When was the last time you opened an email because you were completely uninterested in what it had to say? How about searching on Amazon for products you’ll never need or Googling information you can’t use? Probably never, yet B2B businesses who don’t work to remain relevant to their prospects are investing time and energy in lead gen campaigns to entice their audience into doing just that.
Without relevance, your email lead gen strategy can’t gain traction. Here’s how to make sure you remain relevant to the audience you have today.
Demographic Details
You need to know the fundamental facts of who your leads are before you can make your email marketing relevant to them. Selling snowplows in San Antonio is a non-starter, so get the geographic and demographic details that let you narrow down your market first. Email append and reverse append services help you focus your lead generation activity where it matters most and keep your marketing relevant to your audience.
Behavioral Data
Watching how your leads interact with you and monitoring their engagement will speak volumes about what’s relevant to them. You’ve seen this process in action whenever you return to a favorite online store and are presented with products from the same brand names or categories you’ve shopped before. You’re also seeing it when you click links within this blog. If you’re interested in our white papers on using webinars as a lead gen tool or finding the source of your success with attribution, for example, we know that when you click through and download.
Behavioral data also contributes heavily to lead scoring, which in turn tells you when to connect with leads, what level of content they need, and when they’re getting close to sales readiness. Combine this data with demographic and firmographic information, add in some historical insight, and you have a remarkably clear picture of individual leads.
Segmentation
If gaining insight into one lead is useful, being able to connect with leads as members of a group is essential to scaling up your marketing strategy. Effective segmentation is the foundation of designing relevant email marketing campaigns. With well-defined segments, you’re able to talk to thousands of leads at once while remaining highly relevant to each of them as individuals. Unless your business is so new that you can count your leads on your fingers, you need segmentation – and one way to get effective segmentation is through marketing automation.
Automation
Marketing automation increases the relevance of your email marketing in multiple ways. First, it manages your market segments for you, making sure your messages are targeted appropriately. Then, it lets you personalize and customize email content to a far greater degree than a standard email marketing service can provide. It also automatically manages the timing of your email communications based on triggers your leads create. You might set up a confirmation email when a lead signs up for a webinar, send a reminder the day before the event, and mail a follow-up message two days afterward, for example.
Testing
How do you know if your email lead gen strategy’s working? Simple: You test it, and then you test it again. Every aspect of your email marketing can be tested, from optimal email send times to the most irresistible subject lines. (If you’re stuck for what to test in your email marketing, we have a white paper with 25 suggestions for you.) By testing your email campaigns with marketing automation technology, you’ll get results in real time so you can send your message when it matters most.
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