Email marketing and lead gen are crucial to business growth, but mastering these interconnected disciplines requires strategy and skill. This comprehensive guide reveals tips and tactics to take your efforts to the next level.
Follow along as we break down list building, compliance, deliverability, outreach sequencing, lead nurturing, analytics, and more. Whether you’re looking to ramp up conversions, increase ROI, or optimize your sales and marketing workflow, you’ll discover actionable insights to put into practice.
Prepare to tackle your biggest email marketing and lead generation challenges and start driving real results with research-backed best practices. Let’s dive in!
Understanding Email Marketing and Lead Gen Basics
Email marketing and lead generation are key components of a successful growth strategy, but it’s important to understand the differences between these two interconnected disciplines.
Defining Email Marketing and Lead Generation
Email marketing involves using email to promote your business and products. The goal is to nurture relationships with potential and existing customers through relevant, valuable content and special offers delivered to their inboxes.
Lead generation focuses on identifying and qualifying new potential customers known as sales leads. This often involves more targeted outreach and conversion-focused messaging to persuade contacts to take a desired action, like requesting a demo.
While email marketing and lead gen campaigns can utilize similar tactics like personalized emails, the end goals differ. Email marketing aims to build brand awareness and loyalty, while lead gen is focused on acquiring new customers.
Email Marketing Goals and Metrics
The main goals of email marketing include:
- Increasing brand awareness and reach
- Driving traffic to your website
- Nurturing existing contacts and converting subscribers into customers
- Improving customer retention and loyalty
Key metrics used to measure email success include:
- Open rate – Percentage of recipients who open an email
- Click-through rate (CTR) – Ratio of unique clicks to total emails sent
- Bounce rate – Percentage of undeliverable emails due to invalid addresses
- Conversion rate – Percentage of clicks leading to desired actions like purchases
- Unsubscribe rate – Percentage of recipients opting out of future emails
According to Mailchimp’s latest benchmarks, the average open rate is 21.33%, CTR is 2.9%, and unsubscribe rate is 0.1% across industries. Highly-engaged audiences can yield 50%+ open rates.
Lead Generation Goals and Metrics
For lead generation efforts, common goals include:
- Increasing the number of qualified leads in the sales funnel
- Improving lead quality and conversion rates
- Reducing the cost per lead (CPL)
- Shortening sales cycles by nurturing promising leads
Important lead gen metrics include:
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) – Leads that match ideal customer criteria
- Sales qualified leads (SQLs) – Prospects sales deems ready for outreach
- Lead velocity – The rate at which leads move through the funnel
- Lead-to-customer conversion rate – Percentage of leads converted to paying customers
- Cost per lead/customer – The expense of acquiring new leads/customers
According to DiscoverOrg, the average cost per lead is $91 for B2B companies. Top-performing lead gen programs can achieve CPLs as low as $5-25.
Best Practices for List Building and Segmentation
The foundation of successful email marketing and lead gen is a targeted, high-quality subscriber list. Here are some tips for building and structuring your audience:
- Offer lead magnets like gated content, coupons, or webinars in exchange for emails
- Capture emails on landing pages and during purchases or inquiries
- Buy or rent targeted email lists from reputable providers
- Import leads from tradeshows, events, business cards, etc
- Integrate with your CRM to combine subscriber data
Once you’ve accumulated contacts, proper segmentation is crucial. Divide your list into separate buckets like:
- Geographic location
- Demographics like job title, industry
- Lead source
- Engagement level
- Customer lifecycle stage
This allows you to deliver hyper-relevant, tailored messaging and offers to each group, increasing engagement, conversions, and ROI.
Finding and Qualifying Leads
Finding and vetting promising sales prospects is one of the most important aspects of lead generation. This process lays the groundwork for an effective lead nurturing and sales strategy.
Lead Generation Channels
There are many potential channels for discovering new leads, including:
Paid ads: Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Reddit ads can reach specific demographics and interests. Lead forms can be embedded in ads or linked to landing pages.
SEO: Optimizing for key industry keywords will drive organic traffic from search engines. Include lead capture forms on relevant pages.
Events: Conferences, webinars and tradeshows provide access to engaged prospects. Collect business cards and capture leads.
Referrals: Reward existing customers for referrals. Ask for introductions to prospect companies.
Content offers: Provide gated assets like whitepapers, demos or webinars in exchange for work emails.
Direct outreach: Identify prospects through research and send highly personalized cold emails or LinkedIn messages.
Partners: Promote your products to channel partners’ and technology partners’ customers. Offer co-branded content.
Social media: Share relevant content and engage prospective accounts that comment or like posts.
Researching Target Accounts and Contacts
Thorough research is required to identify ideal prospects at your target companies.
- Start by listing buyer personas – research job titles, pain points, and demographics.
- Use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo to find contacts who match target personas at companies that are a good fit based on industry, location, size etc.
- Visit company websites and LinkedIn to gather insights on initiatives and challenges you can address.
- Enrich data with tools like Apollo.io and Lusha – add direct dials, cell numbers, and personal emails.
- Review prospects’ social media profiles to personalize outreach and build connections.
Tools to Find and Verify Email Addresses
Finding accurate contact information is crucial for lead generation. Here are some top tools:
- Email verification APIs like ZeroBounce and NeverBounce validate email accuracy.
- Email finding tools like Voila Norbert, RocketReach, Anymail Finder and UpLead help discover direct business email addresses.
- Chrome extensions like Clearbit, Anymail, and Hunter can find emails on pages you visit.
- Data enrichment platforms like Lusha, Apollo, and ZoomInfo append personal and work emails, along with other contact details.
Techniques to Qualify and Score Leads
Once leads are identified, properly qualifying them improves conversion rates. Useful tactics include:
- Online lead forms: Ask questions to gauge needs and challenges. Progressively profile visitors.
- Landing page interactions: Assess interest based on time on page, scrolling, clicks etc.
- Lead scoring: Assign points for criteria like job title, pages visited, form submissions etc. to categorize leads.
- Email engagement tracking: Monitor opens, clicks, and content downloads after sending emails.
- CRM integration: synchronize lead activity across systems. Set automated lead flow based on interactions and scores.
Avoiding Bad Data that Hurts Deliverability
List hygiene is vital for email deliverability. Here’s how to keep your data clean:
- Email verification to remove invalid addresses, catch typos, and fix formatting issues.
- Spam trap checking to detect email addresses created to catch spammers.
- Bounce processing to automatically remove hard bounces. Send to new addresses if available.
- List washing to check for risky, poor quality lists. Avoid buying marketing lists of unknown origin.
- Suppression list management to honor opt-out requests and improve sender reputation.
- Email append testing to sample results and avoid unreliable sources polluting your data.
Maintaining an accurate, high-quality subscriber list will maximize deliverability while minimizing bounces and spam complaints.
Managing Compliance and Deliverability
Adhering to email regulations and maintaining strong deliverability is crucial for successful email marketing and outreach. Let’s explore major compliance requirements and deliverability best practices.
Understanding CAN-SPAM, CASL, GDPR etc.
There are several important laws governing commercial email in major markets:
CAN-SPAM Act – U.S. law requiring accurate headers, opt-out compliance, and sender identification in commercial messages.
CASL – Canada’s anti-spam legislation similar to CAN-SPAM covering consent, unsubscribes, and sender info.
GDPR – European data protection regulations with consent, privacy, and retention requirements impacting email marketing.
PECR – The UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations with opt-in consent rules for electronic marketing.
Compliance tips:
- Honor opt-out requests immediately and maintain suppression lists.
- Ensure accurate sender details, subject lines, and content.
- Obtain consent where needed and record proof of permissions.
- Provide an unsubscribe link and options to opt-out of communications.
- Only contact existing customers with relationship-based messaging.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC Explained
Proper email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC improve deliverability and inboxing rates by helping recipients verify senders and block spoofed spam.
- SPF checks the sending IP against authorized servers listed in DNS records.
- DKIM cryptographically validates messages to confirm they haven’t been tampered with.
- DMARC aligns SPF and DKIM to set handling policies for unauthorized messages.
Key tips:
- Set up SPF and DKIM using your domain’s DNS records.
- Start with a DMARC policy of “monitor” to identify issues before enforcing.
- Use tools like 250ok to analyze and troubleshoot authentication and alignment.
- Proper authentication shows recipients your messages are legitimate.
Monitoring Spam Complaints and Bounces
Actively tracking spam complaints and bounces helps identify deliverability issues:
- Monitor complaint rates from ISPs like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.
- Analyze bounces – detect bad addresses and improve list hygiene.
- Use feedback loops with ISPs to learn what messages were marked as spam.
- If complaint or bounce rates exceed 1%, investigate the root causes.
- Filter out spambot honeypot addresses that only exist to detect spammers.
Maintaining Sender Reputation and Warming Up IPs
Guarding your sender reputation ensures reliable inbox delivery as recipients associate your domain and IP addresses with quality:
- Maintain complaint and bounce rates under 1% to avoid red flags.
- Warm up new IP addresses by gradually increasing volume.
- Use dedicated IPs for email versus web traffic to avoid issues from other functions.
- Send consistently valuable content to establish positive engagement patterns.
- Monitor blacklist listings and delist if needed by identifying and fixing problems.
Strategies for Inboxing
There are several techniques to improve email deliverability and avoid the spam folder:
SMTP gating – Route messages through a dedicated IP with strong reputation before sending to recipients.
Anonymized fingerprints – Use unique mailbox names and remove user details in messages to avoid reputation issues from reused names.
Address warming – Gradually send more messages to new addresses to establish relationship. Use services like MailboxValidator.
Role addresses – Create functional mailboxes (e.g. support@, sales@) to build domain reputation.
Email authentication – Implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to prove message legitimacy.
Building Effective Cold Email Campaigns
Cold email outreach is a crucial skill for lead generation. While cold contacts don’t know you yet, best practices can lead to fruitful relationships.
Defining Cold vs. Warm vs. Hot Leads
There are three broad categories of sales leads:
Cold – Prospects you have no prior relationship or engagement with. Need most nurturing.
Warm – Leads that have interacted in some way, like opening emails or visiting your site. More primed for sales.
Hot – Ready to have a conversation and close to purchasing. Just need a final push.
Outreach strategies typically start cold and progress leads to warmer stages for higher conversion potential.
Best Practices for Cold Outreach
Here are some tips for effectively engaging cold contacts:
- Personalize every message with relevant details and avoid mass templating.
- Provide value by sharing useful insights, resources, or exclusive offers.
- Keep it short – get to the point within 2-3 concise, scannable paragraphs.
- Make it conversational with a friendly tone and avoid aggressive sales lingo.
- Focus on helping solve a problem or fill a need, not just promoting your product.
- Follow up twice over 2 weeks if no reply, before dropping the lead.
- Segment and track outreach for analysis and optimization.
Personalization and Relevance in Cold Emails
Personalized, relevant outreach converts significantly better than generic spam. Useful personalization tactics include:
- Name dropping contacts, colleagues, companies etc.
- Researching challenges to position your solution as the answer.
- Referencing interests like hobbies, sports teams etc. learned through social media research.
- Mentioning common connections and introductions to establish rapport.
- Following up on website pages visited, content downloaded, etc. that indicate needs.
Subject Line A/B Testing
The subject line is the first and biggest barrier to someone engaging with your cold email. Use A/B testing to discover what works. Try subjects focused on:
- Quick questions: “Quick pricing question”
- Time sensitivity: “Available this week only”
- Intrigue: “Just discovered something you missed”
- Social proof: “Currently used by 500+ top companies”
- Value proposition: “How we increased conversions 20% for….”
Getting Started with Cold Email Services
Platforms like Mailshake, Lemlist, and Woodpecker can streamline cold outreach campaigns. Benefits include:
- Email tracking and analytics – monitor opens, clicks, and replies.
- Lead scoring and nurturing – identify hottest prospects and automatically enroll them in workflows.
- Sequence scheduling – follow up promptly and consistently with automated stagger sending.
- List management – sync contacts across your stack and group for segmentation.
- Email templates and testing – leverage pre-built templates and subject line experimentation.
- CRM integrations – sync email performance data with your contacts database.
Nurturing Leads and Automating Workflows
Setting up automated lead nurturing sequences and workflows is key to efficiently converting and qualifying prospects.
Creating Email Drips and Lead Nurturing Sequences
Email drips automatically send a preset series of messages to leads over time to educate and build interest. Typical nurturing sequences include:
Content Drips – Send a sequence of gated content like ebooks, whitepapers, and guides that provide value and establish your authority.
Newsletter Drips – Automate a series of newsletter subscriptions to build ongoing engagement.
Questions Drips – Provide answers and recommendations tailored to prospects’ needs or interests.
Offer Drips – Share special promotions and personalized discounts to incentivize action.
Case Study Drips – Showcase previous customer success and ROI stories relevant to their situation.
Webinar Drips – Promote upcoming webinars and remind prospects to attend.
Video Drips – Send a sequence highlighting specific product benefits and features.
Segmenting and Personalizing Based on Interactions
Triggers and lead scoring rules can segment contacts and serve targeted, hyper-relevant messaging and offers based on their behaviors like:
- Email engagement – opens, clicks, content downloads
- Visiting key pages – pricing, help center
- Form submissions and demo signups
- Content interests and pain points provided
- CRM data like company, role, lead source etc.
Personalized follow-up increases conversions up to 6X over generic outreach.
Automations to Move Leads Through the Sales Funnel
CRM workflows and marketing automation rules can automatically advance prospects through the sales funnel stages by:
- Sending cold outreach to new leads
- Moving leads from MQL to SAL after demo sign up
- Escalating hot leads to an SDR for prompt outreach
- Handing off SQLs to account executives
- Following up with non-responsive leads
This ensures no leads slip through the cracks and get timely, appropriate messaging tailored to their buy stage.
Integrating Your CRM and Marketing Automation
A unified sales and marketing platform is crucial for alignment. Useful integrations enable:
- Shared lead database to eliminate duplicates and inconsistencies
- Data syncing across systems – changes in one update the other
- Attribution reporting on lead generation sources
- Automated lead flow based on behaviors and scoring
This single source of truth allows sales and marketing to work from the same information and orchestrate handoffs for efficient conversions.
Continuously Optimizing and Improving
The most successful lead gen and email marketing campaigns continually optimize based on data and testing. Here are some best practices for boosting performance.
Use Data to Refine Outreach and Increase Conversions
Leverage engagement and attribution analytics to identify what’s working and refine your approach:
- Review click-through rates on links and content offers to find most compelling assets to promote.
- Check conversion rates by lead source to focus energy on highest potential channels.
- Analyze email open and response rates by contact role, seniority, company size etc. to determine most engaged segments.
- Monitor win/loss rates to identify bottlenecks across the sales cycle and improve nurturing for common falling off points.
- Look at bounce/complaint rates, delivery times, and spam test results to enhance deliverability.
A/B Test Content, Offers, Subject Lines
Small tweaks can lead to notable lift in email and landing page performance. Test variables like:
- Subject line phrasing, length, emoji use, urgency
- Content format – long form vs snippets, text vs visuals
- Offers – pricing, discounts, trials, demos, content
- Calls to action – buttons, placement, messaging
- Sender name and email address
Use a dedicated tool like Convert or your email service provider’s built-in A/B testing to identify improvements statistically.
Monitor ROI and Cost Per Lead/Customer
Determine overall profitability by tracking key metrics like:
- Marketing costs compared to pipeline generated
- Cost per lead/customer acquisition
- Sales cycle length impacts on Lifetime Value
- Email click to sale conversion rates
This allows you to calculate your ROI, find expensive areas to optimize, and shift budgets to high-returning activities.
Experiment with New Channels and Improve Processes
Look for new lead sources and campaign ideas while refining workflows:
- Test innovative outreach channels like direct mail and giveaways
- Explore emerging social platforms and engagement ad formats
- Try lead flow optimizations like adding online calendars and lead scoring rules
- Automate repetitive tasks for efficiency
A culture of continuous experimentation and process improvement will propel your lead gen strategy.
Key Takeaways
Email marketing and lead generation are multifaceted disciplines encompassing many moving parts. By following the strategies and best practices covered in this guide, you can optimize your efforts for maximum ROI:
- Build a strong foundation with accurate, targeted subscriber lists and customer data leveraging tools like Lusha and Apollo.
- Ensure regulatory compliance and implement tactics like address warming to enhance deliverability into inboxes.
- Create tailored, hyper-personalized messaging and lead nurturing sequences based on interests and behaviors.
- Craft compelling cold email outreach campaigns and leverage services like Mailshake to scale.
- Track detailed analytics and run A/B tests to continuously optimize and improve performance.
- Automate workflows with your CRM and marketing automation platform for alignment.
- Develop cohesive lead gen strategies across channels and teams focused on your ideal customers.
- Secure investment in new initiatives by presenting a data-driven business case to leadership.
The ultimate goals are to generate more qualified leads, accelerate conversion rates, and maximize lifetime value from new customers. With the tactics and technologies covered in this guide, you’ll be well on your way to email marketing and lead gen mastery.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some top lead generation strategies?
Effective lead gen strategies include content offers, paid ads, events, referrals, SEO, email nurturing, and direct outreach. Multichannel campaigns typically perform best.
How can I build my email list?
Tactics to build your list include web forms, lead magnets, site popups, social media, integrations, and importing existing contacts. Getting subscriber consent is critical for compliance.
What’s the best way to segment my email list?
Divide your list into granular groups based on data like demographics, interests, lead source, lifecycle stage, content downloads, and engagement levels. Send hyper-targeted messaging.
How do I improve email deliverability?
Strategies include authentication protocols like SPF and DKIM, address warming, maintaining under 1% complaint/bounce rates, DMARC policies, and monitoring blacklists.
What tools can help with lead generation?
Helpful lead gen tools include data enrichment platforms, email verification services, AI lead scoring, marketing automation, CRM, cold email software, and more.
How can I nurture and convert more leads?
Lead nurturing tactics like drip campaigns, personalized follow-up, lead scoring rules, lifecycle segmentation, and sales and marketing alignment help convert more leads.
What metrics indicate email and lead gen success?
Key metrics are open, clickthrough, and conversion rates, traffic driven, cost per lead, sales cycle length, win rates, and ultimately revenue and ROI.
How can I optimize my efforts?
Use detailed analytics to identify successes to double down on and weak points to improve. A/B test subject lines, content, etc. Continually refine.