Email Marketing is Still the Best Way to Generate Leads

Ever heard the saying “the money is in the list”? If you haven’t, you need to pay attention. “The list” is basically the emails and contacts of prospects who are interested in your offers and content. It can also be current customers who have bought your products or hired your services in the past.

Email marketing is capable of generating incredible ROI. In fact, its returns are better than the more popular marketing strategies. Doubt it? Email is currently the only medium that produces an average of 38X return on investment.

That’s right, $38 returns for every $1 invested. It also has higher conversion rates per session than search and social combined -4.16% to search’s 2.64% and social’s 0.48%. Crazy, isn’t it? There’s no other medium capable of returns like that right now.

Remember, this is in spite of the perception that email marketing is dead. The good thing is that this perception leaves less competition for you. If you do it right, you’ll be banking hard with far less effort, while your rivals are competing for traction on other platforms.

So, if email marketing isn’t the cornerstone of your campaigns, best believe you’re leaving a ton of cash on the table. And the best part, it’s largely inbound, which means if you set it up correctly, you won’t be spending a lot of money on outbound marketing campaigns.

Even if you have a large advertising budget and are running ad campaigns on other platforms, email marketing can complement your paid campaigns.

How Businesses Can Generate Amazing Results from Email Marketing 

What's your email marketing strategy or campaign like? Do you have any? Most business owners fall into one of three categories:

• No email marketing strategy,
• there’s one but it’s not full-fledged yet,
• full-fledged but still lacking the “sauce” for higher conversions.

If you fall into one of these categories, the good news is that this can be fixed. If you don’t have any email marketing campaigns running currently, you’ll need to start one right away. Thankfully, because it’s an inbound marketing technique, it won’t cost as much as doing a media buy.

Small, medium, and large businesses can use email marketing for everything, from lead generation, to sales, to audience nurturing. As a result, you can comfortably cut back on your ad spend, if that’s the goal, and just use this proven inbound marketing tactic to generate sales every day.

SaaS giants like Hubspot, Shopify, and Salesforce understand this, which is why they do an awesome job of creating large scale email marketing campaigns.

Quick Tip: If you’re really in doubt about how to create a successful email marketing campaign, just go sign up for your competitors’ email lists.

When you do, see what they’re doing, then analyze and compare. This will help you identify what you’re doing wrong. It’s easy, fast, and gets the job done, although you will need major modifications to better suit your brand.

That said, let’s take a look at email marketing best practices guaranteed to provide great results for you and your business.

Email Marketing Best Practices for Max ROI

I know, this is supposed to be about email marketing but you need to think of content as part of it—it’s the top of the funnel. While you can put up pop-ups, opt-in forms, and hello bars on your site, there’s got to be a reason why your visitors will give you their contact information.

From experience, nothing does a better job of this than badass, premium content. People love thorough, in-depth content. So, have at least 10-20 highly exhaustive pillar posts on the site. 

These are thought leadership type content pieces that establish you as a thought leader, can go viral because they get shared with tons of people, and drive bucket-loads of traffic back to your site in return.

Don’t get me wrong, some websites and businesses are able to get people to give up their emails without offering much, but the best email marketing campaigns, are usually tied to pillar posts and content that inform, educate, and entertain.

What do you intend to give away in exchange for valuable emails? You need to figure that out quickly. Most businesses go with a free report, but that’s not enough. What separates the successful, highly responsive email list from the poorly performing ones, is kickass content in the free report.

Your landing page is key for lead generation and it should be compelling. Pair a well-designed, no-frills, high-converting landing page with excellent information in your free report, and you’ll have a list that listens to you.

The most responsive lists are nurtured, highly informed, and get a lot of pleasure from reading your emails. To do that, you need to be regularly in touch with them, feeding them great information, and putting in a ton of value.

Also, make sure to incorporate key components like the following into your emails:

• Powerful subject lines—curiosity, shock, awe, and benefit-driven subject lines always work e.g. How to lose 10 lbs in 30 Days Doing Just 1 Thing.
• Great first 2 sentences that’ll compel prospects to open your emails—your subject lines and preview should be attention-grabbing. This is particularly true when you consider that most people deal with flooded mailboxes and you only have 2-3 seconds to catch their attention.
• Concise information with a call to action (CTA)—focus on delivering value and building rapport instead of selling all the time. The latter is a surefire way to experience high unsubscribes and abysmally low conversion rates.
• Engagement/conversions—ensure that you have a persuasive copy, great email formatting, and a captivating CTA at the end of every email.
• Segment your email marketing list—separate your email lists into various categories. One for buyers, one for warm leads, and one for cold leads.
• A/B test your copy—headlines, body, CTAs… the works.

Consult an Email Marketing and Lead Generation Agency

We can help! My Creative Mark’s team of email and inbound marketing experts will help create powerful, high converting campaigns, guaranteed to increase your revenue and boost your profits. Click here to get in touch with us today.