The good, the bad and the ugly of generating leads through email marketing

This post was last edited by Alex Cohen, on February 21, 2012 @ 2:34 pm

Many businesses have tried or thought of generating leads through email marketing, but only some get it right. Here we look at three different approaches – the good, the bad and the ugly:

The good

Emails that work best to your own databases or third party lists look like an email you’d send a colleague, have one call to action and give away some free content. The content could be a white paper, guide, free report or link to a video.

By giving something away for free you are adding value to your recipients. Some people will reply and by using reporting in your email marketing software you can see who has opened, clicked and downloaded your content.

The bad

Talking about yourself! This is what we do or here’s our latest offer. Most people don’t care (yes, you may find the odd person who’s interested in what you do at that exact time) but in general these emails get ignored, people unsubscribe and it could damage your brand.

It’s far better to warm someone up with a useful guide or white paper (as mentioned above) and then send a related offer to people that show an interest in your first email.

The ugly

There are many examples of ‘ugly’ emails

• Introductory emails with no calls to action
• Emails made up completely of images (most people that use Outlook will see a series of x’s)
• Sending the same direct mail content (a letter or flyer) in an email
• Sending large attachments (it annoys people)

If you do email right you can get some great results. There are results here of a 17:1 ROI with one client and how we generated 116 leads with another client.

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