Four tactical tips to improve email lead generation

It’s predicted that there will be 4.6 billion global email users by 2025…That’s over half the world’s population, and a statistic that clearly demonstrates email marketing is an opportunity you shouldn’t be missing out on.

You’ve no doubt heard the myth that email marketing is dead. No, it isn’t! Email is still one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching new customers. With that in mind, here are four ways that you can make performance improvements in your email lead generation.

1. For best results, segment

The spray-and-pray approach to email is what’s becoming extinct. Use the data you have on your contacts to send them emails that they simply have no choice but to respond to! Whether they’re prospects you’re trying to convert or happy customers you want to upsell, segmenting your audience means your email campaigns are far more likely to be successful:

  • Show that you know their pain points by addressing their business problem areas directly and demonstrating how you can solve them.
  • Leverage social proof from existing customers with a similar profile to the audience you’re trying to convert.
  • Personalise your emails based on their preferences and previous engagement with your business.

By sending campaigns that resonate with your target audience, you’ll naturally see your conversion rates increase.

2. Have an integrated strategy

A consistent experience across your business goes a long way. Think about the all the different touchpoints and messages a prospect encounters from across your business, and tie it all together:

  • If someone has just downloaded a resource from your website, take advantage of that extra opportunity to send them a follow up email with useful and relevant content, and more choices of what to do next.
  • Capture key aspects of their journey and use these to further engage them with, such as “Don’t forget your basket” abandoned checkout emails, or related recommendations.
  • Coordinate with other customer-facing messaging, including welcome and on-boarding emails, social media, blog posts – even your personal email signature is a solid marketing opportunity.

3. Test EVERYTHING!

Your email subject lines, friendly-from address, plain text vs HTML, personalisation, messages, images, colours, layout, calls-to-action, days, times, landing pages… the list goes on.

Running A/B tests on all aspects of your campaigns is something you should be doing all the time. Luckily, it’s easy to do, and the best part is that you can see results straight away.

The key thing is to remember to only test one element at a time – such as the subject line, or a different colour call-to-action button. If you test more than one thing and your metrics improve or worsen, you won’t know exactly what affected the response.

Don’t forget… your tests can have much wider implications than just your open and click-to-open rates. Close the loop on your analytics and you’ll get much more granular insights than you ever imagined. You might find that people convert quicker when you use an orange button instead of blue. Or that emails without images net you higher value sales.

4. But don’t get caught up in vanity metrics

Chances are that your executive team don’t really want to know about opens or clicks anyway. They want to know how many leads and how much revenue your emails generate.

Link your email campaigns to inbound leads, outbound activity, opportunities created, deals closed, and revenue won. You’re already using tags to segment and track your online marketing activity (if not, then why not?), so this data is simple to capture and measure.

This level of detail is infinitely more valuable, giving you a much truer picture of your current email performance. It lets you easily see the aspects of your campaigns that are working well and producing leads and revenue. You can then use this information to replicate your successful activities. Connecting the dots and attributing leads and revenue is easy to do in Mediahawk.

With email users on the rise, email marketing can be a very powerful lead generation tactic. The right approach to your strategy will lead to huge improvements in your email conversion rates.

About the author - Natalia Selby

Marketing Executive at Mediahawk, with 20 years experience in analytics and content management.

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