10 Steps to Generate B2B Sales Leads from Email Marketing

Are you seeking a robust strategy for email marketing for B2B lead generation? You're eager to solidify your brand's reputation, nurture high-intent leads, and drive sales to new heights. You might also aim to expand your subscriber base, increase customer engagement, or reduce churn rates. 

Now, if you’re unsuccessful in meeting the goals mentioned above, your current approach may require an overhaul.

Numerous factors contribute to its underperformance, including:

• Poorly targeted emails,
• Unclear Calls to Action (CTAs),
• Lack of personalization,
• Neglect of A/B testing.

However, email marketing for lead generation can wield substantial power when executed effectively. Companies that excel at lead nurturing through email generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost per lead.

Despite the potential, many businesses grapple with crafting a winning B2B email lead generation strategy. 

As a B2B lead generation agency, we have curated a comprehensive guide that provides a foolproof approach to email marketing, designed to boost your conversions. But first, let’s clear up some basics.

5 Benefits of Email Marketing in B2B Lead Generation

You may have encountered the claim that every dollar invested in email marketing yields substantial returns. Fortunately, this assertion holds true. 

Email marketing in B2B lead generation is a flexible avenue to enhance brand visibility, stimulate interest, foster leads, and, most importantly, catalyze conversions.

Here's the compelling rationale behind why every B2B enterprise, including yours, should consider embracing an email-centric approach to lead generation:

1. Nurtured Leads Across the Sales Funnel

Embracing an email marketing strategy offers many advantages. One standout benefit is the capacity to nurture and convert leads at every stage of your sales funnel. 

Notably, B2B marketers recognize email newsletters as the top-performing channel for lead nurturing – with an impressive 66% conversion rate.

A segmented audience list, automation, and A/B testing can help achieve optimal results. This combined approach enables you to strike the right chord with your prospects and guide them toward a purchase decision. 

Also, you can use email marketing for lead generation to

• Re-engage cold leads
• Foster robust relationships with active customers,
• Extend the reach of your content to a broader audience

2. High Return on Investment (ROI)

Email marketing for B2B lead generation is known for its remarkable ability to help you achieve your goals. 

Recent insights reveal the following facts:

• Email click-through rates (CTRs) in B2B are 47% higher than in B2C. 
• Up to 87% of B2B professionals say email marketing is their most successful free organic distribution channel.  

It showcases this approach’s unrivaled effectiveness. Its exceptional ROI – outperforming many other marketing channels makes it even more appealing. 

With an average open rate of 21.33%, email marketing isn't just a nice-to-have. It’s your master weapon to drive demand and supercharge profits.

3. Consistent Reach and Visibility

Unlike dynamic algorithms, emails promise consistent reach to your leads. Therefore, it eliminates the risk of fluctuating visibility. 

It explains why email marketing has become the go-to choice for 89% of marketers for lead generation.

Furthermore, tailoring emails for every stage of the customer journey ensures your brand remains at the forefront of your leads' minds. It’s a significant factor driving a major chunk of B2B marketers to prioritize emails as their primary form of content distribution.

4. Super-customized Messaging

Reports state that targeted emails drive 36% of marketing ROI.

Yes, email marketing platforms provide sophisticated targeting and segmentation features. Now, this enables the delivery of highly personalized messages to your subscribers. 

You can engage with your customers on a personal level by crafting diverse versions of a single email tailored to various buyer personas. This approach empowers you to address persona-specific challenges and make a more significant impression on your audience.

5. More Efficiency with Automation

One of the primary reasons B2B marketers turn to email marketing is the incredible efficiency of automating various workflows. 

It means you can effortlessly manage end-to-end email campaigns without straining your budget. And this holds even with a lean team. How is this possible? 

• Automating triggered emails
• By orchestrating lead-nurturing sequences
• By refining audience segmentation

Automation streamlines your processes and widens the scope for personalized communication using valuable customer insights. 

How to Design a B2B Email Marketing Strategy: 8 Master Tips

Now that you understand the upsides of email marketing, let’s come to the main topic. Here’s our comprehensive list with practical advice and valuable insights to build a successful email marketing strategy:

1. Embrace Email Automation

It enables you to embrace personalization on a larger scale. You can establish automation workflows for various tasks, including:

• Drip Campaigns: Create a series of automated emails to nurture your email marketing leads or onboard new customers. Set the campaign rules, and watch these emails consistently land in your leads' inboxes.
• Segmentation: Automatically segment leads in real-time – based on predefined parameters. You can design automation flows to analyze your CRM data and keep your segmented lists current.
• Reporting: Utilize automation to evaluate your email performance and generate reports encompassing various metrics. These numbers provide deeper insights into the effectiveness of your campaign.
• List Maintenance: Automation simplifies maintaining the cleanliness of your email lists, enhancing deliverability. You can effortlessly remove invalid or defunct email addresses for higher open rates.
• Triggered Emails: This is one of the most common automation uses in email marketing. It involves sending targeted emails to leads right after they perform specific predefined actions or meet particular behavioral criteria.

As such, It's no surprise that 58% of B2B companies plan to adopt automation in their email marketing campaigns. Why the push for automation? Because it can help achieve the following outcomes:

• Reduce the time spent on backend activities
• Consistently improve performance
• Drive conversions

2. Utilize Email Templates

Creating B2B email lead generation campaigns from the ground up can be demanding. After all, emails are your primary communication channels – each message either captivate or loses prospects.

So, what's the secret to crafting impactful emails without expending excessive effort? The answer lies in using email templates. Pre-designed messages can:

• Simplify your workload.
• Accelerate your B2B lead generation efforts.

Here are some tried-and-true email templates to consider:

• Pre/Post Visualization: Illustrate scenarios before prospects use your product or service and after they've experienced it. This template highlights various features and use cases tailored to specific buyer personas.
• Competitive Advantage: Grab your prospects' attention by acknowledging a competitor brand they currently use and hinting at how your offering surpasses it. Briefly emphasize your key differentiators without revealing too much. Conclude with a compelling call to action.
• Sales Catalysts: Identify recent sales triggers, such as promotions or company funding. Craft emails centered around these events. Demonstrate that you've done your research and can make an immediate impact.
• Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS): Begin by emphasizing a significant pain point, weaving a narrative that underscores your prospects' challenges. Then, position your solution as the ideal remedy. 

Customize this template to address various Job-to-be-done (JTBD) scenarios and apply it across different sales funnel stages.

Here's a PAS email template you can download and use:

3. Use Personalization Strategies

Personalization is a prominent term in sales and marketing, and for good reason. Personalized B2B lead generation email marketing can boost revenue by an impressive 760%. 

This statistic makes it abundantly clear that personalization is no longer a luxury. It’s a fundamental requirement for achieving success in B2B email lead generation.

To strategically infuse personalization into your lead generation emails, consider the following best practices:

• Segment Your Leads List: Conduct in-depth research to segment your leads list based on behavior, preferences, and demographics.
• Automate Behavior-Based Triggers: Implement automated triggers that generate behavior-driven personalized emails, enhancing the relevance of your messaging.
• Maintain and Update Your Lead Database: Frequently refresh and manage your lead database to ensure accuracy and consistency – avoiding data discrepancies.
• Incorporate Contextual Personalization: Include contextually personalized elements such as questions, CTAs, and events that resonate with your recipients.
• Embed Personalization: Weave personalization into your email copy and design, encompassing subject lines and visual themes.

4. Integrate A/B Testing

Who wouldn't want a higher open rate, increased clicks, and more conversions in B2B marketing? Making this dream a reality involves diligent A/B testing and optimizing your lead generation emails.

In simple terms, A/B testing compares responses to different variations of an email sent to distinct sets of users. You can test various elements within your emails, including:

• Subject lines and preview texts
• Email length and structure
• Personalization
• Word order

To get started, establish the specific goal you want to test your emails for, such as the click-through rate. Give yourself a window of at least five days to gather substantial data, and then choose the version that performs best. 

Let's check out the primary goals to consider:

Email Metrics Matrix:

5. Use Data Processing and Analytics

Data is a potent ally in enhancing your email marketing B2B lead generation strategy. Leveraging it can help you pinpoint areas where your strategy falls short and refine it for better outcomes.

Here are five crucial metrics to assess the effectiveness of your lead generation process:

• Click-Through Rate: Evaluate the number of leads who click on your CTAs – to gauge the level of engagement your emails generate. Despite a reasonable open rate, a weak click-through rate suggests that your email content may be missing the mark.
• Bounce Rate: It estimates the number of emails that failed to reach recipients' inboxes. A high bounce rate often results from poor list hygiene, such as having too many inactive or incorrect email addresses.
• Open Rate: This metric quantifies the percentage of recipients who have opened and viewed your email. Many platforms consider an email as 'viewed' when all the graphics load fully. 

A low open rate may signal issues with email deliverability or less persuasive subject lines.

• Conversion Rate: Calculate the percentage of conversions achieved in an overall email campaign. It provides insight into how effectively you are converting leads throughout the campaign.
• Unsubscribe Rate: It indicates how many individuals have chosen to opt out of your email list. Put differently, it reflects the leads you've lost from your pipeline.

6. Leverage the Power of Segmentation

Lead list segmentation stands as a cornerstone of success in B2B email lead generation. It involves categorizing your entire lead database based on specific criteria.

Consider these vital factors for effective list segmentation:

• Demographics: Group your prospects by various demographic factors such as location, age, spending capacity, and more.
• Behavioral Metrics: Sort your leads based on their interactions, like website visits, email clicks, or page visits.
• Funnel Stages: Place your leads in different funnel stages and deliver content tailored to each stage, as mentioned earlier.
• Buyer Personas: Customize your communication for each prospect by assigning them to the most suitable buyer persona.
• Engagement Levels: Classify leads as active, inactive, or lost based on their response to your emails.

A well-segmented audience list opens up a world of opportunities to capture your prospects' attention in crowded inboxes. In addition to enhancing personalization, segmentation empowers you to send highly relevant and targeted messages, strengthening your position.

What’s more? Setting up a segmented list is a straightforward process. Integrating your email automation platform with your CRM tool allows you to segment your leads dynamically and effortlessly send personalized emails.

7. Focus on Persuasive Email Copywriting

Even if you've got all other aspects of your B2B email lead generation campaign perfectly aligned, a slip-up in your copy can bring the whole effort crashing down. There's nothing quite as effective as concise, compelling, and crystal-clear email copy when it comes to driving conversions.

The golden rule for crafting winning lead-gen emails is speaking to your prospects in their own language. Instead of complicating matters, pay close attention to their concerns and expectations, and transform this knowledge into impactful content.

Here are three tried-and-tested frameworks to optimize your email copy:

1. Pain Points Prioritization

This is the classic problem-oriented email tailored for each unique buyer persona. It utilizes each source of discomfort as a foundational element to resonate with your potential customers before introducing your solution.

In this approach, the quality of storytelling takes center stage. You must captivate your audience with a compelling narrative and position your brand as the ultimate remedy.

2. Enigmatic Opener

This method aims to pique your prospects' interest with a question, a thought-provoking statement, or a captivating hook. Here are some examples:

• Question-based Opener: "Do you know about the untapped potential hiding within your data?”
• Thought-provoking Opener: "The most successful entrepreneurs didn't follow the trends; they set them”
• Captivating Hook Opener: "Here’s how to launch a marketing campaign that generates not just leads but loyal brand advocates.”

The above openers spark the recipients' curiosity, enticing them to open the email and click on the CTA. Invest your efforts in perfecting the hook or the intriguing element to draw people into your email, and then proceed with your pitch.

3. Bond Establishment

This approach demands thorough research to demonstrate to every prospect that you understand them inside out. The objective is to identify a common thread between your pitch and their role or company, then craft a personalized email. 

While this approach may not be scalable, it can be highly effective for your most valuable leads.

Remember to avoid technical jargon and marketing lingo regardless of your chosen approach. Keep your communication friendly and conversational to connect with your leads on a human level and leave a lasting impact.

8. Optimize for Email Deliverability

Email delivery rates are pivotal in determining whether your messages reach a recipient's primary inbox or get lost in the digital wilderness. It is a core performance metric, reflecting the impact of your email marketing Campaigns.

Your sender reputation holds the key to deliverability. If your emails frequently end up in spam folders or bounce back, it damages your rapport. Plus, it signals email platforms to treat your messages as junk.

Beyond sender reputation, several other factors can either make or break your B2B lead generation email campaigns, including:

• List hygiene
• Email volume
• Message frequency

To enhance your email deliverability, consider these best practices:

• Embrace Personalized Verification: Employ custom authentication methods to send your emails securely, boosting your credibility.
• Have an Unsubscribe Option: Always include an option for recipients to unsubscribe easily. It's not just a best practice; it's a legal requirement in many places.
• Avoid URL Shorteners and Spam: Steer clear of URL shorteners and terms that trigger spam filters.
• Use Alt Text for Accessibility: Enhance accessibility by adding descriptive alt text to images and other media in your emails.
• Create High-Value Content: Craft content that provides real value and engages your leads, as engaged readers are more likely to receive your emails positively.
• Limit Media: Don't overload your emails with excessive images or media; it can trigger spam filters.

Conclusion

When executed effectively, email marketing for lead generation can evolve into a powerful catalyst for revenue growth. However, achieving this requires a meticulous strategy backed by vigilant monitoring. Our comprehensive guide to email marketing B2B lead generation will empower you to harness the full potential of email outreach and consistently generate conversions.

If you're seeking experts to supercharge your lead generation efforts, turn to Revnew. We have the expertise to elevate your email marketing ROI. Schedule a call with our team of professionals to discover our approach.