Email marketing for lead generation and lead nurturing

Table of Contents

Use email to generate leads and educate your prospects

What other tool allows you to reach thousands of people at no cost, with a simple click? And to have an almost immediate confirmation of the effectiveness of what you have written?

If applied correctly, email marketing is a very powerful tool, which allows you to communicate with the market, create relationships, and ensure that customers give credibility to your company.

Conversely, if used inappropriately, email marketing can annoy recipients to the point of damaging your image.

The golden rule is simple: “Treat the people you send an email to just like how you would like to be treated.” If you send useful information, in a personal but professional tone, you’ll never be wrong.

Email marketing has multiple applications:

it can be used to promote products;
to generate leads;
to develop leads;
to raise awareness of your company;
to disseminate information, updates;
to train, “educate” customers on a certain subject or application or product;
to generate trust in you;
and finally, but not least, to sell.

Don’t improvise.

Effective email marketing doesn’t mean sending an email from Outlook every now and then to 1,143 recipients in blind carbon copy. There are dozens of tricks to follow to get good results. For example:

Do you know which is the best day of the week to send emails?
And the best time?
Is Outlook enough or do you need to buy a particular software? Or it’s better to turn to an outside vendor so he can take care of everything?
In the sender field, is it better to indicate something generic (Sales Office) or a name (Mario Rossi)?
Do you know how to write an effective “object”?
How long should the subject of an email be?
How long should an email be?
What are the words to avoid not to be filtered by anti-spam?
Better e-mail in html format or in text format?
Do you know the difference between opt-in and double opt-in?
Do you know what opt-out is?
Do you already have your own list? How do you create your own list?
Who do you rent your lists from? What guarantee do you have that the list is qualified, and not a list of generic e-mail addresses, linked by an automatic software that visits websites?
Deliverability: how many emails can you send at a time? Are you sure that they arrive at their destination? What is the “reputation” of the server from which your emails start, in the eyes of the anti-spam filters of the various email providers?
Do you know how to measure how many emails have been opened? And how many have generated a click, or the desired action?
etc. etc.

Which of the following scenarios do you identify yourself with?

Ideal case

Email marketing is already part of your internet marketing strategies.

You know how to use it:

– you always set yourself precise objectives;

– you know the customers or prospects to whom you want to write;

– when and how often to do it;

– the content is relevant to your target audience;

– you always carry out tests on your campaigns;

– and then measure and analyse the results.

You also know all the functional and technical steps to do things the best you can, both internally and when you turn to an external supplier.

Finally, most importantly, email marketing brings you the results you’ve set.

Intermediate case

You do some e-mail marketing, even if it’s not organized.

You inform your customers about product and service news, and occasionally campaign with new names to generate leads.

What you’ve done so far has produced encouraging feedback, but you haven’t yet made this tool systematic, even though you’re aware that it could give you much more.

Worst case

You can’t say you’ re doing ’email marketing’: you just send an email every now and then to a bundle of names, just to inform them or hoping some negotiations will turn up.

Once you did a campaign with an outside vendor, you produced about twenty leads, but you weren’t ready to follow them, so you burned out potential opportunities.

Email marketing strategy

If you fall into the last two cases, the main guidelines we recommend for an email marketing strategy that will give you lasting success are the following:

Define clear and measurable goals first

What do you want to achieve with your email campaigns? A specific number of leads, or sales, or a turnover, or the request for appointments, or the download of a demo version?

Or do you want to perform an informative/educational function for your potential customers?

The important thing is that you set clear, specific, measurable objectives.

Who is your target audience?

Be precise in predicting who you want to write to.

Is that an internal list? Or are you thinking of renting a list of names?

The better you profile the list, the more effective your email campaigns are.

Always create a valid offer, and clearly explain what you want your recipient to do. Emails are consumed at a very high speed, the reader doesn’t have time and do’t feel like catching minor details. Be direct and clear.
Contents are fundamental

Whether you use email marketing for lead generation, or to sell something, you always offer relevant information to the reader.

Don’t write for its own sake. Otherwise the recipient creates a nice rule and next time he sends you directly into spam.

Remember that one email is never enough.

As in the classic direct mail, postal, also in email marketing the repetition is successful.

Plan email sequences.

Is the website ready?

Can it stand the impact of your campaign? For example, if you take an action to get new subscribers, is the registration form OK? Are the contents okay? Always check everything in advance.

If you promise something, then keep it.

If the email invites you to buy a product and says that the product will be delivered in 5 days, you must be extra-sure that the customer will have the goods within the fifth day.

Prepare the follow-up you want to give to the respondent properly.

Don’t avoid requests for more information, phone calls, etc.

Be ready BEFORE it, because if you plan to improvise and organize yourself AFTER it, you’ll see that you’ll have problems and you’ll end up burning opportunities.