By Faye Eldridge Founder of FYAMI – Business Growth Consultancy
Email marketing is a key strategy in generating new business leads, but get it wrong and you will be hit by a wall of silence. How can you get prospects to engage with your email campaigns right from the start?
Here are 7 top tips to generating leads at the very start of your B2B email marketing campaign– to entice and engage your future customers and accomplish your objectives.
Be short, sweet and succinct
To get the most success from your email campaign during the initial outreach stage, it’s vital to keep your message short, sweet and succinct. Ensure you make all your words count, and that your product or service sounds dynamic, and is, most importantly, of value to your prospect. Keep the text to less than 100 words – think about people’s attention spans. 70-100 words is ideal.
Make sure that you have the most up to date contact details for your campaign, to reduce bounce backs and low open rates. LinkedIn can be used to help build up to date contact lists, while Mailchimp and HubSpot are great tools for email marketing. These tools, when used correctly, can help you to be GDPR compliant, enable you to manage subscribed and unsubscribed lists and any bounce backs – all useful insight for the campaign follow up.
It’s also possible to buy data, but you must remember that it’s your responsibility to keep it clean and up to date. All of these tactics combined can help you do the job effectively and efficiently to deliver maximum ROI
Have an attention-grabbing subject line
You have a miniscule window to capture attention, make it count! For the email subject use two or three words maximum and don’t make it ‘salesly’ or spammy. Something like ‘Your opinion and or even ‘Favour’ are good strong subjects to grab their attention. Anything to start a conversation and build rapport.
Do your research
It’s essential to convey that you know something about the person/ business that you’re emailing. This might be stating the obvious but is so often forgotten in the rush to complete the task and tick the boxes. Take your time to properly research your subjects and it will reap benefits. If you don’t care about your target’s business, then you shouldn’t be emailing them in the first place. Sending them something useful and of value will be recognised.
Be authentic and find the right balance in tone
Striking the right balance, between over personalising and looking like a ‘Bot’ is a real skill and the tone of your message is essential to get right. Don’t be too formal, it won’t work. C Level execs receive 100’s of formally addressed emails every day and most of them press, ‘delete, delete, delete’… Addressing as Dear, or include a surname and you’re toast.
Also be mindful of including too much about yourself. Your service or product yes, but you, no. The reader does not care for personal details, but does need to be able to reply directly to you. It sounds simple, but so many companies don’t adopt this approach. To clarify, never send emails from generic ‘[email protected],’ or ‘[email protected]…’ and definitely, no emails that have those really long undecipherable codes by response.
How to use images, links and icons
Although it’s tempting, don’t use any images in the first email. The second, fine, but not the first. It doesn’t work – this is proven from our own campaign research – the response and open rate was higher when no images were used during the early stages of contact.
Likewise, don’t send a link with a click though to view images, as prospects will find this annoying, and possibly think it is spam.
Faye Eldridge
Always include a link to a clear and informative landing page. The page must have the capability to capture the visitor’s details – their name, company name and email. Don’t ask for any further details at this stage. A good strategy is to offer a resource, free to download, such as a complimentary e-book on a topical issue, that will be valuable to their business.
Ensure that your company social media icons are easily visible on all emails and outbound communications, and that you are active on your chosen channels. It’s really common for people to click on a company’s LinkedIn to check out their standing and credibility. Consider having this tracked too.
The importance of asking questions
Aside from taking the time to research your subjects and ensuring that your email campaigns are personalised and tailored, such as to their industry, it is often beneficial to ask at least one question to help incite a response. The question should be relevant to your subject and thought provoking. This creates a more human and meaningful approach, while captivating the reader with a personal question that flatters their professional knowledge.
Track your results
Track everything and crucially, follow up. You can build code into your emails to track replies, or you may already have a CRM that enables this – contact your support person who runs your software to check. You can also try email marketing tools including HubSpot and Mailchimp. Tracking will ensure you have solid data on engagement and ultimately, success.
To really understand lead generation and marketing and create successful campaigns, you have to understand people. By understanding people, and the psychology of people, and acting on that knowledge, will stand you in strong stead in the delivery of intelligent sales campaigns.
Getting the details right at the start will save time, money and effort. Most importantly, it will help you secure the prospects you need to help your business thrive.
