Hey marketers – what do you actually use email for? Chances are you’re sending out a regular, probably-automated newsletter to your subscribers, and maybe you’ve got some nurturing automation in place.

Email’s a much more powerful tool than many folks, even marketers, give it credit for. You can use it to move people along your funnel and even generate fresh new leads.

You already use email (and if you don’t, you’re about to!). Let’s look at how you can get more out of it.

Creative Email Marketing Ideas to Boost Engagement (and Leads)

1 – Turn Your Newsletter Into a Resource

Sure, your newsletter probably already includes things like your latest blog posts. The best way to keep people engaged, however, is to give them plenty of value just for opening your email.

Instead of a generic, here’s-what-we’re-up-to newsletter, give your subscribers something a little more interesting and valuable.

Try adding in a Resource Spotlight section where, every week, you highlight a useful tool or resource for your subscribers’ industry or niche. Don’t make it your own product. That’s not the point. Your goal here is to make your subscribers want to open your newsletter because they want to see what cool new app or tool they might discover every week.

It doesn’t need to be a product, either. Highlight a particularly informative episode of an industry-related podcast, for example.

What you include isn’t as important as whether it’s valuable and interesting to your subscribers. You want to keep them opening your emails.

2 – Sneaky Nurturing

While we’re talking about making better use of your newsletter, here’s another thing you can do: start including case studies.

Of course, this means you’ll have to prepare case studies. However, they’re one of the most useful forms of social proof, and are an excellent weapon in your arsenal. Generating more of them is never a bad idea.

If your newsletter has a monthly feature where your subscribers can read a case study about the killer results you got for a customer, that’s cool. But if there’s a new case study every month, you’re doing something else: you’re steadily building up the impression that you deliver awesome results.

Plus, you can use those case studies across all your marketing channels to do the same thing! Expand that monthly customer spotlight to your social media, maybe even give it a spot on your website. Show everyone how great you are.

3 – Lead Generation

Okay, we’ve talked about a couple ways to buff up your newsletters. Nurturing is effective, but it’s also kind of slow and doesn’t really help you generate new leads. So let’s talk email lead generation.

Forget your subscribers for the moment. Email’s an excellent channel for bringing new leads into your funnel at scale, but you need to do it right.

Naturally, if you want to generate new leads, you need to reach new contacts. That means that by nature, you need to send cold campaigns.

Now, it’s easy to fall into the “but that’s spamming” trap. If you were to just grab a list of random contacts and send off some marketing to them indiscriminately, yeah, you’d be spamming.

But when you send a campaign to a list of cold B2B contacts in your target audience, that’s good marketing. The trick is getting a list like that! You need to avoid vendors that sell scraped lists, because that’s exactly what you don’t want – a randomly-collected list of emails from around the internet.

What’s the point of buying a list of contacts who might not even be in the right industry – or might not exist at all? Instead, source your list from a reputable data provider that aggregates their data. If you’re not sure where to find one, drop us a line. We partner with a number of them and will gladly refer you!

Anyway, once you’ve got a list, you need a way to send to them. Clickback’s Email Lead Generation software is designed for – you guessed it – generating leads with email. It’s a leading-edge platform that enables you to send those cold campaigns to as many contacts as you want, and gives you a complete set of tools to get your campaigns where they need to be: inboxes.

Get your free 1-on-1 software demo today.