B2B Email Lead Generation Tactics (2024)
Leverage the power of B2B email marketing to advance your lead generation efforts. Start increasing sales and boosting ROI with this comprehensive guide.
B2b email lead generation software gives marketers the tools they need to engage with prospects and move them down the sales funnel. Marketers can incorporate purchased b2b email lists into their overall strategy to drive engagement by offering something of value (i.e ebooks, white papers, marketing materials, etc.) to recipients in exchange for their information. Setting up your landing pages with lead magnets on different parts of your website capture the necessary visitor details needed to conduct an effective marketing strategy.
B2b email marketing is a channel that provides a high rate of return on your investment. A study done by DMA found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $42.
1. Find Your Target Audience
Once you’ve decided on your b2b email marketing service, the next step to creating a successful B2B email lead generation campaign is to determine your target audience and build your ideal buying persona,
Are you in the business of selling a SaaS service or are you selling physical products? Do you know who the decision-makers are that would be interested in your products and who has the buying power to ultimately make that call?
When creating your buyer personas, some things to consider are customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. This can be done by identifying your current clients and finding similarities between them.
You can apply the same principle to find companies you’d be interested in approaching. Are you targeting only small businesses or large enterprises? Is your product relatively costly to implement? Is your product geared towards developers or accountants? Determining which audiences to target is the most important step in the b2b lead generation process.
2. Personalize your B2B Email Lead Generation Campaigns
When composing a cold email you want to come across as both professional and authentic. Subject-line emojis accounted for increased open rates for 56% of brands. Does that mean every b2b email you write should include emojis in the subject line? Not at all. Your approach should change depending on the type of audience you are addressing. Using emojis, informal speech or colloquialisms in your b2b lead generation emails might work for middle management, but the same approach could fall flat on the face with C-suite executives.
Given the B2B sales cycle is typically much longer than that of B2C companies, your ultimate goal with email marketing should be to educate potential clients with information on your industry or product until they are ready to make the decision to buy. This can be done by linking to other marketing materials such as helpful articles, blog posts or other useful information that adds value to your recipients.
You really want to think about the type of problem your company is solving and create effective messaging that includes your value proposition in a creative way.
1. Email Subject line
With billions of emails being sent on a daily basis you have to finds a way to stand out from the crowd. One of the most important weapons you have is the subject line.
Ideally, you would want to make it persona by including the prospect’s name or company name. Geographical information can also help to grab your recipient’s attention. Studies have shown that personalized subject lines can help increase open rates by more than 50%.
2. Email Content
Personalized the content in your b2b emails to target different audiences. For example, if you are sending cold emails to prospects in the software industry, the messaging should be different than what you would be sending to leads in the hospitality industry. Research your target market and craft emails that let prospects know you understand the needs and can offer viable solutions to their pain points.
Finding ways to personalize your emails will help you get better open and click-through rates and increase your b2b email lead generation efforts
3. Email Frequency for B2B Lead Generation Campaigns
The key to deploying a successful lead generation campaign is email frequency. You don’t want to fatigue your email prospecting list by sending out emails every day. Instead, find a good cadence that fits your business goals.
Typically, sending once a week to the same recipients is more than enough outreach for many companies. Segmenting can also help you ensure that you are not targeting the same leads across different campaigns. You can also give your subscribers the option to choose how often they receive email from you.
Many sales experts agree that it takes more than 7 touch points before a sale is made in most industries. So be consistent with your b2b lead generation efforts.
4. B2B Email Lead Generation Best Practices
There are many different ways you can deploy a b2b email marketing campaign. However, there are some general guidelines to adhere to to make your b2b email lead generation efforts a success. Here are some of the best practices for utilizing emails:
1. Strong content: Content is king when it comes to email. You want to make sure that every email you send offers something of value to prospects and that the messaging will resonate with your target audience.
Adding supplemental content outside of the email by linking to blog posts or articles on your website is a great way to engage and build credibility with prospective clients.
2. Responsiveness: Given that most people are now viewing emails on the go, you need to ensure that all of the emails that you send are optimized for all viewing environments including various mobile phones, tablets, and email clients.
3. CTA: A strong call-to-action will resonate a lot better than dry sales copy for emails, particularly if the email is product-focused.
Including a ‘learn more’ button is more effective than a ‘buy now’ button so be sure to work a prominent CTA into your B2B marketing emails if it fits your needs.
4. Images: When you think of sales emails, you probably imagine text-heavy emails. Many sales emails do not include any images outside of what you may find in the signature and that’s alright. This is because the email is essentially going out on behalf of a sales representative or business development manager.
With emails that are based around product marketing, however, you would be sending on behalf of your organization and would want to include a great looking template, a strong CTA, and some images to make your email really stand out.
5. Deliverability: After sending your campaigns, your ESP will provide you with information about how many emails were successfully delivered and how many have bounced. Having too high of a bounce rate can have an adverse effect on your reputation and deliverability..
If you are sending cold emails to a list that you’ve purchased, one thing you can do before sending is to ensure that there are no bad emails on your list. There are email verification services like BriteVerify that can help clean your lists before you send them.
6. Lead scoring: If you are sending sales emails on behalf of a sales team, every email that you send should also be tracked in your marketing automation tool and CRM. This allows you to set up lead scoring based on actions taken by recipients of your email campaigns.
For example, if someone opens an email, you can assign them a set amount of points. If they go through and visit your website, give them even more points. If they fill out a form or request a demo, that shows intent and can be used to sift out better leads.
5. Testing and Reporting
A/B testing allows you to test different versions of the same email campaign to see which version of an email performs better against a controlled group. Take the same email list and create different templates to measure engagement. Use this data to make informed decisions about the right messaging for each audience.
Here are some things you can test to fully optimize your b2b lead generation emails:
1. Subject Lines
2. Content
3. Length
4. Templates
5. Send time
Sending the right message at the right time to the right people is ultimately what differentiates a successful b2b email lead generation campaign from an unsuccessful one. You won’t always get it right the first time, but keep your eye on click-through rates, bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints to consistently optimize your campaigns for better response rates.
6. Leveraging B2B Email Lead Generation with Other Marketing Initiatives
Are you planning on attending an industry conference in the coming months? Oftentimes, you can find prospects directly from conferences and follow up with them after the event via cold emails. Sometimes you can even obtain the attendee list to contact prospects directly.
If you are planning a webinar, a great way to promote it would be through email marketing. You can follow up with a recording or presentation as a thank you note for attending the event. This builds trust with your potential clients while informing and educating them on a subject your company is an expert at.
Are you currently running Google Ads or other promotions that are driving traffic to your website or social media profiles? If so, incorporate a way to drive traffic to lead magnets and landing pages on your website to get more inbound leads signed up to your email list. This is a great way to find new audiences that you may not have known existed.
7. Complying with US CAN-SPAM, GDPR and CASL
Spam laws such as the US CAN-SPAM Act, the EU’s GDPR and Canada’s CASL all have to be taken into consideration when creating b2b lead generation campaigns. To stay compliant with the US CAN-SPAM law, your emails must include the following:
1. Your company name and address in every email
2. The ability for recipients to unsubscribe
3. Valid emails in the ‘from’ and ‘reply-to’ fields
4. Subject lines that match the content of your emails.
Conclusion
B2b lead generation is here to stay because it enables companies to leverage data and make informed decisions that help generate and convert leads. Whether you are a B2B-focused startup with a SaaS solution or an established B2B company selling products to large enterprises, knowing the ins and outs of B2B email marketing is a must.
It’s all about testing and optimizing. Each campaign that is sent needs to be evaluated based on performance and optimized for the future. Following all of the guidelines outlined in this article will help yield a larger return on investment from your B2B email lead generation strategy.