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Email marketing can be defined as the act of sending emails to a list of potential customers or clients in order to promote your business and increase sales. The goal of email marketing is to make sure that you have an open line of communication with your target audience.
This also helps build trust with your audience because it shows that you care enough about them to send them emails regularly.
Email marketing is essential because it allows you to reach out to your audience without having to spend money on other more expensive advertising methods such as television ads and billboards.
It also gives you the opportunity to create more personal connections with your audience by providing valuable information about yourself and your company.
Examples of email marketing include newsletters, promotional emails, retention emails, acquisition emails, etc. Email marketing began back in the late 1970s but has only become popular within the past decade. Today, there are many different ways to use email marketing for businesses.
How Does Email Marketing Work?
There are two main ways that email marketing works.
First, you need to collect contacts (or subscribers) so that you can send them emails. Then, once you have collected all of your contacts, you can start creating content that you want to share with them. Once you have created this content, you can send it to your contacts using email marketing software.
What Are Email Leads?
Simply put, an email lead is a person who has shown interest in your product or service through their actions.
They may have visited your website, downloaded your free ebook, watched one of your videos, or filled out a form on your contact page.
These leads will then receive communications from you that they find interesting, relevant, and useful. This could be anything from news and updates about your business to offers and promotions.
So, why not just buy email leads?
Buying email leads is usually not a good idea because most people don’t know what to look for when buying these types of leads. It’s best to get real email leads instead of purchasing them. Ultimately, bought email leads can potentially have a negative impact on your brand awareness.
Lead generation is the process of finding new prospects (people who might be interested in your products or services) and building trust and credibility with these prospects.
It is crucial to have a lead generation strategy because if you do not generate enough leads, you won’t be able to meet your goals. Email marketing is a great way to generate leads.
10 Ways To Generate More Leads With Email Marketing
Even though there are various ways to create more leads with email marketing, we listed our top 10 ways to do so.
1. Know Your Target Audience
Let’s start with the basics. Knowing and identifying your target audience is a crucial part of email marketing and generating leads. It’s oftentimes a good idea to create a buyer persona before starting any kind of campaign.
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. By knowing your customers better, you’ll be able to design campaigns that resonate with them.
Personalized content marketing is among the top digital marketing trends. It is effective, and you can use your buyer persona to craft personalized content to include in emails.
Creating a buyer persona isn’t difficult, but it does require some upfront work. The first step is to define your target audience.
- What are their interests?
Once you’ve answered those questions, you’re ready to move on to the next step.
2. Design Straightforward Emails
The design of your email is an essential part of lead generation. It isn’t as easy as finding a good theme for your business website. Don’t make your readers scroll down to read your message.
Make sure that you use clear headings and subheadings. If possible, try to avoid images unless they add value to your message. Also, keep your messages short and concise, as longer emails tend to go unread by recipients.
Furthermore, if your design isn’t minimalistic and straightforward, you run the chance for the recipients of your email to get distracted from the main point of the message. When designing straightforward emails, in this case, white space is your friend. White space makes it easier for the reader to focus on the content.
Image source: Really Good Emails
Here are a few best practices to follow when designing straightforward emails:
- Visually Clear Call-To-Action
Make sure your call-to-action button stands out from the rest of your text. Use bright colors and bold fonts to draw attention to your CTA. Furthermore, make your CTA click-worthy by attracting the recipients’ attention through creative ways.
- Use Plain And Simple Fonts
Using plain fonts is great because they allow the recipient to focus on the content of the email without being distracted by fancy formatting. However, using too many fonts will only confuse the recipient. When selecting the typography you’re going to use, pay special attention to your overall email design.
Image source: Really Good Emails
3. Optimize Your Efforts With Contact Scoring
Reaching the right people at the right time is really important for giving through your message effectively.
Contact scoring can help you do this by ensuring that you capture high-quality prospects.
Contact scoring is a way to segment your list into different groups based on how likely they are to buy from you. This allows marketers to send personalized messages to each group of prospects.
For example, you could send an offer to all subscribers who haven’t opened an email from you within the last 30 days. On the other hand, you might want to send a special welcome message to new subscribers.
4. Make Your Subject Lines Catchy
It’s important to get creative with your email subject lines so that you can stand out among your competitors. As mentioned earlier, you need to know your audience well in order to come up with effective subject lines. To do this, you should ask yourself these questions:
- What would my ideal client or prospect search for?
- How can I say what I am offering in just one sentence?
- How can I make my subject line catchy?
Additionally, grab the attention of your recipients by using various elements, such as fonts, emojis, and bold. The objective here is to increase your email open rates. Get people curious about your email by using interesting subject lines.
Image source: Really Good Emails
5. Timing Emails Is Crucial
Timing emails correctly are crucial to generating leads.
It helps you reach your target audience at the right time. For example, sending an email after someone has already purchased something from you increases the chances of them buying again. Similarly, sending an email during off-hours increases the chances of getting more clicks.
6. Set Up Automated Campaigns
Setting up automated campaigns is a great way to generate leads. These campaigns include drip marketing, social media automation, and others.
Drip marketing involves sending regular emails to your contacts over a period of time. Social media automation refers to automating tasks like posting on Facebook and Twitter.
Other examples include scheduling posts on Instagram and Pinterest. Manually setting up your emails is a waste of time as it takes away from doing other things.
Instead, set up automated campaigns so that you can spend more time focusing on growing your business instead of managing your email drip campaign.
7. Include A Call-To-Action
Including a call to action is important because it gives visitors a reason to take action.
Some examples of calls-to-actions are subscribing to your newsletter, downloading a white paper, filling out a form, or purchasing a product. Calls-to-action also encourages people to share your content with their friends.
Image source: Really Good Emails
8. Optimizing Emails For Mobile
Your emails should be optimized for mobile because most people access email via smartphones and tablets.
They don’t have to scroll down to read your entire email; rather, they can simply swipe left or right to go back and forth between your text and images. Additionally, including links to your website and blog in your emails will allow readers to easily navigate to those pages.
9. Leverage Social Media Channels
Leveraging social media channels can be really powerful because it allows you to connect with your customers directly.
This means that you can interact with them on a personal level. You can find ways to leverage social media channels to promote your products and services.
For instance, if you sell health supplements, you could post pictures of yourself taking the supplements. If you run a restaurant, you could post photos of your food. There are many different ways to use social media to improve your lead generation efforts.
10. A/B Test Your Emails
Split testing or A/B testing is important for optimizing your emails. Split testing lets you compare two versions of one email.
For example, you can create two variations of your email: one version includes only the headline while the second version adds the details. Then, send each version to a group of people. The results will help you determine which version converts better.
10 Best Email Lead Generation Tools
Email generation tools are the software that helps marketers automate their email marketing campaigns.
Email marketing tools are generally used for but are not limited to generating email reports, optimizing email, email design, etc.
Using email lead generation tools is great for different reasons, such as saving time, reducing workload, increasing deliverability, and improving overall conversion rates. There are different types of email lead generation tools that include:
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
- ESPs (Electronic Service Providers) and web-based solutions.
Let’s look at the ten best email lead generation tools.
1. Wishpond
Image source: Wishpond
Wishpond offers a whole host of tools for capturing, nurturing, and converting leads to help you run extraordinary email marketing campaigns. Unlike most competitors, they also provide an affordable service of managing customers’ accounts. Wishpond has over 300 integrations available, including collaboration, payment, email, and analytics apps. Some of these tools include Zoom, Slack, WordPress, and Salesforce.
Pricing Plans: Contact Wishpond’s vendors to receive a demo to learn about their flexible pricing options and start a free trial account.
USP: Lead generation and marketing automation
2. Pipedrive
Image source: Pipedrive
Pipedrive is an all-in-one platform for growing revenue by connecting salespeople with potential clients. This tool offers sales and email software to help manage leads, email and communications, and campaigns. It integrates with 250+ integrations, including marketing automation, phone solutions, and lead generation tools.
Pricing Plans: Starting from $12.50 per user per month (billed annually). Pipedrive also offers a 14-day free trial with all the paid plans.
USP: CRM solution
3. Hunter.io
Image source: Hunter.io
Hunter.io is a platform that can help you quickly find professional email addresses to connect with people that are important to your business. Hunter.io offers data and outreach tools to help with campaigns, domain searches, and email verification, to name a few. It offers integration tools to CRM, automation, and email platforms, like Zapier, Gmail, and Salesforce, amongst other things.
Pricing Plans: Hunter.io offers a free version, with a starting paid version price of $34 per month (billed annually).
USP: Find contact information for any domain
4. Omnisend
Image source: Omnisend
Omnisend is an email and SMS marketing automation solution that helps engage shoppers. Other features include web push notifications, segmentation, and audience sync for ads. Their templates are customizable to help give customers a personalized experience. Omnisend offers various integrations, including Shopify, WooCommerce, and AfterShip.
Pricing Plans: Omnisend offers three different pricing plans, one option is free, and their paid pricing plans start at $16 per month.
USP: Email and SMS marketing
5. Snov.io
Image source: Snov.io
Snov.io helps users scale their business and engage leads with their sales CRM. It offers various sales solutions, including a technology checker, email finder, email verifier, sales CRM, and email drip campaigns. It supports over 2000+ integrations, including CRMs, customer support platforms, social media apps, teamwork tools, etc. HubSpot, Slack, Google Forms, and Zapier are just some of the integration tools.
Pricing Plans: Snov.io offers five different pricing plans, depending on how much data you want to store in their database. Their pricing plans start at $33 per month (billed annually).
USP: Building email drip campaigns
6. ActiveCampaign
Image source: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign focuses on creating an incredible customer experience through email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools. ActiveCampaign offers over 870 integrations, including accounting, CRM, CMS, HR, and sales apps, amongst other integrations. Some of their most popular integrations are Facebook, WordPress, Zapier, and Salesforce.
Pricing Plans: ActiveCampaign offers four different pricing plans based on the number of subscribers. The prices range from $9 per month to $1499 per month (billed annually). ActiveCampaign offers a free trial.
USP: Marketing automation
7. HubSpot
Image source: HubSpot
HubSpot is an easy-to-use CRM to help businesses with sales, marketing, content management, and customer service. This tool offers over 1000 integrations, including workflow and marketing campaign apps. Some of these include Gmail, HubSpot for WordPress, TextingHouse, and Mailchimp.
Pricing plan: HubSpot offers three different pricing plans, depending upon your needs. They start at $45 per month (billed annually) for 1000 marketing contacts. HubSpot also provides some free CRM, marketing, and sales tools.
USP: CRM solution
8. Sendinblue
Image source: Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a platform that strives to help small businesses grow by using the proper marketing and sales tools to build better relationships between companies and their customers. Some of their features include email and SMS marketing, marketing automation, and CRM. You can use Sendinblue to keep your audience engaged by sending the right message at the right time.
Pricing Plan: Sendinblue offers four different pricing plans, depending on the number of emails you want to send. Although a free plan is available, their cheapest plan starts at $25 per month. You can also contact Sendinblue to get a quote on a custom plan
USP: CRM solution
9. AWeber
Image source: AWeber
AWeber helps users engage with and grow their audience, all from one platform. Some of this tool’s features include email marketing and automation, landing page builder, web push notifications, and web push notifications. Some of their most popular integrations include Facebook, Paypal, WordPress, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
Pricing Plans: Aweber offers two different pricing plans; one is entirely free, and the other starts at $16.50 per month (billed annually). The pricing of the second option depends on your organization’s number of subscribers.
USP: Email marketing and automation
10. Mailchimp
Image source: Mailchimp
Mailchimp helps businesses grow by building better relationships with their customers through sending and creating engaging emails. Some of their platform features include audience engagement, creative tools, marketing automation, and insights and analytics. Mailchimp offers a whole variety of integrations, including analytics, design, customer service, social media, and marketing apps, to name a few. Some of these include Adobe Photoshop, Barn2Door, Facebook, and Calendy.
Pricing Plans: Although they offer a free plan, Mailchimp’s other pricing plans depend on your number of contacts. Go to their website to see their pricing plans here.
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Wrapping Up
To summarize, we’ve compiled a list of 10 ways to generate more leads through email marketing. Firstly, if you know your audience, you’ll be able to create campaigns that resonate with them. You can achieve this by creating a buyer persona.
Next up, you can try to design minimalistic, straightforward emails by leaving out unimportant information and using simple fonts. You can also optimize your efforts with contact scoring, meaning that you should focus on capturing high-quality prospects by segmenting your list into different groups.
Make your subject lines catchy by grabbing the attention of your target audience. Sending emails at the right time is crucial; if you send emails during off-hours, you increase your chances of getting more clicks. However, you don’t have to send these emails manually as it can be a waste of valuable time, rather set up automated campaigns.
Don’t forget to include a call to action as it gives your audience a reason to take action. Often, people would rather open their emails on their phones rather than on their devices, which is why it’s crucial to optimize these for mobile.
Leveraging social media channels can also be a really powerful way to connect with your customers and improve your lead generation efforts. Our last suggestion is split testing your emails by creating two versions of one email.
By following these strategies, you will start getting more leads in no time, and later on, you’ll have to start focusing on getting more quality leads.
No matter at which stage of the lead generation process you are, offering emails with high-value, relevant content to your target audience should always be your number one priority. This is the key takeaway from this guide, even though there are various strategies to follow for lead generation.
Additionally, if you manage to find the right email lead generation tool for your business, this will surely streamline the process.
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Written by our guest writer Yash Chawlani
Yash Chawlani is a Digital Marketing Consultant and co-founder of Marveta, a result-oriented digital marketing agency. He specializes in SEO & Content Marketing and helps various B2B & SaaS companies out there with his top-notch marketing strategies.
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