To achieve long-term success and be sustainable, your business needs to work on retaining its existing customers and continually attracting new ones. However, customer acquisition and successfully identifying prospects are notoriously challenging tasks. With this in mind, it is vital to use proven tools to generate leads and turn prospects into customers. Businesses increasingly use email lead generation to target prospects and build relationships with potential customers.
In this blog post, we will explain everything you need to know about email lead generation and how to ensure it is effective for your business.
What is Email Lead Generation?
Before we dive deeper into how email lead generation works, it is helpful to clarify exactly what it is. Email lead generation is a process that begins with capturing the names and email addresses of potential customers. Once this information is captured, targeted emails are used to nurture the prospect, engage them with the business, build brand awareness, and ultimately convert them into customers.
The Importance of Email Lead Generation for Businesses
Email marketing has long been a crucial part of the marketers’ toolkit and is widely recognised as an effective method for customer conversion. In a survey of marketing influencers, 46 percent considered email marketing their most effective lead generation tactic. In the same survey, email marketing was ranked as the most effective lead nurturing tactic by 47 percent of the marketing influencers surveyed. But you may be wondering why email lead generation is important and how it can help your business.
There are a host of reasons why email lead generation is crucial for businesses. Here are just some reasons why email lead generation is worth exploring further:
Email Marketing is Proven to Deliver High ROI
If you are looking for a way to generate leads and increase your sales, email marketing is an essential activity. Statista research shows businesses can expect an ROI of up to 45 dollars for each dollar invested in email marketing. So, there is no question that email marketing can deliver impressive results.
Builds Brand Visibility and Awareness
Increasing your brand’s visibility and promoting brand awareness is a priority if you want to raise the profile of your business and attract new customers. The good news is that email lead generation can help facilitate this.
The more familiar potential customers are with your brand, the more likely they will make a purchase. If a prospect has opted-in to your email list, they are very likely to be responsive to your emails and want to know more about your products and services. The more familiar your brand becomes, the more likely they are to make a purchase from your business.
A study by DeVries Global of Gen Z consumers showed that 85 percent of respondents preferred buying from familiar brands. In addition, 69 percent of respondents said they ‘find comfort in the familiar.’ So, using email to build awareness and familiarity is an excellent method of converting prospects into customers.
Nurtures Customer Relationships
Inactive leads can be nurtured and re-activated with the help of email marketing. Sending an email packed with irresistible content and offers is sure to capture the attention of a previously inactive lead. Throw some personalisation into the mix, and you are sure to have caught the attention of your prospect and brought them a step closer to becoming a customer.
Examples of Email Lead Generation
Email lead generation can be executed in several ways. Tailoring the type of email lead generation you use with the stage the prospect is at in your sales funnel is an excellent way to boost conversions.
Welcome Emails
Welcome emails introduce new subscribers to the business and forge the start of the customer relationship.
Promotional Emails
Promotional emails inform subscribers about upcoming sales, special offers, and new products.
Educational Emails
According to Gartner, personalised messages perceived to help potential customers can positively impact commercial outcomes by 16 percent. So, sending educational emails with relevant, helpful tips can boost conversion rates.
Re-Engagement Emails
Re-engagement emails are used to re-activate customers. An example of this is an email reminding recipients that they have items in their shopping cart waiting to be purchased.
Best Strategies for Email Lead Generation
Email marketing may be super effective, but it is also an extremely popular method used by many businesses. Figures show that in 2023, 347.3 billion emails are sent each day. This means you need to work hard to cut through the clutter and ensure your emails get noticed. So, how do you ensure that emails are opened and, more importantly, read? The answer lies in taking a strategic approach to email lead generation.
Here are some strategies you can use to increase the chances of your emails successfully turning prospects into customers:
Take a Targeted Approach
Segment your email lists so that you are sending relevant content rather than blanket emails.
Create Personalised Communication
Personalisation is big news in email marketing circles. Emails with personalised content are far more likely to be read.
Produce Well-Formatted Emails
The purpose of your emails is to generate leads and increase conversion rates, and this requires clear, concise messaging. Ensuring that your emails are visually-appealing and well-designed will help boost your click-through rates.
Write an Enticing Subject Line
You don’t have long to capture the attention of your prospects, so your subject line needs to work hard to encourage them to read the contents of the email.
Use Valuable, Engaging Content
Your content should be relevant, engaging, and deliver value for your prospect. This could be in the form of a special offer or helpful tips.
Include a Strong Call to Action
Be clear on what you want your prospects to do after reading the email with a strong call to action.
Provide Exclusive Subscriber-Only Benefits
Make receiving your emails worthwhile and nurture customer relationships with subscriber-only offers such as discounts and early access to sales.
Ensure Content is Accessible and Mobile-Friendly
Your emails need to display correctly for every user, so making them accessible to all devices is vital.
Tools & Software for Email Lead Generation
To create leads from your email list, you need to have the right tools for the job. Managing an email list and delivering email campaigns can become complicated and time-consuming. But, with the right tools and software, your email campaign will be slick and effective.
Here are some of the helpful tools and software that can facilitate your successful email campaigns:
Email Designer
Creating the perfect email campaign can take a lot of work. Formatting your emails, inputting all the code, adding all the images, ensuring that it is mobile-friendly, and finally sending it out to your email subscribers is a time-consuming task. After all that work, discovering that you have then sent the wrong discount code or included a broken link is devastating. But there is an easier way to produce emails that capture the attention of your prospects. Using an email designer, such as our very own Instiller email designer, will make creating responsive emails simple. Just drag and drop; no coding is needed.
CRM
Data is something that many companies have lots of, but this is often scattered in siloes rather than stored in one system. Unless your data is organised effectively, creating personalised, effective email marketing campaigns will be impossible. Introducing customer relationship management software to your organisation can help you to manage all your data in one place and ensure that it is optimised to help you create successful email campaigns.
Real-Time Reporting
After carefully crafting your email strategy, you need to be sure that it works. Using real-time reporting will make this possible. The Instiller email designer has a real-time activity feed, so you can track results and receive reports detailing key information, such as deliverability and location reports.
Case Studies
Here we examine some case studies of effective email lead generation campaigns:
Trello
This email from Trello is a perfect example of an effective welcome email. The friendly tone of the email, combined with the concise information, immediately establishes a relationship and builds trust.
Source: reallygoodemails.com
Columbia
Columbia has perfected the art of re-activation emails with the example below. Informing the recipient that the item in their abandoned basket is now available at a lower price is an excellent way to boost conversion rates.
Source: reallygoodemails.com
Pizza Express
Emails are an ideal way to promote special offers, as Pizza Express demonstrates in this email. The clear layout and addition of images make this email appealing and easy to read. Including a choice of offers increases the chances of the prospect clicking through to claim their voucher.
Source: reallygoodemails.com
Key Takeaways
Email marketing is widely acknowledged as a highly effective method of converting prospects into customers. But, to get success from your email campaigns, you need the following:
- A clear and concise email lead generation strategy.
- Email content that is well-designed and follows best practices for lead generation.
- The best software and tools to facilitate your emails and ensure their effectiveness.
- Regular reporting of results to provide insights that inform your campaigns going forward, helping you to refine your strategy and increase conversion rates.
Combining each of these elements will help you to create an email lead generation strategy that works and plenty of insightful results you can use to achieve further success.
Source: reallygoodemails.com
Columbia
Columbia has perfected the art of re-activation emails with the example below. Informing the recipient that the item in their abandoned basket is now available at a lower price is an excellent way to boost conversion rates.
Source: reallygoodemails.com
Pizza Express
Emails are an ideal way to promote special offers, as Pizza Express demonstrates in this email. The clear layout and addition of images make this email appealing and easy to read. Including a choice of offers increases the chances of the prospect clicking through to claim their voucher.
Source: reallygoodemails.com
Key Takeaways
Email marketing is widely acknowledged as a highly effective method of converting prospects into customers. But, to get success from your email campaigns, you need the following:
- A clear and concise email lead generation strategy.
- Email content that is well-designed and follows best practices for lead generation.
- The best software and tools to facilitate your emails and ensure their effectiveness.
- Regular reporting of results to provide insights that inform your campaigns going forward, helping you to refine your strategy and increase conversion rates.
Combining each of these elements will help you to create an email lead generation strategy that works and plenty of insightful results you can use to achieve further success.