Email Lead Generation: Tips and Strategies That Work

Email lead generation is the first step in setting up a successful email marketing strategy. Before you start writing content or creating subject lines, you need to generate leads.

In this article, we’ll show you how to find email leads and develop great campaigns that continue generating leads in the future. We’ll reveal where to find the leads you need and which tools you can use to your advantage.

By the end of this article, you’ll know everything you need to know about generating email marketing leads, setting up your strategy, and selecting the right tools for the job.

Let’s get started.

Quick Links:

1. What Is Email Lead Generation?
2. The Most Effective Strategies for B2B Email Lead Generation
3. Tips To Improve Your Email Campaign
4. Important Steps For Cold Email Lead Generation
5. Enhance Your Efforts With This Email Lead Generation Software
6. Frequently Asked Questions About Email Lead Generation
7. Here’s What You Need to Remember About Email Lead Generation

What Is Email Lead Generation?

Email lead generation refers to finding and collecting potential leads’ email addresses. With email lead generation, you can generate leads for each part of your sales process and find the information you need to engage them with personalized emails.

While many companies merely use an opt-in form on their website to obtain email addresses, expanding your reach even further can help you get the most out of your email marketing campaigns. 

With a good lead generation strategy, you’ll never run out of email leads for any sales funnel segment.

The Most Effective Strategies for B2B Email Lead Generation

Here are some of the most effective strategies for B2B email lead generation:

Build an email list using UpLead

UpLead is a powerful lead-generation company that allows you to generate leads on command. 

With a vast database including millions of contacts in over 200 countries, UpLead’s prospector tool allows you to find the leads you need by searching for those who match your target audience. From there, you can easily select the leads you want to download—individually or in bulk. UpLead verifies all email addresses in real-time, removing invalid data to ensure deliverability.

Already have a lead list? Upload it and use Uplead’s powerful database enrichment capabilities to fill in any missing fields with updated profile data and validated contact information.

Try UpLead for free today and see if it’s the right fit.

Meet new leads (and capture their email addresses) at industry events

The meeting leads in person allows you to establish a deeper connection in less time. That’s why trade shows and industry events are great places to generate warm leads that your sales team can nurture.

Before you rush to the next industry event, be sure to do your research. Find the events most worthy of your time, research who will be there, and perfect your sales pitch.

Create gated content that your ideal audience will love

Gated content can become a powerful lead magnet. Oftentimes, users will gladly give you their email addresses and lead information in exchange for content with high perceived quality. 

Salesforce, for example, has developed a whole library of content. Although not all of their content is gated, accessing some of the highest-quality content requires filling out detailed opt-in forms, which allows the platform to segment leads perfectly and follow up with them as needed.

By developing high-quality content that’s engaging and hyper-relevant to the user, you can create a lead magnet that will continue generating quality leads over the long term with little maintenance.

Use automated drip email campaigns

A drip email campaign is an email marketing strategy that automatically sends several emails to a lead over a fixed period. These emails are usually sent as a response to lead triggers that activate based on user activity on your website, ensuring an immediate response.

You can learn more about this technique and start a campaign with pre-tested drip campaign templates by HubSpot.

Make your content and emails share-worthy

Expand your email marketing reach by developing unique content that users can’t resist sharing. Although this may not be the easiest email marketing technique, it can generate a ton of leads at a very low cost if done right.

Creating share-worthy content doesn’t have to be difficult. Look at the email above by TheSkimm, where they offer loyal customers the title of “brand ambassador” if they share one link with ten people.

Provide a FREE offer (free products, coupons, trials, etc. Anything free will do!)

People always respond well to free offers, whether it’s a t-shirt, trial, or any other freebie. They allow the recipient to interact with your brand and solutions and help develop a good relationship with potential customers before purchasing.

Signaturely, for example, gives users a generous forever-free version of its online signature solution, offering up to 3 signature requests per month plus access to notifications and reminders. This persuades the user to adopt the platform and determine if it’s a good fit without the risk of losing money.

Leverage social media

When done right, social media is a powerful and cost-effective lead-generation tool. Social media allows companies to develop a following and foster a community that’s constantly tuning in and engaging with their content.

Wendy’s is a great example of successful social media engagement. By developing a sassy Twitter persona, Wendy’s completely redefined their public perception and gathered a massive following of millions of users through a solid and defined social media content strategy.

Host a contest (with a prize that’s relevant to your audience)

Contests can be a great source of email leads by creating a burst of high engagement from your potential—and existing—customer base.

Despite its massive size, Coca-Cola keeps it simple, instead of complex contests with a few lucky winners. This technique also fosters engagement in coordination with seasonal events and holidays.

Develop a newsletter

Great newsletters can help you foster a more engaged audience of users who expect your emails and look forward to the next one.

If you want to write a good newsletter, offer your audience hyper-relevant information instead of just sending coupons and offers. Combine this technique with others from our list—such as giveaways and shareable content—to create engaging newsletters that people can’t wait to open.

Combine email with direct mail

With direct mail losing popularity among companies, receiving a physical letter is rare and increasingly memorable. Therefore, combining direct mail with your email marketing campaign can effectively boost your email efforts.

You could develop physical content made to re-engage with cold leads and offer personalized content based on their behavior and profile. You can also use tracking numbers to coordinate emails with your direct mail campaign to follow up as leads receive your letters automatically.

Tips To Improve Your Email Lead Generation Campaign

Here are a few tips to improve your email campaigns:

1. Call to follow up

Calling for a follow-up can be a great way to improve your cold email campaigns. However, since they’re time-consuming, you’ll want to ensure your sales team only calls the best-qualified leads. This increases the likelihood that your calls will be accepted and welcome.

Use tools like UpLead’s Chrome extension to ensure you’re collecting all lead information, including phone numbers that can be used for follow-up. The extension also includes full user profiles, making determining which leads are the most qualified easier.

2. Know your target audience (better than they know themselves)

The first step to finding the right leads is knowing their characteristics. Building highly-accurate user personas will give you and your sales team a good idea of who they’re developing email campaigns for and how to improve the campaign in the future.

Use data-driven decisions to build and continually refine user personas, their purchasing process, and the best channels to reach them.

3. Highlight one strong call to action per email

The call to action is the main event in most successful email marketing campaigns. Typically, the purpose of valuable content is to entice users to click through the call to action and get to your landing page.

Optimize your email and ensure all content is written and designed to make your call to action irresistible.

4. Test different calls to action (CTAs)

Since CTAs are so important, it’s essential to determine which ones work best for your audience.

Conduct A/B testing to figure out which ones are most effective, and continue testing to improve your efforts going forward.  

5. Use strong lead magnets on your site

Lead magnets can be a perpetual source of leads as long as they’re built right. However, since building lead magnets is often time-consuming, it can be intimidating to start without knowing how well they’ll work—or if they’ll work at all.

That’s where your target audience data comes in. Find out what “valuable content” means for your audience. Use that information to match your product or service to their pain points and attract them to your brand.

6. Score your leads

Lead scoring is an often overlooked but vital part of the lead generation strategy. It’s a method used to rank the potential value of your leads. The better you can score your leads, the easier it’ll be to develop appropriate email marketing campaigns.

Make sure you’re using the right tools to score leads. It will streamline your work and buy more time for your team to develop a relationship with your leads and make the sale.

7. Ensure your email list is accurate

Often just a few or even one invalid email address can be extremely detrimental to the success of the campaign it was included in and the campaigns after. Using unreliable, untested email addresses can put you at risk of spam traps, which would flag all emails from you and send more and more of them directly to spam. They can also bounce back, which affects your deliverability too. 

That’s why it’s vital to get rid of all invalid email addresses before they’re ever added to your marketing campaigns.

Use verification tools like UpLead’s email verifier to ensure all email addresses are fresh and valid before the start of your campaign.

8. Personalize every email

With the widespread use of personalization techniques and strategies, customers have come to expect catered marketing material. It has become common for people to see ads targeting their exact pain points while navigating online, so your email marketing efforts should match their expectations.

Enrich your current databases with fresh and accurate information to use automatically in your campaigns, such as addressing leads by their names and providing them with content they’ll find relevant.

9. Create urgency to entice action

Urgency is a great motivator you can use to entice your leads to open and click through your emails. 

Ensure you’re using a healthy amount of urgency in your email marketing efforts. You want to include enough to be effective while ensuring you don’t look pushy. Ensure you infuse urgency into your content, CTA, and subject line.

10. Ensure your emails look great on mobile devices

Most people read their emails on their phones. If your emails aren’t optimized for mobile devices, you will likely lose most of your audience’s attention.

Develop your emails with a focus on mobile compatibility. If you can’t accomplish this yourself, use email marketing software to access templates that work well for mobile and computer settings.

Important Steps For Cold Email Lead Generation

Here are the most vital steps to ensure the success of your cold email lead generation efforts:

1. Ensure the “from” address clearly demonstrates who you are

Gone are the days when it was the norm to send emails from “[email protected]”. Companies use the “from” field to expand their email lead generation strategy.

Humanize your “noreply” address to an email address with a name, and foster customer interactions by actively asking people to reply. 

That way, they know they’re not just interacting with a faceless company; they’re communicating with a member of your team.

2. Focus on creating a compelling subject line

Your subject line is the most important part of your email. It should pop out when the lead opens their inbox, inform them about the email, and entice them to open it. 

Instead of making assumptions about what would work best, use data-driven decisions based on your customer profile to develop compelling subject lines. Test them regularly, and be sure to monitor your success. Also, be sure to keep an eye on what the competition is doing.  

3. Offer value to the reader

Every email lead generation strategy should revolve around getting valuable content to the leads who can benefit from it the most.

Ensure you’re giving as much value to the reader as possible. Once the reader has clicked a link in your email, reward them with valuable, good-looking, easy-to-read content. If your audience expects valuable content from you, they’ll look forward to every email you send them.

4. Ensure your email is clear and concise

The point of cold email marketing isn’t always to make an immediate sale. Often, it’s only about opening the door.

Keep your emails concise instead of overwhelming your audience with a long sales pitch. Figure out your CTA, then lead your reader to it in as few words as possible.

5. Include a clear and catchy call to action

We’ve already mentioned how vital it is to use your content as an arrow pointing toward your CTA. However, remember that your CTA should be as clear and catchy as possible.

Design your CTA to be immediately identifiable as soon as the email is opened. Then design your content to motivate your lead to click on it.

6. Implement an email retention policy

An often overlooked aspect of cold email lead generation is the importance of an email retention policy. This policy outlines how long emails are kept and when they should be deleted.
Maintaining a clear email retention policy helps keep your email list clean and ensures compliance with data protection regulations. It also aids in managing storage space effectively and improving email deliverability by removing outdated or inactive email addresses. Regularly review and update your email lists to maintain relevance and maximize engagement with your leads.

Enhance Your Efforts With This Email Lead Generation Software

You’ll need to use the right tools to improve your email lead generation efforts. UpLead helps you build and maintain your email list efficiently.

UpLead offers a 95% data accuracy guarantee unlike many lead generation tools. They validate your email addresses in real-time to ensure you only get accurate and fresh lead data.

UpLead also displays data on simple and intuitive profiles to simplify lead scoring and personalization for your sales team.

Try UpLead for free today.

Frequently Asked Questions About Email Lead Generation

Here are a few answers to commonly asked questions about email lead generation:

Here’s What You Need to Remember About Email Lead Generation

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective lead generation strategies out there. Ensure you’re developing cold emails with optimized subject lines, attractive CTAs, and highly valuable content. If you need help, you can check out external services for email marketing campaigns.

Once you’re ready to start, you can generate the email leads you need with UpLead and immediately get started on your lead generation strategy.

Try UpLead and start generating the leads you need today.