There’s hardly a marketer out there who isn’t familiar with using email. Between newsletters, nurturing, promotions and all the rest, email is one of our go-to tools.

Lead generation campaigns, on the other hand, are an extremely useful method of actually generating leads with email. The name gives it away a little, doesn’t it?

Let’s take a look at what email lead generation (ELG) is and how you can use it to keep your funnel brimming with leads.

What are Lead Generation Campaigns? Email Lead Generation Explained

Why Email Lead Generation Rocks

A big part of our job as marketers is figuring out how to reach our target audiences as effectively and efficiently as possible.

There aren’t many ways you can do that at the same scale you can with email. ELG enables you to reach hundreds of thousands of contacts at once. The only real limit is how many cold contacts you have.

But we’re getting slightly ahead of ourselves. First of all, what is ELG?

Email lead generation is a process where you use specifically-designed software to send cold email campaigns to large lists of targeted B2B contacts, with the goal of generating opt-in conversions. Not all that different from what we do every day with other marketing platforms, but on a much larger scale.

The first step is purchasing a high-quality list. You need to ensure that you have a good list sourced from a reputable data vendor. This is absolutely critical, because low-quality lists will prevent you from achieving results.

That’s because some lists are created by scraping, which is where the vendor uses a program to find email addresses on the internet and builds a list out of them. Scraped lists are full of bad data, spam traps, honey pots, addresses that don’t exist, and on top of that you have no way of knowing whether any of the contacts are in your target audience.

Reputable providers, on the other hand, collect and curate their lists by aggregating data over time. This leads to much more reliable contact lists. If you aren’t sure where to find a reputable vendor, let us know. We partner with a number of them and can refer you!

Once You Have a List, Clean It

Every email list decays over time. Even that shiny new one you just bought from a reputable vendor. It happens as people switch jobs or addresses or domains, for example. Existing addresses are sometimes repurposed as spam traps, too.

The last thing you want to do is send a campaign to a list that might have spam traps and bad data in it. That’s where email verification comes in.

Email verification is a process that puts your list’s contacts through a series of tests and checks to scrub as much of that bad data as possible. It’s an important step before sending your campaign!

Normally, it’s a third-party service you’d need to pay for. If you’re using Clickback’s email lead generation software, however, there’s a cutting-edge email verification system built right into the list upload process.

Build Killer Campaigns

Once you’ve got a well-scrubbed list, you’re ready to start assembling your first lead generation campaign.

We have a deep dive into crafting awesome cold email copy, but here are a few of the most important points:

• Clearly state the problem you’re addressing. When your contacts can immediately tell that you’re offering a solution to a problem they face, you’ll snag their attention much more firmly.
• Keep it brief. Cold contacts are even more ready to ditch your email than warm ones. Get to the point rapidly and stick to it.
• Use benefits-oriented language. Don’t talk about you or your product – talk about the benefits the contact will gain. People are much more interested when you talk about what’s in it for them.

Aside from awesome email copy, you should make sure you’re using a dedicated landing page for each campaign. You should avoid directing people to your homepage or product page – don’t make them hunt around for a way to take the action you want them to take.

A dedicated landing page for each campaign means you can carefully craft the page to reinforce that specific campaign’s message, and place a form directly above the fold. In other words, make it as easy as possible for your contacts to convert!

The Technical Challenges

As awesome as they are, email lead generation campaigns have their own set of challenges beyond convincing people to convert.

Sending a campaign to a hundred thousand contacts at once is a technical hurdle. First of all, you need a platform that even allows cold lists, or campaigns that large. (Clickback does, of course.)

Beyond that, though, you also need to contend with spam appliances. Many people don’t give much thought to what happens in the background when they send an email. Hit send and then it appears in the recipient’s inbox, right?

When you send an email, it gets scanned by a spam filter at your end and at the recipient’s end. If your campaign is going out to tens or hundreds of thousands of people at once, it’s going to get looked at with deep scrutiny.

Spam filters assign your IP and domain a score from 0-100, called a sender score. The lower it is, the less trustworthy your emails are, and the more likely they are to end up in a junk folder.

Managing your sender score is a crucial aspect of email lead generation. Luckily, Clickback handles the technical side of it for you.

If you’re looking to generate B2B leads with email, you’re in the right place. Clickback is the leading-edge cold email software, designed from the ground up to make email lead generation possible. Get your live 1:1 demo today and see for yourself.