is most likely to convert. For example, if you own a plumbing company, your target audience would mainly consist of landlords and homeowners.
To better define your target audience, try answering the following questions:
- Where do they live?
- What are their jobs (title, industry, etc.)?
- What are their interests and hobbies?
- How would your products or services help solve the issues they’re having?
Once you answer these questions, you will have a clear and comprehensive idea of your target demographic. Now, it is time to move on to the creation process of the actual email marketing strategy.
2. Create catchy and concise emails
When it comes to email marketing lead generation, the overall design of your email is of great importance. It’s crucial that you have concise and clean emails. Additionally, emails should not be very long. Instead, be straight to the point but without coming off as overly professional or serious (depending on the nature of your business, of course!).
Design tips for email marketing lead generation
As for the design of your emails, here are some tips and tricks that you should follow when putting together your emails:
- Have an attention-grabbing subject line(s)
- Rely on plain fonts that are clear and easy to read. No need to go with something fancy
- Use an email design that is simple and clean, something that recipients of your email would appreciate
- Your email copy should feature concise, well-spaced wording. Make sure to highlight any bits of information that you deem more important than the rest
- Lastly, your CTA, that’s the call to action button, should stand out from the rest of the email. This can be achieved through the use of alternative colours and proper placement
Some of the aforementioned points are extremely important in the overall email creation process that they deserve an in-depth analysis of their own.
Subject lines
The subject line of your email is very important because it’s the sole thing that pushes your email recipients to click on it. Try to come up with ways to incentivise your recipients to click on your email. For instance, you can add an element of curiosity or urgency to your subject line.
You could also use a bold or Italic font to help grab the attention of your target audience. Such an approach can make or break your email marketing lead generation campaign since it all depends on your email open rates.
CTA (Call-to-action)
Your email should include a clear and interesting call-to-action (CTA). Interest, in this case, can be the result of you incorporating an element of mystery, excitement, or urgency. After all, the whole point of sending out emails is for users to click on your CTA.
Here are some tips that you can rely on when trying to write an effective CTA:
- Your CTA should include action-oriented bits of text. What do we mean by this? Well, anything that incentivises users to take a certain action. This can be achieved through sentences such as “download for free”, “order now”, “claim your coupon”, “start saving today”, “get 50% off now”, and more
- As you have already seen in the examples above, your CTA text should be short and concise. Two to four words are enough, nothing more, nothing less
3. Use automated emailing
Email automation refers to the process of relying on email software to automatically send out emails to a specific group of people at a specific time and date.
The most obvious advantage of email automation is the fact that once you set it up, it will run on its own while you focus your time and energy on the more important matters of running a business.
Another key advantage of email automation is the ability to send out emails to users whenever they perform a certain action. These include:
- Users to opt-in to your email list
- Sign up on your website
- Subscribe to a service
- Buy a product
- Register for an event (webinar, seminar, etc.)
- Etc
The benefits of email automation don’t stop at this. And it perhaps should come as no surprise that automated emails have proven to generate 320% more revenue than non-automated ones.
4. Email marketing lead generation: Use personalisation
Email personalisation refers to the act of targeting users based on data that you have already collected on them. Things such as their first name, their address, the last time they showed interest in your business, and more.
Personalisation is important because everyone wants to be perceived as an individual and not as someone who is labelled under a set of criteria. And according to a report done by HubSpot, more than 20% of digital marketers say that personalisation can drastically improve email engagement.
5. Be a source of valuable content
Yes, it’s easier to send out emails full of fluff content with the sole purpose of grabbing as many opens as possible. However, if you truly want people to opt-in, sign up, or interact with your business in general, then you need to provide them with useful and relevant content.
Remember our questions about the interests and pain points that your ideal audience might have? Well, this is where (and when) you put your answers to those questions to good use. Your content should be tailored to your target audience’s needs, interests, and behaviours. This is because, in the unfortunate situations where they find the content of your emails irrelevant, your open and conversion rates will be nothing short of disastrous.
6. Make sure your emails are mobile-friendly
In 2021, it was recorded that 81% of all emails are opened and read on mobile devices. That number was just 27% ten years prior to this. So, you can see the importance of having emails that are well-optimised for the mobile experience.
Here are some essential practices that every marketer should follow to ensure that their emails are mobile-friendly:
- Subject line length: A typical desktop computer will display about 60 characters of an email’s subject line. Mobile devices, however, can only display anything between 25 to 30 characters. So, you can already see where this is going
- Content length: In order to ensure a mobile-friendly experience, make sure that your content is concise and well-organised. Rely on short and consumable chunks of content
- CTA placement: Most people who open emails on their mobile devices tend to have a short attention span. That’s why you want the whole aim of your email (the CTA) to be front and centre. We recommend placing your call-to-action button near the top of your email. Also, make sure that it’s at least 44 x 44 pixels in size
7. Email marketing lead generation: Split test
Split testing, or A/B testing, allows you to better optimise the copy of your marketing emails as well as your strategy as a whole. Every marketer out there knows that there is no such thing as a perfect email copy. There’s always room for improvement – an improvement that is only possible through testing different variations of your email.
These different versions of your email shouldn’t necessarily be overhauls of an initial version. Instead, try to test two variations of one element at the time (CTA, body text, subject line, design, etc.).
Email marketing is hard, so let us help
There’s no denying that email marketing lead generation is one of the hardest marketing channels to get right. If you feel overwhelmed by it, book a discovery call with us today. We’ll show you how we can make the process easier.
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