Lead Generation and Email Marketing: 7 Tips to Grow Your Open Rate

The more contemporary approach is to not use a single medium for communicating a value proposition but to combine multiple channels to get your message across. Every customer will prefer receiving information in a different way.

Email marketing is a direct marketing tactic that’s an excellent way to enhance your marketing and lead generation campaign. As a direct contact form of marketing, you can use email leads to get in contact with your potential customers directly in an effort to communicate what your business is offering and how it can benefit them.

You can get access to email addresses through various methods, whether it’s people signing up to your website directly or tools that allow you to access lists of potential customers for your business.

Email leads can be a help or hindrance. It’s important to collect email addresses in a method that observes legal requirements for privacy and to provide an opt-out option in your email marketing campaigns. Many email marketing tools will have this feature as a default.

Here are seven ways to grow your open rate:

1. Choose the right target audience

Improving your open rate can be more easily achieved by taking the first step in choosing the right audience to target with your emails. Many marketers make the error of choosing a shotgun strategy: going too wide and targeting segments that aren’t ideal for the product or service on offer. By narrowing the target market based on demographics such as age, gender, occupation or hobbies, you can find your future customers much easier. You can use public records for your email marketing strategy which will help to grow your open rate and find your target audience easily.

2. Keep your list fresh

The list that you’re using for your email marketing will dwindle over time. Recipients who start out interested often wane, and many will choose to delete the email before even opening it. By updating your list with new emails and culling email addresses that are opening your email less often, the new leads will help inject new life and improve the opening rate.

3. Segment your list

Segmentation can be used to ensure that you’re sending the email to the right target audience, but your list can be further segmented based on the type of language that you are using in the emails that you’re sending. For example, segmenting by gender can allow the use of gender-specific pronouns to make the email feel more personalized. Segmenting by age will allow your emails to be written in a sentence structure conducive to communicating with different generations. Millennials and Generation X will have different buzz words than other groups.

4. Personalization

What better way to connect with your target market than by using their name? Sales and marketing experts have been doing this for years in sales scripts using the customer’s first name to make the interaction more friendly. Reverse email lookup tools assist in not only finding the email address for your prospective customers and decision-makers but also their names and positions in their business. By using an effective email lookup tool you’ll be able to add that touch of personalization in the first line and body of the email to connect with the reader.

5. Email subject line

The subject line of the marketing email is the first message that the reader will see and often determines whether the email will be opened. By sending a marketing email, you’re asking for a small amount of the reader’s time to express your value proposition. Depending on the nature of your business and the segment that you target, this will change. Some businesses may call for the attention-seeking discount offer. No matter what the subject line is, it must communicate that the email contains essential information to enhance your reader’s knowledge.

6. Email content

The phrase ‘content is king’ has been ringing true for many years now. Regardless of whether you’re posting a video on social media, a blog post or an email newsletter, the content you produce is what will be attracting your customer and personifying your business. In recent times research has found that the best way to connect with your target market is to ensure that they’re entertained. For this reason, marketers have switched to communicating using infotainment; the combination of both information and entertainment in the message. Good content should communicate the message you want combined with being entertaining for the reader.

7. Use a tool for email marketing

Tracking the open rate can only be done well if you’re able to track the emails and individuals opening them. Many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools such as Hubspot will provide this service through their platform. This allows you to see not only who has opened the email but how often they’re opening it and which links they may be clicking. Good email marketing tools aid in  tracking the opening rate and the effectiveness of the content generated and who should be targeted stronger in the future. Since you put a lot of effort into creating a marketing campaign, it’s best to track the result of your efforts.

Final thoughts

Email marketing campaigns can be either the backbone of digital customer interaction or the ideal support system for your marketing campaigns. By having effective direct contact with potential customers, you’ll be able to establish and build strong leads and future relationships with your business. The more tools used, the greater the aggregate effect of the campaign. Email marketing could just be the first step in generating the next level of leads that your business is in desperate need of.