If your answer to ‘how do you generate leads?’ isn’t email marketing, I’d think you were lying. As digital marketers, there are a select few ways to generate good quality leads for our ever-hungry sales team. Sure, email isn’t the one and only answer, but combined with your other channels, email is up there with the highest returning channel for delivering B2B marketing qualified leads. As email marketing experts, we’ve outlined the 10 highest lead generators.

Welcome Email

It goes without saying to send new contacts a welcome email to say hi! Let them know who you are, what you do and why you’re good at it. Whether its new contacts at existing target accounts or brand-new contacts via your website or downloading your content they all should receive at least one touch point. Take it one step further and add them to a ‘welcome email’ nurture series to convert your new contacts into customers.

Website Triggered

In marketing, we spend a lot of time, and money, on getting visitors back to our website, which is great but what do you do with them once they’ve hit your landing page? Hopefully, you have website triggered campaigns set up so that you can send relevant content to your visitors based on what they are engaging with. Whether its URL visited, time or score spent on specific pages or downloaded content you should use this as your touch point for future campaigns. Tailoring your marketing messages to your leads’ needs.

Weekly Send

The all famous Tuesday send, or is yours a Wednesday send? Whatever it may be, us marketers spend our days setting up weekly sends and then watching with the hope of getting enough marketing qualified leads to keep the bosses happy. Because, well we have to send content out on a Tuesday because that’s all we’ve ever done, right. Wrong! If it’s not working change it. Split test the hell out of your weekly send data, use outlook style vs design led emails. Send on different days of the week and at different times in the day. For greater impact change what you are going to do on a quarterly basis. Don’t be predictable. Mix it up!

Events & Webinar Invites

Obviously, you want to invite prospects to your events and webinars. These are a great lead generator in fact. You have a purpose to your email that you really believe they will find value in. So, use these as part of your lead generation strategy too. If someone is reading content on your website about email marketing trends, invite them to your next email marketing seminar nearest to them. Remember it’s all about personalisation.

Because you like…

Talking of personalisation, sending triggered campaigns based on your leads interests is bound to get good engagement. Take the content they are downloading from your site, or the posts they are interacting with on your social channels and use this as your next campaign fuel. “Because you viewed our blog on how to generate leads on social media, we are going to send you our whitepaper on maximising your pipeline using social media”. It’s about getting to know their interests and the topics they really care about and utilising that knowledge. Be sure to check your inbox for a related whitepaper coming your way soon because you’re reading this very blog! Yes, we practice what we preach at CommuniGator.

Industry specific

It’s time to stop banging on about yourself. And why you are better than all your competitors at what you do. People will very quickly turn off from this. After all, cocky is an unattractive trait no matter where or who you are. Interact with your leads based on the industry they are in. Do your research and find out what’s hot and what’s not, what they’re talking about and what they’ll care about. How can your content help them be better at their job? Remember, different industries care about different things so make sure you get to know your target industries inside out, so you can hit the spot.

Sales messages

‘When’s a good time to call?’ is a really good campaign for us. Put the power in your prospects hands, let them come to you about when really is a good time for you to set up a call with them to discuss your products or services in more detail. Just be careful not to send these too soon. It’s important to warm up your leads with your content and then get in touch when the time is right. So, don’t worry, no sales messages coming your way just yet!

Targeted

I’m sure you have a CRM, or at least somewhere that stores all data for your leads and prospects. What’s the point in collecting all that data if you aren’t going to use it? Segment your data and run targeted campaigns based on the criteria you hold on them, such as their industry, location, job role. The more specific and segmented you can be, the better.

Because you use…

Another targeted campaign based on the data you hold in your CRM. Think about your killer values for your ideal customers. What makes up your ideal customer? For us, one is that they must have a CRM system that we can integrate with. Enter our CRM nurture campaigns. We run campaigns to companies we know are using Microsoft Dynamics for instance, because our integration is king. And we want them to see that too. You could also use this for your competitor users. How many of your ideal prospects are using your competitors? You want to win them over right? Set up a competitor nurture campaign to introduce yourself as a competitor, just ensure you get your timing right with this one so think about the length of the contract and buying process. Send them case studies or testimonials and success stories of customers like them who made the switch to encourage them to see the benefits.

One last push

All that work to get them back to your website and then what. Sit and hope for the best? No, you need to keep hitting it over and over again. And there’s no stopping. What about your nearly-hot leads? Don’t just leave them there. Ever heard of the leaky bucket? A classic example is that marketers spend copious amounts of time and money getting leads to their website and then fail at the last hurdle. Run campaigns to your ‘nearly there’ leads who aren’t quite ready for a sales call or not quite classed as a marketing qualified lead to push them over the edge.

All this sounds like a lot of work. A lot of content to write, a lot of data to segment and a lot of campaigns to build. And then there’s excluding each group from each to ensure you are not spamming your leads and pushing them to unsubscribe. Take a look at our tried and tested workflows for the best pick of the bunch.