Email marketing is an excellent lead generation tactic that gives you an unparalleled ability to contact people who aren’t familiar with your company’s products and services. If you can reach the right audience, at the right time, with the right offer, you may prompt that audience to make a purchase, or, at the very least, request more information about your company.
You can effectively steer leads towards this desired action, because email marketing gives you complete control over the messaging experience. You get to dictate the look, feel, content, and deployment time of your messages. This level of control allows you to tailor campaigns to the behaviors and demographics of your target audience, improving the likelihood that they’ll act on your offer.
Despite the tactic’s effectiveness, email marketing has a bad rap in some circles. Many people think email marketing is synonymous with spam – bulk unsolicited email marketing messages. By 2003, the spam epidemic reached such prolific heights that the federal government introduced the CAN-SPAM Act – a set of legal guidelines for email marketers. CAN-SPAM protects legitimate marketers from prosecution, and has aided in establishing email as a sustainable lead generation tactic.
To launch an effective email marketing campaign, you first need to rent a list of email addresses from a list owner. You then need to identify the demographic, geographic, and behavioral characteristics of your target audience and communicate that information to the list owner. The list owner will then pare down their list so that you have a selection of names that match your target audience.
Once you have your list in-hand, you then need to develop the creative. This includes the email message itself and a corresponding landing page. There are a variety of best practices associated with email and landing page content and design, which I cover at length in my book.
After your creative assets are in place, it’s time to set the testing parameters for the campaign. You can test on criteria like target audience, budget, email design, and offer. You should analyze open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates for all of your test messages. Once the marketer determines which schedule, content, and audience delivers the best performance, you can roll out the campaign on a larger scale.
Learn about other lead generation techniques: Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Display Advertising, Direct Mail, Cold Calling, Trade Shows
