Irrespective of being a traditional method, email marketing is one of the most lucrative channels of generating as well as closing potential leads.
Email marketing is the best form of marketing campaign where investing merely $1 can help in attaining an average return of as much as $42.
Email provides a personal and direct connection with the recipient. The marketers can interact with the target audience while giving a personalized touch to every email.
What Do You Mean By Email Leads?
Email leads refer to the individuals who have shared their contact information with the marketers through various sources such as forms, social media, and readily available email marketing lists, or other offline and online platforms. These email leads are acquired so the marketers can send them to future email marketing campaigns.
The process of email marketing involves a series of steps that will enhance generating the leads as well as closing the leads. Here is how email marketing works for running a successful marketing campaign.
Identifying Your Target Audience
The process of email marketing begins with identifying the target audience who need the products or services only if you can understand the pain points of the leads. Email marketing is effective when you can first define a target audience. Your target audience consists of the ideal customers or clients who are willing to invest and buy your products and services.
These audiences can reach out to your website, web pages, or landing pages through search pages, linked blogs, social media pages, news, and other PR activities. However, the purpose of inviting the target audience to the website or web pages is to get the contact details to reach out to them by requesting them to fill a form. Naturally, the customer who is interested in your brand will be willing to buy your products and services, in other words, this is the general practice of getting leads.
Apart from SEO and SMO, some organizations work towards generating data for the marketing campaigns, wherein they tend to source data from direct and indirect reliable sources for the marketers. Such organizations provide contact details through the desired database that is customized to meet the requirements of the marketers.
Thereafter, as a marketer, you must create attractive offers or the lead magnet through the email marketing campaigns that will induce the leads to opt for your brand and induce them into taking the buying action.
Structuring Your Email Marketing Plan
Before you begin preparing an email, you must devise an email marketing plan that will help you in meeting the goal and objectives of your marketing plan.
Also, you need to plan as to how you will be using the data about the leads and how you will disseminate the information to the leads about your brand. Note down the structure beforehand and the relevant points you will include in the email marketing plan.
Structure your email campaign regarding the position of the logo, imagery, content, title, CTA, integrated Social Media platform, or other elements of the email.
Creating Exciting Offers
The next step after acquiring the contact details and identifying the target audience, as a marketer, you need to understand their pain points and create useful and resourceful email campaigns. That is to say, you need to create a lead magnet in the form of offers, discounts, or irresistible attractions that acts as a solution to the problem that the prospective buyers are facing. To make the best use of the gathered leads of the target audience, it is suggested that the creation of irresistible offers drives the email marketing campaigns to be successful. That means, the chances of conversion increase, as well as the number of closing, leads enhance.
Engaging the Target Audience With Interesting Content
When you send emails to the leads, once they sign up to receive your emails, then you need to nurture the potential customers.
With this, it means you need to send engaging and interesting content to the prospects that may contain links to the newsletter, ebook, blogs, or directly to the page of buying your products and services.
Designing the Email for Generating Leads
When you are developing an email for generating the leads, it is suggested that you must dive deep into the sales funnel. This helps identify the stage of the lead in the sales funnel. And based on this, you must design emails that are attractive, inviting, and inducing. To design an email for lead generation, the following points must be considered.
a) Subject Line/ Heading of the email: The subject line of the email should be attractive enough so that the recipient clicks to open and view it. The subject line must be catchy, mentioning the problem being faced by the lead, creating an urgency to view as well as personalized.
b) Images: The email should accompany creative images that look appealing and relevant to the content. It will attract more to the reader than the copy of the email that has just created content. Content that is accompanied by images has fairer chances of being read and to act upon.
c) Brevity: Remember, there are thousands of emails that your prospects receive daily, while most of the land in the spam folder. Therefore, keep your email to the point, short and engaging while highlighting the purpose and the action that you wish that the lead should take.
d) Call to Action: The motive of every email campaign is to drive the lead to take an action according to the sales funnel. You must advertise your CTA appropriately in the email and it can be related to attending a webinar, register for any newsletter, download an eBook, read the latest blog, etc. The CTA is the main purpose of the email that drives the lead to visit the webpage, avail services, buy products or take the relevant action that the marketer wants.
e) Integration: You must make your email integrated with the social media platforms such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, or other similar platforms. Providing the social media account details facilitates the lead to share the links of the brand or email on their own pages.
f) Email Template Design: When designing an email, follow a pattern that is convenient for you to design as well as for the recipient to view and understand. Keeping a uniformity and consistency of fonts, colors and layouts make the lead identify the brand and make out easily within a single glance about the brand he/she is viewing. The theme of the website should coordinate with the email template. Along with that, you need to manage with the appropriate placing of the logo.
g) Consistency of the email: The emails should be sent consistently to the lead recipients with the consistent tone of the brand. While being regular, the email campaign should not be overdone or more than that is necessary. Also, it would be a great idea to mention the reason behind sending the email to the leads to ignite the interest and engage the lead in your brand. The regular emails should clearly send the communication to the lead
h) Personalized email: Personalising the email campaign will enhance your relationship with the lead especially when you are launching a new product or service. This heightens the trust of the lead on the brand. The personalization of the email marketing campaign must be done after segmenting and organizing the email list according to the location, type, preference, and position of the prospect as appears in the conversion funnel. Accordingly, you can decide which segment needs frequent emails and which segment requires occasional emails. Personalization of the email also helps in attracting the attention of the leads. Moreover, when the leads see your email message they are delighted and feel connected with the brand.
i) Compatibility of an email template: Nowadays more than half of the world’s population has access to the mobile phone and prefers to check out their emails on smartphones instead of the laptop, desktop, or other devices. Therefore, the email template you are preparing must be compatible with all the devices including desktop, laptop, android phone, iOS, iPad, or other devices. The compatible email marketing campaign will offer better UI and UX to the lead and will generate a better view.
k) Automation of email: Automatic email helps in sending the email to a large number of leads at one time. You can schedule the emails considering the lead’s behavior and then plan to send a welcome email, thank you email, feedback email, and so on.
Conclusion
Personal and direct emails to the leads tend to generate a relationship of the leads with the brand. The more the leads find themselves engaged, and connected with the brand. An attractive email that understands the pain point, raises the emotional aspect, and ultimately offers the desired solution to the leads will have higher chances of conversion, provided the above points are followed.
Author Bio:
Angelina Smith is a marketing consultant with 15 years of experience in the execution of marketing strategies. Currently, she heads the marketing department at eSalesData LLC, a renowned database company based out of Fremont, CA which offers customized and pre-built email marketing solutions to improve b2b sales leads for enterprises.