Any kind of business’s ultimate goal is to grow its audience. And email remains the greatest source for achieving that objective. That said, email marketing tactics can help companies to convert email leads into paying customers.
These leads have shown interest in the company’s product and given their email addresses via a subscription form. By implementing the right tactics to find perfect leads and successfully nurturing them, businesses can grow and prosper.
Email leads and the importance of finding them
Once your prospects have signed up to receive emails from you, they are beginning their journey with your company as email leads. When sharing email addresses and giving other contact information, these people indicate a willingness to receive news about your company. Although these prospects can be in different stages of the sale cycle, businesses can turn them into customers by effectively targeting them.
It wouldn’t be a great discovery to say that email marketing campaigns can be the greatest medium to nurture leads successfully. But let’s discuss the topic in detail and give a specific reason why email is an irreplaceable medium for lead generation:
✔ Email marketing can provide a high ROI
This is probably the most important factor because email has the highest ROI compared to other channels. In fact, surveys have shown that $44 is made in return for every $1 business spend on email marketing.
✔Collect better quality leads
Because email gives the opportunity to communicate directly with the target audience and build targeted messages that are tailored, it’s a great option for generating high-quality leads.
✔Enhance customer relationships
This channel opens the amazing opportunity to provide ongoing support to both potential and existing customers and improve customer experience.
✔ Promote your campaigns
Email is an excellent medium to educate leads about campaigns’ new offers and successfully promote them.
How to generate email leads in four ways
It’s already clear that email is an irreplaceable source for building strong relationships with potential customers. But the question is how to convince prospects to give their email addresses and other contact information as well. So, we are going to give tactics that will help you to implement that process successfully.
Identify your target audience
Without a clear understanding of who should use your product and solutions and who is your target audience, it will be impossible to generate leads. Even before launching your product, have in mind who is your ideal customer and create a buyer persona.
When defining your target audience, find the following characteristics about them:
✔ Location and knowing the age range of your target audience
✔ Motivations, values, and hobbies they have
✔ Their profession and income levels
✔ Resources and channels they use to find information
✔ Struggles and pain points your customers have
There are wide opportunities for businesses to collect data about their leads. And having that valuable information, they can build strategies that effectively target email leads.
Build sign-up and opt-in forms
After discovering your target audience, in the next step, create a sign-up form to generate leads and build an email list. It is businesses’ chance to convert website visitors into subscribers and start to nurture them via email. When you have an email sign-up form, you provide people with a simple way to sign up for your newsletter or email list.
This way, your business has a chance to increase and promote email marketing campaigns. Moreover, these sign-up forms can help to increase email engagement as well.
There are several steps you should follow to improve the subscription process. First, make the process smooth and simple by inviting people to sign up for your email newsletter. Therefore make your opt-in form simple and effortless and ask for the most important details like their name, profession, and definitely email address.
Next, when sharing those forms on your website, strategically place them on the pages that have high traffic. Also, give people reasons and encourage them to become email subscribers, which brings us to the next point.
Offer attractive lead magnets
Email leads should get value in exchange for giving their email address. Therefore you should offer different incentives or lead magnets that your potential customers may find useful.
We already mentioned the importance of understanding who is your ideal customer and what pain points they have. And having this information, you can design and include in your opt-in form lead magnets which are the free value you offer to convince your visitors to give you their email addresses. If your lead magnet is irrelevant for website visitors or blog readers and doesn’t target their needs, they wouldn’t give their email addresses.
There are several types of lead magnets, like e-books, webinars. Your job is to find the option that will be relevant and valuable for your target audience.
Get email leads via social media
It’s hard to underestimate the power that social media channels have in different stages of business growth. In fact, your social media channels are an amazing source for building and growing your email list and finding new leads. And the reason is obvious. Statistics indicate that people spend an average of 2 hours and 28 minutes during the day on social media channels. Not only do people use social media to communicate, but also follow businesses on that platform and keep up with the latest business news.
Firstly you can promote your lead magnet to generate new leads. Also, add a sign-up button and opt-in form to your social page to give people even more opportunities to sign up for your list. Social media channels offer businesses to add clickable links and lead-generation ads to grow their email list thanks to these platforms.
In the stage of defining your target audience, you have discovered which platform they use actively. Therefore use those channels to get new leads and grow your email lists. And finding those channels you can create an ad campaign there to find new email leads. Consider creating Facebook ads and promoting your lead magnet, encouraging them to give an email address.
Another tactic is to use webinars to generate leads for email marketing campaigns. You can also create social media posts about webinars, and invite followers to join them by giving them their email addresses. Another great tactic is to collaborate with influencers whose audience matches your target customers, and they can encourage them to subscribe to your newsletter.
How to successfully nurture email leads
You already have managed to grow your email list; in the next step, you should start to build strong relationships with them. It will be beneficial to guide leads along the buyer journey and eventually turn them into customers.
Offer high-quality and engaging content
There are several goals that effective email content needs to accomplish: it should educate, engage and deliver value to the email recipients.
Once quality leads have opted into your email list, a company should build trust with those leads so they want to continue to communicate with those businesses. Therefore email content that is relevant to email recipients’ needs can be extremely helpful in that process.
If a customer has given his email address after attending a webinar, it would be a great idea to send an email with a free ebook that further expands on the topic.
Don’t avoid personalization
If your goal is to increase the efficiency of your email marketing campaigns, then personalization is a must. This way, you can ensure high email engagement. Because email recipients will open your emails only if they are relevant to them.
Personalization starts segmenting leads into different groups based on their level of engagement, behavior, and demographic. In the next step implement a lead scoring system, which will help to find leads that are most likely to become customers. Moreover, after lead segmentation and scoring it will be much easier to build personalized email campaigns tailored to their needs.
Having this data you can offer personalized recommendations or content that are relevant to email recipient interests. There are other methods of adding personalization to your emails and nurturing leads. One of them is sending engaging emails on your prospects’ birthdays and providing them with an offer specially created for them.
To sum up
Retaining new customers and finding new ones: are the two most important aspects of growing your business. And as email marketing can be your strongest instrument in this process, you should employ tactics to grow your email list and successfully nurture them.
In the article, we gave you actionable tips, and by following them, you can generate qualified leads and successfully nurture them.
