You’d be forgiven for assuming that email marketing is a bit archaic in an age of social media marketing, local SEO and artificial intelligence.
But you’d be wrong.
Email still plays a huge role in the marketing strategies of companies across the globe. According to HubSpot, 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute their content.
It plays an even bigger role in B2C industries, but what about your business? Can it really play a role in your lead generation strategy?
There’s no escaping the fact that email marketing won’t suit every business.
For instance, if your customer base is completely wedded to another form of communication or marketing output (such as social media), then email probably won’t help you generate leads.
Equally, if you’re unable (or unwilling) to collect data in a GDPR compliant fashion, email marketing isn’t for you (we’ll get onto why in a moment).
However, the above represents a relatively small portion of modern businesses. In truth, email marketing suits any industry, no matter the products or audience.
The introduction of the GDPR in 2018 brought about seismic changes within the email marketing world.
Thankfully, it’s pretty simple. In order to email people out of the blue, you need their explicit permission. That means you need to ask them to tick a box for all communications (particularly if you intend to send different categories of communication, such as marketing and product updates).
This means that the forms on your website for newsletter sign-ups can’t feature pre-ticked opt-in boxes, and you’ll need to implement features such as double opt-in to meet the guidelines. Oh, and you’ll need a strict, well-written privacy policy, too.
Then, and only then, can you start email marketing.
If you want to generate warm, pre-qualified leads from your email marketing efforts, you need to understand the benefits of segmentation.
This is simply the process of dividing up your email marketing database into distinct groups. Those groups might be based on demographics, buying behaviour or geographical data. By putting those addresses into specific pots, you can then send more relevant emails their way.
You also need to use personalisation. This is where you address recipients by name and use data they’ve provided you with (see last section) to make the email feel as though it’s for them and them only.
These tactics build a layer of trust between your business and its email marketing recipients, and that trust will, after a while, result in plenty of new leads.
An email marketing campaign is nothing without a relevant, well constructed landing page.
Your website and email marketing go hand-in-hand. The ability to generate leads will only manifest itself if you build landing pages for each email campaign you create.
It’s all about creating the perfect buyer journey, and if that starts with an email, it needs to end with your website.
Email has, somehow, remained one of the most relevant and powerful forms of marketing, despite numerous new methods attempting to consign it to the history books.
There’s a reason for this; it provides a direct line of communication to a defined endpoint - the recipient’s inbox. Get it right, and there really isn’t a more direct way to generate leads.
You just need to follow our tips above and, in particular, play plenty of attention to what the GDPR asks you to do. It’s hard work, but absolutely worth it.