How to generate leads through email marketing

Originally Published on 18/07/2019

Email marketing is one of the simplest and most effective tools available, capable of generating an impressive return on investment.

There are, however, plenty of ways to fail, such as sending emails at the wrong time, including the wrong subject line, sending an email that’s too lengthy or sharing irrelevant content.

If you’re sending hundreds of emails a day and are seeing little or no results, that can be disheartening.

But with a few simple tweaks to your strategy, you could make email marketing really work for your business.

Target the right audience

Your target audience is the group of individuals your campaign is aimed at. It’ll differ for every campaign, and therefore for every email. It’s important to remember that your target audience is the one who is most likely to purchase your services - so if you’re a broker targeting mostly landlords over homeowners, write your email only for landlords.

The goal is to have a really focused email that engages the reader, making them think ‘yes, this content speaks directly to me’.

Read more: How to grow your email list

Offer something they’ll want

Sending general emails that recycle content your readers can find elsewhere will only serve to bore them. Instead, give them something special such as an offer, a freebie, a discount, an early bird price, or a downloadable guide that teaches them something new.

This has the added benefit of boosting how your brand is perceived, though readers will come to expect more great content in the future, so make sure you have a strategy behind every offer.

Make it personal

Are you able to scan your inbox and know immediately what can be deleted and ignored? Unfortunately, so can your readers, which means you need to cut through the noise and stand out with a personal email. This can be tricky and time consuming without a good CRM, but it’s worth the effort if it means your readers feel you care enough to write directly to them.

Read more: Boosting customer retention with CRM

Create a newsletter

A weekly newsletter can make a real impact on how people interact with your business. We’re not saying you should become a news agency, or that you should produce several insightful articles every week; instead, share relevant industry articles that you think will engage them. 

Ultimately, you’ll be seen as an authority, boosting your target audience’s trust in you.

Send at the right time

Finding the best time to send an email has been studied by businesses for decades, and we could dispense statistics all day long showing how Tuesdays at 11am is the time people check their inbox most.

But that only achieves one thing: every business will send emails on Tuesdays at 11am. Instead, test different times and gather data on how your audience thinks and acts. After all, maybe they’re the few that actually check their emails on a Friday afternoon... 

Keep it brief

Our online attention span lasts eight seconds, which is why the really interesting stats for this article were put in the first sentence. Email works the same way, so your content needs to hook readers very quickly and be easy to scan. Short messages with bold, punchy headlines will help people consume your email more easily which, in turn, will help them navigate to your call to action.

Perfect your subject line

Everything, and we mean everything, hinges on a successful email subject line. The most well-written, engaging email ever written might go completely unnoticed if the subject line doesn’t grab the reader’s attention. There’s no magic formula, but it’s worth familiarising yourself with some basic rules:

• Write like a human, and match the tone to that of the email
• Make sure every word and character exists only to be scanned and quickly digested
• A/B test your variants to find what works best.

Helpfully, Coschedule has an email subject line tester that gives you handy insights into the strength of your ideas.

Write for mobile users

Around eight in ten emails are opened and read on mobile devices, yet email marketing campaigns will often be put together on a desktop. This means many emails are not optimised for mobile users so they appear to contain huge chunks of text that are not scannable. 

So write for mobile first with shorter sentences and call to action buttons that fit on a small screen.

We hope the tips above help you turbocharge your next email marketing campaign. For more tools, tips, tricks and guides on taking your business forward, be sure to check out the Growth Series.