Lead Generation Strategies That Start With “E”

How can you drive revenue with the letter E? Let’s take a look at some of the strategies:

Email. I know, this is kind of like “duh”, but it is amazing to me how poorly email is used as a medium. For starters, many marketers are still using either no permission or opt-out as the preferred subscription management, as opposed to double opt-in, the gold standard for list quality and performance. Marketings working with better permission and quality lists outpull their counterparts by more than 4 to 1 in response rates. Hardly anyone is doing testing. No one says you have to do something complicated like multivariant, but at least do an A/B split test with subject lines and calls to action on every email campaign. It doesn’t take much longer and can improve your performance by up to 400%. How about just good copywriting? With the ubiquity of blackberries, most executives are reading their email on mobile devices. That pretty HTML template with endless copy isn’t going to cut it any more. The best thing you can do with email is get the respondent to the website as quickly as possible where you can engage and lead them through a more interactive experience. What about how you are using email? Are your autoresponders optimized to have additional calls to action and relevant messaging, or are they just an afterthought? Are emails being used only for new prospect acquisition, or are you also leveraging them for customer education, knowledge management, lead nurturing, or a host of other options? Email is a very powerful medium, and when used to its fullest extent, can be a very valuable part of your Web 2.0 marketing mix.

Executive Briefings. Whether they are breakfast meetings, teleconferences, hosted summits, or a variety of other approaches you can take, executives like to network with other executives and learn from their peers. If you do not have some kind of high-level educational or thought leadership program that is targeted at senior level executives, consider adding one today.

Stay tuned for the letter “F”…