- B2B email lead generation -

Frequently Asked Questions

B2B Email Lead Generation

Business to business (B2B) email lead generation describes the process of sending email communications to predefined business prospects, with the objective of generating interest and engagement in a company’s products or services.

There is lots that goes into effective B2B email lead generation. But in its simplest form, the process requires:

a) a predefined contact or list of contacts with email addresses

b) An email service provider (ESP) to send email

c) Some email copy (words) introducing the business products and/or services

Our full-service B2B email lead generation campaigns include Expert setup, experienced management, copywriting, A/B testing, free contact records, inbox management, reporting, performance analysis and more.

This will largely depend on the audience and how much they want what is being offered. 

Generally speaking, it takes around 1,000 emails sent to generate one marketing qualified lead (MQL).

Under our contracts, a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is defined as:

  • A suitable contact at a suitable company (as defined by you in your audience profile)
  • That has understood the offering
  • And has followed the call to action or replied with a positive expression of interest
  • And is ready to engage within the next 28 days at most

Return on Investment (ROI) under our campaigns is calculated by:

The amount of money made (revenue) /divided_by/The amount of money invested

In the last review, our participating customers made an average of 500-600%.

Meaning, for every $1/£1/€1 spent, they made 5-6 back.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) under our campaigns is calculated by:

The amount of money invested /divided_by/The number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) generated

At last review, our average customer CPA was $133/£105/€122 per Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).

Audiences

An Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP) defines the most prominent features and characteristics of the people and companies that you expect to become your best customers.

The characteristics of an Ideal Customer Profile can be broken down into two parts:

  1. The types of companies: usually segmented by industry, business type and/or company size (headcount or turnover)
  2. The types of people: usually segmented by job title keywords, seniority level and location

Usually a business will tell us who they think their best target customers are. We will then build that profile into an addressable audience.

Email Contact Data

All our contact data is sourced through a high-quality network of platforms & websites and substantiated by human verifiers. We also regularly reverify B2B email records through SMTP to ensure they remain valid and accurate.

Our data is continuously checked and frequently reverified.  Contacts undergoing company and/or job changes are typically updated within 28 days.

Our system uses a 5-step verification process to verify emails. This includes SMTP testing and is one of the most accurate systems in the industry.

Our email data is GDPR compliant under the lawful basis of legitimate interests. 

Every business is responsible for ensuring their own data processes are compliant with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) guidelines.

Our contact data can be filtered by contact job title keywords, contact seniority level, contact location (country/state/city), company industry, company employee headcount range.

Campaign Setup

Setup usually takes 5-15 working days, depending largely on the customer.

Our customer is assigned a Dedicated Onboarding Manager, who will guide through the following setup processes:

  1. Target audience confirmed
  2. Mailbox logins (with IMAP/SMTP access) supplied by Customer
  3. Copy Questionnaire completed by Customer
  4. Email copy created by Supplier and sent to Customer
  5. CNAME records supplied to the customer and published on the domain DNS
  6. Suppression list supplied by Customer
  7. Lead forwarding mailbox addresses confirmed by Customer

Once Setup is complete, you are assigned a Dedicated Account Manager. They will be responsible for the launch and ongoing success of your domain warming and pilot.

Your Dedicated Account Manager will be checking your campaigns regularly to ensure they are happy with performance. Where necessary, they will make changes to improve performance. They will also be checking your inbox frequently to ensure suitable database cleansing is performed and to forward leads to you. They will generate weekly reports and communicate the campaign details to you.

Email Copy & Content

Our emails usually follow a plain text HTML format. We’ve done lots of testing around the best performing formats for lead generation and this wins every time.

We ask new customers to complete a short questionnaire (5 questions) which gives our copywriters the information they need.

The guiding principle needs to be clarity.  Your prospects are busy people and need to be able to grasp the initial concept of your email within 10 seconds or so. 

We generally recommend leading with one clear and concise offering for best results. 

That said, most prospects understand that many businesses have multiple offerings. So leading with one service or product does not mean they will not enquire about others. 

It just helps to capture and retain their attention for long enough to generate a response.

There can be many reasons why an email may trigger a spam filter. We listed the main ones in this article. 

https://www.proven-concept.com/emails-spam-understand-how-to-fix-them/

Domain Warming

Domain warming is a process of building a positive sending reputation for a sending domain with Email Service Providers (ESPs) such as Outlook and Gmail. It works by gradually and systematically building send rates over a defined period of time.

Domain warming helps to achieve low bounce rates and high inbox deliverability rates.

Most businesses perform domain warming through a network of robots. The problem is that major Email Service Providers (ESPs) such as Outlook and Gmail can easily detect these robot networks. 

 

Proven Concept instead performs domain warming to real contacts.

Our domain warming phase lasts for 2 weeks. We find this is the optimal timeframe for speed and performance.

Proven Concept performs domain warming by sending real emails to real contacts. For this reason, many of our customers begin generating leads within the domain warming phase.

After the 2 week domain warming phase is complete, the campaign will automatically move into the full-sending phase.

The full-sending phase follows once the domain warming phase is complete and is the phase when emails are sent at their optimum volume and performance.

The Pilot/Trial

The pilot is an initial period of service that allows a customer to test Proven Concept and B2B email lead generation without any obligation or commitment.

Our pilot includes free setup (5-15 working days), free domain warming (2 weeks) and a 30-day full-sending phase.

The pilot automatically completes after 30 days of the full-sending phase.

During the pilot, you can cancel at any time. 

7 days before completion of the pilot, you will receive a notification stating that your pilot is nearing completion and confirming the renewal date. You can cancel the renewal by providing Proven Concept with email notice before the renewal date.

Provided no notice to cancel renewal is received, services will automatically continue.

Campaigns that continue after the pilot carry a 30-day cancellation notice period.

Our Guarantee

As a leading provider of B2B email lead generation services, it’s important for us to stand out in a highly competitive market. 

Our Guarantee shows customers we are reliable at generating results and committed to their success.

Each of our packages comes with a prescribed minimum number of Marketing Qualified Leads. 

If we are unable to hit that target by completion of the Pilot phase, we’ll offer all your money back within 2 working days.

Proven Concept

Proven Concept is a B2B email lead generation agency based in the United Kingdom. We are a small and highly skilled team of email marketers.

We are proud to have delivered successful campaigns in more than 60 industries. Our most popular industries include (but are not limited to) Information Technology & Services, Marketing & Advertising, Management Consulting, Staffing & Recruiting, Professional Training & Coaching and Financial services.

We have managed successful campaigns in the US, UK, Ireland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Singapore, China, and Australia.

Most of our customers are small to medium sized businesses.

We are fortunate to have many customers sing our praises. 

Some can be found on our Clients page https://www.proven-concept.com/b2b-email-marketing-clients/

Or Case Studies page https://www.proven-concept.com/b2b-email-lead-generation-case-studies/ 

If you don’t find what you are looking for on our website, please get in touch and we will be pleased to assist.

We choose to provide just B2B email lead generation services and B2B email contact data.

Did we miss anything?

Please let us know your questions and we’ll be pleased to help.