Generate Leads For Free! T&C Apply

Surprised! I know you must be thinking that how can someone generate leads for free.Yes, It is possible with email marketing !But, this comes with some terms and conditions. At Znbound, as a part of our inbound marketing services for clients, email marketing is one of the primary sources of lead generation, especially when it comes to the business space.

Recently, we did email campaign for a beloved client. Below is the scenario

There are three main components of email marketing

1. Email marketing tool ( To send emails )
2. Email templates
3. Email Data ( Most crucial - to whom you are sending your emails )

We had the first element in place.Then, we made four email templates

1. Prospecting email (To start the conversation)
2. Follow-up email (To be sent if the prospect has not responded to first email)
3. 2nd Follow-up email (To be sent if the prospect has not responded to first 2 emails)
4. Last - Break email (To be sent as the last email to end conversation, if the prospect has not responded to last 3 emails)

All the emails will be sent consequently after a gap of 1 day.At last, Email Data.Either you can buy email data or you can build your own list.We did both - bought one email list and also created one.The process involved in creating your own email list

1. Identify your buyer persona (his/her designation)
2. Search for them on Linkedin
3. Extract their email ids (use software to extract them)
4. Last step - Validate them

But this process is not easy for an individual (as it takes time). I had my team at Znbound who helped me complete this task within 2 hours.If you are looking to make your own email list, it would be better if you have a team. And if you are doing this process yourself it can take upto 2 to 3 days in extracting around 400 - 600 emails.After this whole process use your email marketing software to send emails. We used Mailchimp in this case.Emails were sent to 2 lists

1. The list we bought (100 emails)
2. The list we made manually (293 emails)

Sending emails to purchased list was not fruitful as there were no conversions from this list.But the performance was opposite in the other list.

Stats

Email sent - 293 Emails opened - 151 | 51.54%Leads Generated - 19 | 12.58% ( Conversion rate of emails opened to leads generated )At last we did generate leads for free, but with a great effort.

Insights

• Some prospects didn't reply to first or second mail, but they did reply to Followup 2 or Break emails. You should send all the emails one by one as described above. ( You might be able to generate a lead even from a break email )
• Instead of buying email data from a vendor, make your own. This will take effort but, you will be able to generate quality leads.

You still think buying email data is better than making one. Make your own and share your experience.