Email marketing is a great source to nurture cold leads and stay in touch with your customers. A great email sequence can turn hesitant prospects into loyal customers who keep coming back for more. It can also help you upsell your services to your existing customers with announcements about new products or feature spotlight emails.
Want to know how you can make your email marketing more effective for converting leads? You came to the right place. In this article, we will present five things you can do to ensure an effective email marketing strategy.
Know when to ask to subscribe
Many companies have pop-ups that suggest visitors provide them their email address almost immediately. That’s a big mistake. It’s very unlikely that a visitor is ready to commit their inbox space to you after only spending a couple of seconds on the website. Such pop-ups are only going to irritate visitors.
Instead, it’s better to serve these promotional pop-ups for your email newsletters after they’ve consumed a piece of content on your website, i.e. reached the end of a blog post or a landing page. This way your visitors will get a sense of the type of content you provide before having to make a decision of committing to your newsletter.
When asking, make sure you highlight the values you the reader will get after subscribing, and make sure to give a promise, that you will keep, that you won’t spam them often with promotional emails. These pledge messages work very well with skeptical visitors who are scared that your newsletter will just add to the clutter in their inbox.
Offer gated lead magnets to generate subscribers
Creating content with the goal of converting visitors into leads as well as email subscribers, is the best way to fill in your email base so your newsletters have an audience when you send them out. In case you are not familiar with the terms “gated lead magnet”, here’s what it means.
With gated lead magnets you practically offer content in exchange for an email address. You don’t make the content immediately available on the web, you just create a teaser page where you describe what the content is about and what it includes. If the visitor is interested in the content, they need to provide their email address in order to access it. You can either redirect them to a special link, that isn’t ranked on search engine results pages, or send them an email that contains the content in a PDF format.
Create strong automated email sequences
Make sure your email sequences aren’t too invasive and irritating. Avoid at all costs sending emails too often. In most cases, sending one email per week is the best option, unless you are providing daily inbox news. Send frequent emails only if that was clearly stated in the email newsletter CTA or the subscriber specifically chose the option.
Frequency aside, make sure your email sequences have specific goals. Are you aiming to educate your readers or convince them to get your product? There are many ways you can separate and customize your sequences, but the first division should be based on the type of the lead: sales-qualified leads (SQL) and marketing-qualified leads (MQL).
With MQL campaigns, your goal is to create engaging content that will keep them opening more emails that you will send in the future. If the lead provides an email address to access educational content, then they are most likely interested in more educational content. You can throw in a promotional message or a special offer once in a while to see whether the lead is ready to convert into a customer or not, but don’t push it too hard. Alternatively, you can add the offers as a footer to your newsletters.
As to SQL campaigns, you want to make your emails more conversion-oriented. With these sequences, you want to highlight the features of your product or service more often but again, not too much. This doesn’t mean that you should send an email after another urging the lead to make a purchase. You can diversify the sequence by using feature highlights, case studies, success stories, company updates, release updates, etc. And don’t forget to throw in occasional special offers to get the readers to convert.
Last but not least, make sure to create curiosity invoking subject lines but be careful, you don’t want to sound cheesy. Emails that have generic subject lines are more likely to be ignored. Experiment with asking provocative questions in your subject titles or make statements that will catch the reader’s attention and incite interest in them.
Make personalization a priority
Your email marketing B2B lead generation campaigns will be much more successful if you separate them into several streams that are customized to your leads’ main interests. Higher relevance to the reader will ensure a higher Open Rate and Click-through Rate (CTR) which are the most important indexes that you should always aim to keep higher, but more about that later.
Forms are your best way to achieve the necessary level of personalization. This can be either done by adding an extra multiple-choice section to your website forms that will list all the topics you offer. Alternatively, if you want to keep your website form fields to the minimum, you can send the form in a follow-up email.
You don’t need to create too many newsletter streams for your leads if you can’t handle too many. Just focus on the core topics that your leads will most likely be interested in. Later on, you can use the data to judge which topics are most popular and concentrate on those.
Focus on lead quality rather than quantity
Low Open Rates are not good. The faulty email performance index might cause bad consequences, like your next emails getting delivered into the spam folder. Why? Because some people who are not interested in the emails might find it easier to mark the email as spam than go through the motions of unsubscribing. That is exactly why you need to proactively make sure that only people who are interested in your emails keep receiving them.
To ensure your readers are engaged with your emails, you can send an automated email to those who haven’t opened any of your emails for an X amount of time. The email should notify them that they won’t receive any more emails from you. In case they want to stay subscribed, include a special link, which is basically a re-subscription link, that they can click on to keep receiving more content in their inboxes.
The resubscribing method is the best way to keep only interested readers in your send list and avoid a low Open Rate. The notifying email will also motivate readers who always put off reading your emails for later and never get to it to be more attentive to your emails in the near future. The more focused your email marketing is, the more leads will convert into customers.
Need help in utilizing email marketing for lead generation?
Email Marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels you can employ for your B2B lead generation. By using various personalization and measurement capabilities, we at PMG360 can help you capture your target audience’s attention, generate high-quality leads, and convert them into delighted customers. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.
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