How to Use Email Marketing to Generate Quality Leads

All businesses need customers to grow. And, to get these customers, they must capture their attention first.

In the digital marketing world, a lead is defined as a potential customer in your target audience who is likely to purchase your product or service. However, to capture these leads before the competition does, you need to employ well-thought-out marketing tactics, which are also known as lead generation marketing.

Did you know that lead generation is the most important content marketing goal for 85% of B2B marketers?

But, what is the right platform to capture your leads? Trends in digital marketing change rapidly, but certain marketing tactics have generated spectacular results over the years.

Social media is definitely one of these trends and many businesses are shifting their marketing efforts to popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But, it is also true that social media is a crowded place and having your story noticed by potential customers is really hard. That’s where email marketing comes to your rescue.

Are you aware that 99% of consumers check their personal email at least once every day?

Indeed, email marketing is like a quiet, plodding horse or dobbin for businesses. According to McKinsey, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers. No wonder then that 42% of organisations cite email as one of their most effective lead generation channels.

How to Use Email Marketing for Effective Lead Generation?

Email marketing has been around for years and works for all kinds of businesses despite their niche or size. But wait, that does not mean that every kind of email works for your lead generation campaign. What you need is a targeted email marketing campaign to capture the attention of your leads and nudge them along the sales funnel to convert them successfully.

Build Your Mail List

Here’s the most important thing for your email marketing campaign; only send emails to those who have opted-in. You no longer need to buy email lists to market your products, and instead, gather a list of leads that are truly interested in your product or may have interacted with your company in the past. Read this interesting article on Forbes on building an email database.

Say Yes to Personalisation

Stats indicate that many online retailers find personalisation and segmentation to be their most effective conversion tactics.

We are not surprised.

Email marketing is indeed a powerful marketing tool, but without personalisation, your messages are likely to go unread. Don’t believe us? Have a look at these numbers:

• Personalised emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates.
• 40% of marketers and sales reps send 18 personalized business emails daily
• By adding the recipient’s name in the subject line, you can increase the likelihood of your message being read by 26%.

Personalising your email campaigns is a surefire way to increase your open and click-through rates and can impact your ROI significantly. The reason is simple, personalised emails are more relevant to subscribers.

Think about yourself, would you like to receive a generic, one-size-fits-all campaign email? Or, would you rather prefer an email that includes your name and shows offers that are relevant to your interests. Of course, you would be tempted to act on the latter than the former and it is the same with your audience.

So, how do you personalise your emails?

Basic email personalisation includes stuff like using a subscriber’s name in the subject line, but advanced tactics would require you to change the content of your email based on a subscriber’s shopping behaviour, gender, location, etc.

According to Mail Chimp, segmented email marketing campaigns result in 14.64% more email opens and 59.99% more clicks as compared to non-segmented campaigns. In addition, segmented emails have 208% higher conversion rates than batch-and-blast. If you are looking for more proof, Campaign Monitor pointed out a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns. Yes, not only do targeted emails lead to more conversions, statistics prove that such converted customers end up spending more on purchases based on the information you provided them.

To start with, you can segment your customers according to their position in the sales funnel. Here, you may have potential customers, new customers, loyal customers, and some inactive customers. Once you have divided your email database according to the categories of customers, draft an email for each group of customers that is going to resonate with the target audience. For example, you can email educative content to prospective clients to help them understand your product or service better while new customers would like to receive offers and discounts, consequently increasing your chances of turning them into loyal customers.

Write Enthralling Subject Lines

Would you be surprised if we tell you that 35% of people decide whether to open your email or not based on the subject line alone?

Wondering what makes a good subject line?

Well, the answer will depend on what you want to achieve out of your campaign, but following these simple tips could help:

• Make the subject line explicit – state the benefit boldly.
• Use as few characters as possible, somewhere between 80 and 120 characters is the sweet spot according to stats.
• Personalise the subject line. Remember, emails with personalised subject lines generate 50% higher open rates.
• Create urgency (for example, use words such as Act Now).
• Or, you could ask a question (Do you want to grow your business X times?).
• Avoid exclamation marks or all caps.
• Do not use the word 'donate' in your subject line. It can reduce your open rate by 50%.

Use Simple Design

The best emails are often quite simple. Lots of whitespace, a few images, and not more than one or two fonts; that’s all you need to grab the attention of your potential leads. Here are some interesting facts you could use to improve your email design:

• Add videos to your email to increase your click rates by 300%. If not videos, add some animated graphics to boost your click-through rates.
• Adding a permission reminder to your email is a good practice that builds trust.
• Include a clickable CTA. A compelling message means nothing if your leads don’t know what you want them to do next.

Read this article on HubSpot if you are looking for inspiration to design a neat and creative email marketing template.

The Bottom-Line

There are numerous factors to consider when it comes to designing an effective email campaign. The above-mentioned steps are likely to help you generate highly qualified leads, but email-marketing cannot work on its own unless you have effective landing pages and CTAs on your website to convert the traffic you receive.

At Blue Beetle, we have helped several businesses kickstart their lead generation campaigns. We are entirely focused on helping our partners gain more customers and can help you create an effective email marketing campaign that will not only capture high-quality leads but also boost conversions for your business.

Get in touch to know more. You can also read this article for more tips on building a stellar email marketing campaign.