The Need For Leads: Actionable Email Marketing Tips For Lead Generation

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Before the social media boom, marketing experts focused their efforts mainly on emails as the most potent channel for generating prospects’ interest and nurturing them. However, as a time-tested approach, email marketing remains one of the most efficient methods to drive email marketing leads.

Despite the diversity of marketing channels, brands rely heavily on the ability of emails to guarantee a high level of customer engagement and lasting interest in products and services.

It’s no secret that email marketing is geared toward driving targeted actions like subscriptions, purchases, or downloads. The one thing that hasn’t changed when it comes to this method is that marketers have to be strategic with regard to email campaigns. And email lead generation is no exception.

Today, the need for leads is undeniable and maybe even more significant than it used to be several years ago. So let’s examine the reasons behind this need and how brands can ensure that their lead generation efforts yield good results.

Email Leads Explained

What are email leads? Every email lead you generate is someone who expressed some level of interest in your offer and shared contact information through an online form.

Why do brands need email leads? The goal is to nurture quality email marketing leads and convert them into loyal customers.

Marketers often spend a good deal of time researching prospects, creating buyer personas, crafting specific content, and personalizing offers. Therefore, generating quality leads is crucial to increasing the probability that all future outreach programs and email campaigns generate positive ROI.

In a nutshell, quality email leads are one of the core sources of your revenue.

How to Drive Quality Email Leads

First of all, that’s no easy mission to accomplish. Here’s why: brands often overfocus on the nurturing stage of the lead generation process. Sure, turning cold leads into warm leads through outreach programs is critical for every user acquisition strategy.

Brands must learn how to properly generate email leads in addition to using effective content marketing strategies.

Identify Your Audience

That’s the very first step every company needs to take. Businesses need to know who their ideal customers are before launching any marketing campaign. Marketers can then use this information to develop a variety of buyer personas based on the issues and concerns that are important to their target audience.

Offer Clear Value

Half the battle is won when you know who you’re going after. When developing or scaling your content strategy, keep in mind the value you’re providing to your customers. You won’t be able to achieve value alignment unless you do so.

Let’s say that you own an online store and decided to start your email lead generation campaign by targeting first-time visitors. In this case, your goals are to motivate a visitor to make a purchase and ensure that the visitor will become a repeat buyer.

Here’s an example from the Rebecca Minkoff store. In this instance, the store offers a discount on the first purchase, acquires new high-quality email leads, and targets only first-time buyers.

While the offer is not in the form of a pop-up, it proves time and time again to be a fruitful approach, with great success in nurturing post-purchase relationships.

Consider Intent and Timing

It is common for marketers to collect email leads via blog posts. It is essential, however, to avoid interrupting the user experience by promoting the offer before another paragraphs have been read.

When a visitor opens a blog post, it is rarely a good idea to display large interstitials. This strategy has a significant negative impact because it dominates the display and discourages readers from interacting with your content. Consequently, you have high bounce rates.

If your timing and intent are right, chances are you’ll get a visitor to subscribe to your newsletters and stick with your brand for good.

This example illustrates how HubSpot captures email leads on blog posts by offering expert insights in regular email newsletters to readers. In this case, it’s a blog post on customer success metrics, which means that a visitor is looking for more insights on this specific topic.

The marketers’ goal here is to align the messaging on the scroll-triggered pop-up with the article’s topic. If you’re struggling to align the messaging, try using an SEO tool like Ahrefs. It can help you determine the keywords your blog post ranks for and understand how you can tailor it to meet the needs of your readers.

Here’s another example of a behavior-triggered pop-up used for capturing email leads on blog posts by Harper’s BAZAAR. This is a classic approach many brands utilize when fighting for the attention of the target audience. Since many readers practice comparison shopping, this lead message, in particular, is not likely to leave the readers feeling indifferent.

Build Lead Magnets

The logical next step is to process all the pain points and create resources and content your prospects will find valuable and useful.

There’s no denying that creating lead magnets is one of the most efficient ways to provide a solution for a specific issue your prospects have. Essentially, it can be any piece of content, including checklists, templates, webinars, free tools, gated email courses, etc.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the most popular types of gated content.

Data Reports

Creating a data-backed lead magnet is not only an ethical bribe. It’s a surefire way to convert more sales, significantly grow your email list, and establish brand authority.

eBooks

This is probably one of the most common yet effective lead magnet forms. Brands often use several well-performing blog posts to repurpose them into eBooks.

This approach can be incredibly effective and practical if a topiс you’re covering is complex and requires additional knowledge. For instance, it can be an eBook covering specific SEO tactics, UX/UI trends, or a new product.

Checklists and Templates

Prospects get value right away through these types of gated content. They can use ready-made checklists and templates, customize them, resize, save, share, or even print them.

While such templates might seem relatively easy to create, brands often use these lead magnets to save their subscribers time and effort. Besides, helping your audience customize and design something from scratch builds a strong sense of trust.

Ensure Engagement

Let’s face it: earning the attention of your target audience can be tricky. That’s why brands often resort to leveraging social media. Social media can be a powerful lead source. Businesses often use it to run paid ad campaigns, cooperate with influencers, or post valuable content.

But social media is merely one of the channels that can help businesses drive email marketing leads. Marketers typically leverage numerous email lead sources, including blog articles, podcast content, partnerships, and lead magnets.

Let’s say that you’ve managed to get prospects to subscribe to your email newsletters. Now, you need to keep them engaged.

How can you do that? Here’s a short checklist:

• Use a catchy and intriguing - but not clickbait - subject line
• Make sure to communicate value and strengthen the brand image
• Utilize A/B testing to evaluate different subject lines and versions of your newsletters
• Personalize and automate your email efforts
• Gain and use data to power your campaigns
• Encourage your prospects to take action

When it comes to email lead generation, getting inside the minds of your audience is not the only challenge. The good news is automation can help you tackle most obstacles.

Leverage Marketing Automation

From the marketing perspective, every brand needs to utilize the right email marketing tools and automation software. Why? Taking their technology to the next level is by far the most effective way for businesses to reach their optimal ROI.

Marketing automation platforms allow brands to bring together multiple marketing channels and create more efficient workflows - all while collecting campaign data so that businesses can get the most from their marketing efforts.

For instance, Phonexa, an all-in-one marketing automation solution for calls, leads, clicks, email, SMS, accounting, and more, offers innovative functionality paired with effortless simplicity. With a singular marketing solution at hand, brands can get critical data, put it to work, and maximize their audience reach and earnings.

Automation has an unmatched potential when it comes to running email lead generation campaigns. Let’s look at some of the benefits:

• Access to in-depth analytics and email marketing statistics
• Ability to leverage behavioral segmentation
• A wide variety of email templates
• Accurate deliverability measurement of different email channels
• Automated A/B testing of up to six different subject lines and templates
• In-depth email analytics
• Unlimited automation management
• Seamless API and third-party integration

Ultimately, utilizing an email marketing solution as part of a singular marketing suite can help brands send personalized messages to their audience, assess their performance, tackle any deliverability issues, and cultivate email lists.

Final Thoughts

Email lead generation is not only about successfully generating leads. It’s also about collecting much-needed information on prospects and building lasting connections with them to make a sale.

Brands need to remember that what’s measured can be improved, and email lead generation efforts are no different.

Data can tell you everything about your active and future campaigns. With the right email marketing tools, you can track, test, and optimize every aspect of your campaigns to ensure outstanding results.