The majority of business leaders operate their email marketing under an outdated model. They send the same non-targeted generic email messages to all of their leads, and the metrics that they analyze do not match what is going on in the real world. As a result, their email campaigns are identified as spam and/or missed high-value email conversations with significant prospects through their sales teams.

As such, the most effective strategy for email marketing b2b lead generation is to shift away from larger generic email blasts that do not target any one lead, as today's inboxes contain an increased level of protection (i.e., filtering and sorting via advanced technology). Therefore, as business leaders and organizations, they need to develop evidence-based systems to prioritize technical delivery.

All communications/messages to the prospect must align with the specific title of that prospect. The business leader needs to track metrics that prove the intent of a real human being. The tools and systems that will be used by a business leader to implement email marketing will determine whether or not they are able to build a reliable sales pipeline and/or damage their domain name.

The email marketing framework presented here will help any organization implement efficient lead generation through email marketing.

Why Your Emails Are Not Reaching the Inbox

If the email is not being sent to the primary inbox, then it cannot generate new leads. The majority of companies only focus on either their headline subject line or the offer of their emails, and they neglect the technical foundation of their email sending domain.

Gmail, Yahoo, etc. etc., all have very strict spam complaint limits. Once you hit or exceed their spam complaint thresholds, they will block future emails sent under your domain. You must create a technical process to protect your primary brand domain while increasing your volume of email sent.

Why You Should Stop Caring About Open Rates

For years, email marketers used the metric of open rates to determine whether or not their email marketing campaigns were successful, but this metric is no longer a viable option. Corporate firewalls and Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) now automatically scan and open emails when they are first sent or received.

This causes significant data blurring because now the average B2B open rates range from 36.75% to 42.35%. In addition, some programs in the top quartile report open rates in excess of 50%. While they look impressive on a graph, they do not reflect actual human engagement.

Basing business decisions off of unreliable opens creates confusion and incorrect conclusions about how successful a campaign was, while the company may not have any additional prospect inquiries. This demonstrates the need to shift focus away from 'opens'.

How to Prove Your Identity to Email Providers

To ensure your outbound email can pass through spam filters, your email domain must have a digital passport. This digital passport consists of three types of technical protocol known as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

SPF provides the receiving mail server with the IP addresses authorized to send mail on behalf of your domain. DKIM creates an authentication signature that is attached to your emails, which identifies the email as having been sent without any changes during the transmission process. DMARC provides the receiving mail server with specific instructions about what should happen to any emails that fail either of the previous two processes (SPF or DKIM) to verify deliverability.

In addition, companies who run their lead generation campaigns typically follow strict DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) policies. They do not leave anything to chance.

Without the proper setup of the previous three protocols and alignment of those protocols, your lead generation initiatives will be completely ineffective before your prospective customers will ever see your name.

How to Safely Send More Emails

Using your primary corporate domain(s) to send cold outreach or mass marketing emails is extremely dangerous. If one of your cold or mass marketing emails is flagged by a recipient's email provider as spam, it's very likely that the recipient's email provider will also block all future communications sent from your primary corporate domain.

Businesses who are smart in their operations, which generally fall into the lead generation category of operations use separate subdomains for their lead generation activities. They segregate their lead generation email campaigns from internal corporate email communications. When establishing a new subdomain, you cannot begin sending 10,000 emails in one day.

It is necessary to warm up the domain. This involves sending a very limited number of emails in day 1 and gradually increasing the quantity every day in order to show email providers that you are a legitimate sender.

How to Keep Your Email List Clean

Your domain reputation may be jeopardized if you send an email to an invalid email. A high bounce rate indicates to email providers that you are a spammer.

You must clean your list prior to hitting send and monitor your overall complaint rate. If a large number of individuals label your message as spam, Gmail or Yahoo will punish your domain due to their spam complaint thresholds.

Set strict thresholds for your campaigns. As soon as a campaign experiences a high bounce or complaint ratio, stop the campaign and correct the targeting and/or data before continuing.

How to Write Emails for Specific Job Titles

Once you have secured your technical ground, you are going to address the content of your message. Targeting small and medium-sized businesses with broad messaging is destined to fail.

Studies show that 73% of the B2B decision-makers prefer to be contacted by a vendor via email but will delete emails that do not address their specific, day-to-day issues.

You need to write unique text for each job title, showing you understand their specific pain points.

What to Write to a Chief Financial Officer

CFOs are not interested in software features. Financial leaders are concerned about risk, maintaining tight control of costs and return on their investment.

If you are writing to a financial leader, your problem statement should communicate to the leader that they have wasted money or lost margins. Your proof should consist of hard ROI numbers.

For example, you can tell the financial leader that by using your solution they will save an average of $14 for every new lead that they generate. Your design should be simple, and your numbers should be clear. Do not ask for a 30-minute demonstration in the initial email. Instead, please ask them if they would like to receive a 1-page cost analysis for their review.

What to Write to an Operations Director

Operations leaders focus on process speed and efficiency from their team. Operations leaders absolutely despise system downtime and a slow workflow.

When messaging an Ops director, your focus should include time savings and error reduction. Your proof should be based on how quickly your tool will integrate into their existing system.

Demonstrate to the Ops director exactly how manual labor will decrease when using your system. Ask the Ops director a very short question related to their existing workflow bottlenecks. This will open the door for discussion around their world on a daily basis.

What to Write to a Marketing Leader

Marketing leaders are focused on pipeline growth and improved conversion numbers. Marketing leaders will be evaluated upon the quality of leads they provide to the sales team.

When sending a message to a marketing director you must highlight lead quality and conversion speed. You should also note that a good inbound system will generate 54% more leads than a cold list.

Your supporting information should include a higher click rate or increased placement for their domain. Ask the marketing director if they are currently working to increase MQL to SQL conversion ratios for the quarter.

How to Build a Sequence for Email Marketing B2B Lead Generation

Attributing a single email to produce a business lead is rare. B2B sales cycles last several months. Before making purchases, a company requires agreement on behalf of multiple stakeholders.

Simply sending a one-time email is an inefficient utilization of company resources; therefore, the majority of successful email campaigns utilize a structured series of three-to-five emails over a period of time.

It is essential to have a clear outline of what each email will accomplish; you'll want to transition the recipient from being unaware of your offering(s) until they reach a point where it's reasonable to discuss making a purchase.

How to Ask for Small Actions Instead of Big Meetings

Your initial email of the series should be targeted and specific, not including a comprehensive overview of your company’s history.

A good initial email will start by naming a specific issue your recipient will likely face; then provide the recipient with a singular sentence of proof saying that you have solved the same problem for a company similar to theirs.

At that point, include a "micro-attempt," which is a minimally-invasive question for your recipient to answer. Rather than ask for an appointment, present a chance to view a brief video, or a relevant statistic report. By doing so, you reduce pressure on the recipient and improve the likelihood of receiving a reply.

Why Follow-Up Emails Get the Most Replies

After sending the initial email, many marketers are discouraged if the individual does not respond. This is one of the biggest mistakes a marketer can make; Sopro statistics indicate that 77% of total responses received from follow-up chaser emails.

Follow-up emails two and three should not just say "I am checking in." There should be some added value.

Provide the recipient with a new data point or an abbreviated case study to follow up with them. Keep all follow-ups brief, as you don't want to overwhelm the sender. Your main goal is to put your previous message at the very top of their inbox, while illustrating your real-world experience and industry awareness.

How to Answer Complaints Before They Happen

The fourth email in a series should touch on a common objection to purchasing.

Consider the most common objection your sales department receives. Possible objections could be due to cost, time required to set up, and difficulty of use.

Compose an email answering the main objection directly with reasons for this objection and how the onboarding process will help solve it. The goal is to build confidence by addressing potential challenges with the purchase upfront.

How to Know When a Lead is Ready for the Sales Team

To ensure that sales teams talk with leads who have a high likelihood of converting, it is essential for both marketing and sales organizations to agree on the criteria for a lead to be sent to sales.

The sales team will waste time on prospects who have no intention of progressing through the sales process if the marketing team sends every person who clicks on a link to sales. Therefore, it is crucial to define both marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL).

Create rules in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to ensure that only leads who respond positively to follow-up communications or who score high based on multiple interactions with the marketing team are sent to the sales team.

The Numbers That Show If Your Emails Work

Open rates alone should not be the sole indicator of your strategy's effectiveness in email marketing b2b lead generation. Rather, leading programs measure success through actions indicative of actual human intent.

You should create a dashboard that captures information on the number of clicks, replies, and revenue generated by your leads; this will allow you to see whether your target audience is effectively targeted and your copy is working as intended.

Why Clicks Matter More Than Opens

Click-through rate (CTR) represents the number of recipients that clicked a specific link in your email. CTR requires actual human action to occur for the ratio to be valid.

In terms of B2B email metrics, the average click-through rate (CTR) will vary between 2% and 4%. However, with segmented lists and focused copy, top quartile email campaigns see CTR's reach anywhere from 6% to 10%. In terms of cold outreach campaigns, you are looking at 1.67%-3.2% CTR on average by the industry standard.

If your email's CTR is below these standards, then either you have poor quality/bad offers, or your list isn't targeted properly. In this case, you need to test out new subject lines, change your call to action (CTA), or clean up your list data.

How to Track True Email Value

CTOR is the most reliable indicator of an email's validity and value. It calculates the percentage of recipients who clicked on a link compared to those who opened the email.

In the consulting, finance, and B2B service sectors, the average CTOR is estimated to be around 11.35%, but strong email marketing programs can push CTOR over 21.78%.

If you have a high open rate but a low CTOR, it indicates that your subject line converted well, but the body of the email didn't get the recipient engaged or interested enough to click.

How to Measure Real Responses

The ultimate goal of all email campaigns is for the recipient to respond (to generate leads). However, not all responses equal leads.

If a recipient replies to your message requesting that you remove them from your email list, that is a legitimate response, but it does not provide a lead. You should track your positive reply rate and use it to measure your campaign success.

Cold emails typically have an average response rate of about 1%. However, the majority of marketers use cold emails because a great response can lead to substantial contracts with large corporations. Warm inbound lists can yield much greater positive receiver interaction.

How to Track the Money Your Emails Make

When utilized correctly, email marketing consistently shows a high financial return. Industry benchmarks for B2B email show that for every dollar spent on the email platform, you can expect a return of between $36 and $46.

In fact, according to 86% of marketers surveyed, email provides good to excellent returns on investment. Inbound leads have a 12% conversion rate of landing on someone’s website, while outbound leads have 6% of all outbound leads landing on a website.

To be able to demonstrate return on investment from your email campaigns, you must link the email provider to the CRM. You must track the revenue generated by each lead back to the exact email sequence that started the conversation with the lead.

The Best Tools for Email Marketing B2B Lead Generation

You can’t run a modern email program designed around deliverability in a spreadsheet format; instead, to succeed in email marketing b2b lead generation, you need to implement a technology stack of different software programs that will enable you to create leads, validate their information, run automated sequences, and follow up with them based on the perceived interest in your product.

There are hundreds of tools available on the market today. You do not need hundreds of different solutions; you should work with a small number of tools that meet your organization’s budget, capability, and use cases.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM and marketing tool designed for organizations that want their sales and marketing teams to be closely aligned with each other. If you need to manage your MQLs through the SQL stage, HubSpot is a great fit for you because of its advanced workflow capabilities that enable you to trigger email messages based on how users are using your website.

HubSpot pricing is in the range of $0 to $30 per month for a starter plan and then can go up significantly for larger enterprise organizations.

If you need everything to be one centralized location, HubSpot will work well for you.

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is known for its complex and detailed automation through the use of workflows. The tool is designed specifically for behavior-based nurturing, meaning that once a prospect clicks on a certain link in an email, ActiveCampaign can instantly place them into a specialized sequence based on their action. ActiveCampaign also includes strong lead scoring functionality.

Costing approximately $29 per month, ActiveCampaign is an excellent option for mid-sized organizations that require a tool that uses advanced logic, but that does not require a large business budget.

3. Mailtrap

Mailtrap was engineered with inbox placement in mind. It is an email delivery platform geared towards ensuring deliverability and has a strong focus on testing. In addition to providing testing environments, Mailtrap offers comprehensive analytics.

You can use Mailtrap to review how your HTML will look on different devices or to check the spam score of your email prior to sending a live email campaign. With pricing beginning at $9.99 per month, Mailtrap is ideal for technical marketing teams who place a high priority on safe, guaranteed inbox placement over all other priorities.

4. ListKit

Like Mailtrap, ListKit's focus is primarily on providing business data and targeting information. However, unlike Mailtrap, the focus of ListKit is strictly on B2B (business-to-business) contact records that have been triple-verified.

In addition to providing verified contact records, ListKit offers intent data, which will help businesses find people who are currently engaged in research regarding their industry.

Using only verified data will allow you to keep your bounce rates to a minimum and protect the reputation of your domain. ListKit is targeted towards outbound teams who are performing cold lead generation.

5. Hunter

Hunter is a data sourcing and verification tool that allows you to identify the proper email formatting for nearly any company. Equally important, Hunter provides the capacity to verify whether the identified email address is valid and can receive emails. This will allow you to stop campaigns from bouncing.

~$49/month is a very reasonable price for an essential resource that helps startups quickly build clean outreach lists within a tight budget.

6. Snov.io

Snov.io provides integrated solutions for finding email addresses, verifying email address lists and sending cold emails.

Because of these features, Snov has gained significant popularity for sales prospecting and cold outreach. This platform allows scraping prospects from multiple sources, verifying their email addresses and placing these leads into a simple drip feed sequence for outreach.

Ideal for agency owners or new/early-stage company owners needing a simple all-in-one prospecting engine to build their pipelines.

7. Leadfeeder

Leadfeeder allows you to see what companies visit your site, regardless of whether or not they ever fill out a form.

This means large amounts of intent data can be gathered. If you see a target account viewing the pricing page, you can use that information to send highly relevant email sequences based on what that account was looking at.

Leadfeeder starts around €79/month - an affordable way to identify prospective customers from anonymous traffic visiting your site.

8. Dealfront

Dealfront works similarly to how Leadfeeder helps marketers identify companies that are visiting their website and shows them what signals these visitors are sending regarding buying intent.

You will know when a company shows you’re sending them signals indicating they are likely considering purchasing from your company. This allows you to give your sales team specific information about when to send them timely, relevant emails.

Best for larger enterprise-level marketers developing account-based marketing (ABM) programs for high-value accounts.

What You Need to Know About Email Marketing B2B Lead Generation

The days of blasting out generic emails to purchased lists are over. Email marketing success is no longer a simple matter of sending out general emails to everyone. Success in today's market requires a highly segmented approach to email marketing b2b lead generation. You will need to consider your sending domains to be one of your most valuable business assets and therefore perform due diligence to protect them with appropriate authentication protocols and by managing your volume accordingly.

Your messaging should move away from generic product promotions to targeted messaging that is role-based and addresses the exact pain points of your target market. This type of messaging should be delivered in a multi-step sequence that provides evidence, therefore reducing friction to get interests to open.

The most important thing to remember is to stop using vanity metrics such as open rates. Instead, focus on true human intent signals (click-to-open and positive reply %) to keep your marketing aligned with your pipeline creation. Once you establish this deliverability first mindset and incorporate a lean technology stack into your marketing, email becomes from a noisy source of marketing to a highly desirable and predictably acceptable revenue source.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Should We Do If Our Sending Domain Is Marked as Spam?

If your main sending domain has been marked as spam, you first need to take immediate action to stop all marketing efforts including cold emails to that domain. You also want to audit your SPF, DKIM and DMARC settings for alignment to be sure no technical issues are causing this spam label. Lastly, you should remove any unengaged subscribers who have not either clicked or replied to an email in the last 90 days. You want to reboot all new lead generation campaigns to a new dedicated sub-domain and run a 30-day warm-up cycle before attempting to send ANY revenue generating volumes.

Should You Use Plain Text or Picture Emails for Business?

For cold outbound and early stage lead generation, plain text email is far superior. The use of heavy HTML templates, large image files, or multiple corporate logos, will set off spam filters and be viewed as promotions. Plain text emails come across to the reader like genuine one-on-one communications with a human. Save the heavily designed HTML templates for warm opted-in newsletter lists and updates to customers.

How Fast Should the Sales Team Call After a Lead Clicks?

Speed is crucial for high intent actions. If a known prospect visits a pricing page or downloads a deep-funnel case study, then an email with personalization should be sent within a few hours. If you wait too long, the buyer will have most likely already evaluated your competitor. Always ensure that the CRM has alerted the assigned sales rep and that the rep has been set up with an automated sequence to softly ask for action related to the content viewed.