You need leads because leads help you improve your bottomline.

The goal of generating these leads for your business is to nurture them using permission marketing.

These leads are everything your campaigns and business is built around on.

Is a ready-made list better?

• The people on a ready-made list are not your contacts. They may leave any time they want. 
• Since you’re not someone they are expecting an email from, they may mark these emails as spam. That hurts your sender reputation and results in poor deliverabilty rates for the long term.
• The CAN-SPAM act and the GDPR laws make it extremely difficult for you to continue sending emails to a list you bought with money. The ISP may block you and prevent you from sending any more emails.
• You will hardly make any sales.

How to generate email leads the right way.

If you know how to do things right, getting targeted prospects isn’t going to be too difficult.

Here’s what to keep in mind:

Identify your target audience

You need a target audience first and need to know the identifiers that help you club people with certain traits as belonging to your target audience. For this to happen you need to create a buyer persona and understand the pain points they have.

Here are all the details that are essential for you to figure out:

• Who is your target demographic?
• Where are they located?
• What jobs they do?
• What do they earn?
• What are their hobbies?
• Where do they spend time online
• What are their pain points and challenges?

Email automation tools help you target your ideal customer with data. Once you gather data on prospects, that opens up the way to create more personalized campaigns.

This human touch will help you create better relationships and far more engagement.

Create an Irresistible Offer

Once you know your target audience well enough and have an idea of their pain points and challenges, you have the information to create something they’re going to love. The offer called a lead magnet should be oriented towards solving a problem your prospect has. For example, Jobber has recently created salary guides for its different personas Plumber Salary Guide, Electrician Salary Guide, HVAC Salary Guide and Cleaner Salary Guide. These guides are useful for their audiences who they know are looking for information on salaries in those industries.

If your offer doesn’t offer any real value, you won’t get leads. Don’t cobble together something in a few minutes and call it a day. There are far too many marketers attempting the same thing. And your audience is now trained to look for the best. For example, the people running Honeymoon goals set up a list of honeymoon registres for a honeymoon fund after painstaking research. That gets them a lot of leads.

Use the Power of Social Media

Very soon, there will be more than 4 billion active social media users. You can use the power of social media to generate leads by promoting your lead magnets or even content like images and videos.

Start by posting high-quality content. In addition, create content that’s relevant to each type of social media platform you’re on. The audience on TIkTok is looking for different content than what’s on Facebook. For instance here’s a Caribbean vacation site and his social media feed.

Make your CTA Click-Worthy. 

Your email form needs to have a clear and concise call to action that makes it easy to just click and get what they need. You can use web apps like React for creating landing pages and call-to-action buttons.

Be a little creative to get attention.

Here’s an example from OptinMonster:

The offer makes it hard to resist.

Effective CTAs add elements of urgency, excitement and mystery. That makes it hard to simply not pay attention to it.

• Use action oritented words and get people to take action. Use words like Discount, Schedule your demo and try for free.
• Keep your CTA to one or three words.
• Use the fear of missing out on by making statements like only few spots left or the discount ending soon.

The Actual Content of the Emails Matter

Once the prospect signed up to get emails, they are a lead. But, the journey only begins at this point. You need to nurture them. And that means creating engaging email content that helps and guides them. If you don’t havve the time for creating content, make use of the help of a virtual assistant.

I shouldn’t be quoting this example, because this particular marketer was fined and debarred from selling any make money online offers ever. I am talking about Matt Lloyd an Australian marketer who used to run the MOBE program. It was a sort of quick-rich scheme that promised insane returns. 

However, the point that I am trying to make is—the entire MOBE program was built on the tenet of extremely well-written emails. Matt would promise the moon in each of his emails citing real-life examples of experiences he had. That made his emails all the more compelling and generated hundreds of targeted customers.

MOBE was worth $20 to $30 million dollars at its peak. So, the lesson here is your emails should be filled with good content. They should be short and to the point.

Even if you’re running a simple blog on affiliate marketing tools, make sure that you weave a story through your email content.

Why is this important? Because word gets around. And there will be plenty of people who would sign up just to read the great content in your emails.

Here’s what characterizes a good email:

• Use easy to read fonts
• Choose a simple template
• Use short sentences and highlight important information wihin the email
• Place the CTA button so it stands out from the rest of the content.

Concluding thoughts

Email marketing is one of the oldest and the most effective methods for you to start generating leads and a business online.

Author bio: George blogs at Kamayobloggers, a site he started to share the best marketing advice online.