Email marketing has become an indispensable part of any successful digital marketing strategy. It gives businesses a direct and cost-effective way to achieve one of their biggest priorities: generating leads.
91% of organizations and marketers say that lead generation is one of their top priorities. With so many businesses leveraging email marketing, generating leads might not be the easiest task. In this post, we’ll explore some of the most effective email marketing best practices that can help you generate leads.
What is Email Marketing and How Can It Help in Lead Generation?
Email marketing is simply using email delivery tools and tactics to send emails out at scale and convince people to take a call to action. Over the years, the strategy has also grown to include picking up those emails and nurturing the people on the other end of the line.
One of the most crucial aspects of great email marketing is using the right tools. Fortunately, you will not run low on these tools. Here are some email platforms examples you can use today.
- Equp
- Mailchimp
- Constant Contact
- Campaign Monitor
- AWeber
- GetResponse
- Sendinblue
- HubSpot
- ConvertKit
- ActiveCampaign
- Drip
So how can you use email marketing to actually generate leads? Here are some great best practices to help you out.
1. Provide Value
Email marketing is not just about promoting your products or services; it’s also about building a relationship with your subscribers and providing them with valuable content that can help them solve their problems or achieve their goals. By providing value through your emails, you can establish trust and credibility with your subscribers, which can ultimately lead to more sales and revenue.
Use sales automation tools to provide and deliver lead magnets like:
- Free ebooks
- Free webinars
- Industry reports
- Assessments
- And so on.
Providing value helps you generate leads and even retain existing customers and increase their lifetime value.
2. Make the Opt-in Process Simple
One of the most critical steps in email marketing is building a high-quality email opt-in that’s simple. If your opt-in process is complicated, you may end up losing potential subscribers. Companies and brands do this by adding too many fields to the process or not making their opt-in pages mobile responsive.
You can also use automation tools to personalize your opt-in forms and offer incentives such as free guides or discounts to encourage people to sign up for your emails. You can even add a customer support channel with chat and email contact forms. You can even include a call and SMS channel using a cloud phone system.
3. Personalize Your Emails
Personalization is one of the most effective ways to increase the engagement and conversion rates of your email campaigns. Personalizing your emails makes your subscribers feel that you understand their needs and preferences. This can ultimately lead to more lead generation. It can also help you nurture those leads and turn them into customers.
The best email marketing tools can help you personalize your emails by allowing you to segment your email list based on different criteria such as demographics, behavior, and interests. You can then use this information to create targeted email campaigns that deliver personalized messages to your subscribers.
In addition to segmentation, you can also use email marketing platforms to personalize your email content by adding personalized fields that automatically fill in a user’s name, website, company name, position, and more. By doing so, you can make your emails more relevant and engaging, which can increase the likelihood of your subscribers taking the desired action.
4. A/B Test Your Lead Generation Funnel
A/B testing is a crucial part of any successful email marketing strategy that generates more leads. There’s virtually no way to know for sure what approach might work 100%. So when in doubt, it’s best to run multiple versions, measure each version’s result, and capitalize on the version that works best.
You can A/B test all sorts of parts to your lead generation funnel, including:
- Your social media ads
- Paid ads
- Sales copies
- Graphics
- Lead generation squeeze page
- Lead magnet
- And more
The best email platforms can help you conduct A/B testing by allowing you to create multiple versions of your emails, funnels, and other parts of your system. You can then track the performance of each version and determine which one generates the highest open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
5. Review Previous Campaigns
There are many benefits to reviewing past performance and seeing how you can capitalize on the success you might have already experienced. As the old saying goes, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
That said, it’s highly important that you store all your previous content, in a proper backup. That includes your sales copies, graphics, webinar recordings, stats and analytics, reports, and more. You can check out this compilation of backup software and find a proper solution to help with that. Backups also help you save work so that you don’t lose it in case anything goes wrong with your existing system.
Email Marketing is Still Effective
Email marketing is not the newest of strategies, but it’s effectiveness is still undeniable to this day. To experience the many benefits of email marketing, it’s best to keep your eyes out on latest developments and always try new and up-and-coming tools that can help you boost lead generation, customer relationship management, sales, and more.