Using Email Marketing For Lead Generation

Small businesses struggle to find cost-effective marketing options that will help generate leads, introduce new consumers to their brand and encourage them to engage. Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, retail sites like Amazon and eBay and search engines like Google and YouTube get billions of hits a day and offer affordable advertising solutions. The problem is standing out from the competition and getting the attention of the viewer.

Email marketing bypasses those issues and puts you directly in front of the consumer, on the devices they most frequently use whether it’s their computer, phone or tablet. It’s the perfect way to introduce your brand and bring awareness to a promotion you are currently running. As far as lead generation, email marketing allows you to target the right person and encourage engagement from qualified candidates.

Advantages To Email Marketing

If you have never done an email marketing campaign, there are several advantages that allow you to quickly reach the audience and get them to visit your site. These include:

• Cost-effective: When compared to other services, the cost per record is considerably lower and small businesses have more control over the size of the audience they reach based on their budget. Other platforms determine their own cost per impression and can raise the prices considerably depending on the competitiveness of the vertical. With electronic mail, the cost is based on impressions and that’s all.
• Efficient targeting: To make the campaign more effective, targeting needs to be emphasized from the very beginning. The more you understand your audience, the more effective your targeting will be. A smart thing to do is to analyze your own data to better understand your consumers including age, gender, location, interests and more.
• Make an immediate impression: With electronic mail, you are not waiting for someone to go to a page and hopefully see an ad. You are sending the message directly to the person and even if they do not open the message, they still see who it is from and what the subject is regarding.
• Keeps consumers informed: If you are continuously running new promotions or have news to share, this is the ideal platform to keep your audience informed and up-to-date with what’s going on in your company. The same tactics are used with television and radio ads, only this is much more cost-effective and offers a higher and more trackable ROI.

How To Use Email Marketing To Generate Leads

While electronic mail is a powerful tool for lead generation, it still needs to be done properly. The following steps need to be taken to improve the effectiveness of your campaign:

1. Define your audience: Again, targeting needs to be taken very seriously as you are choosing the recipients of this message. If the average customer for a dealership has an annual income of over $100,000 then targeting an audience that earns under $50,000 will not make sense and you will see a poor return from the campaign. With over 300 different demographic and lifestyle attributes to choose from, you can narrow the audience down to zip code, gender, marital status, how many children they have, if they rent or own their home, personal interests, political affiliation and more.
2. Design your creative: The actual message and subject are also important. This is going to determine if the person opens the message and if they respond. You want an informative subject that’s simple to remember and gets the point across and the creative itself needs to have colors that reflect your brand, a strong call to action and content that’s easy to follow.
3. Introduce yourself: Remember, this is the first time the recipient is going to see your brand. Do not focus primarily on lead generation at this time, focus on introducing yourself as an authority in your industry, that you have been around for years and that you are a great company to do business with.
4. Reintroduce yourself: The second campaign is designed to encourage the recipient to take a more serious look at you, who you are, what your promotion is and why they should be interested.
5. Motivate them to engage: It doesn’t matter which campaign it is, you have to provide the recipient with a reason to respond. What are you offering them that would motivate them to click on the link, visit your site and purchase something, give you their information or whatever else you need for a conversion?

If done properly, email marketing will open new doors to long-term relationships between your business and the consumer. It is the most cost-effective way to introduce your brand and track ROI. In order to generate leads, you must give the recipient something that he or she will feel encouraged to respond to and make sure that you reconnect with them multiple times.

DigDev Direct can facilitate the entire process of identifying an audience, building a creative and deploying the campaign to millions of consumers with our email marketing services. Our database, which consists of well over 280 permission-based email addresses, is the ideal resource for businesses to use for lead generation as it allows them to introduce their brand and encourage recipients to engage. If you are interested in learning more about these services, contact us today for a free consultation.