Email marketing has long been seen as the primary outreach for all businesses. After all it offers a low cost, broad-reach platform to message out to your prospects and customers. However, with over 100 billion emails sent every day, it’s becoming harder to be noticed.
We understand and agree that many marketing teams will rightly continue to communicate via emails, and without doubt email remains one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways of informing customers and prospects about your news, offers, blogs and other updates.
Savvy marketing teams are beginning to understand that results need to be more than only open and click-through rates. Their sales teams understandably want warm leads, quickly.
You don’t always need email addresses for lead generation.
For many years, sales trainers have stressed the importance of selling to the top. It’s often about quality of information, not quantity. Focusing on your key influencers to bring best results.
However, with the growth of platforms such as LinkedIn, you don’t always need the email address of your prospect to be able to contact them. In fact, a well-crafted personal LinkedIn message to a CxO will get a better response than an email that will often be deleted by a PA, long before the CxO even gets a chance to see it.
One of the biggest challenges of using LinkedIn for lead generation is finding those key individuals, without buying expensive LinkedIn premium packages.
Search engines such as Google and Bing will often provide details of who to contact, and processes exist to find which online groups they are in, so you can message them free of charge, without always having to use Inmails.
Marketing automation platforms such as Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot and Nimble, etc now have fields to log people’s LinkedIn profile URLs, so you can continue to nurture this key contact data.
By using well-crafted, focused, relevant and personal LinkedIn messages (never mass messaging) through InMails or groups, our clients are seeing engagement rates as high as 1:10. We are not talking about open or click rates, we’re talking about the start of positive conversations with prospects who want to know more.
Email is not going away, and when used wisely with landing pages, good headlines and copy, it remains a powerful tool for marketers. But you could also be focused and raise the bar by thinking outside the email box and start engaging with your key prospects through platforms like LinkedIn.
If you’d like more advice on how to generate leads thinking outside the email box, then download our free eBook that helps you use LinkedIn for lead generation.
