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

This is a question we are asked a lot. And sadly, there is no one simple answer.

The guiding principle needs to be simplicity, particularly around the intro. Your prospects are busy people and the first 5-10 seconds of them reading your email will involve subconscious scanning of the content to decide if they believe this is of value to them and whether they feel like reading more. If the introduction in particular is confusing or overwhelming, their attention will most likely be lost.  So it needs to be short, snappy and simple enough for a typical prospect to understand. 

That said, prospects will generally tend to understand and perhaps even assume that most professional service providers will offer ancillary services that support the primary offering. These might be features and benefits that wrap around the core, or could even be additional services which carry an extra premium. The way you present this may be unique to each business and is probably something that needs to be tested. 

Most customers that wish to test a concept like this will typically go in with a simple and easy to understand intro (ie. we are a creative agency, we are a recruitment agency, etc) and back up with bullet points in a later paragraph (for example) we offer:

• graphic design
• storyboarding
• visual branding

That way, prospects can easily understand the concept of your core but learn that there are also additional facets to your offering.

Another point to consider is the number of stages (ie. touchpoints) in the sequence. We typically find a 2 or 3 stage sequence works best in terms of conversion rates (ie. 3 emails sent to each prospect over a defined time period of, say 10 working days) but we do have many campaigns that still successfully convert on stages 4, 5 or 6 of the sequence. Each one of these stages or touchpoints is another opportunity to present something new. So if you’ve sent 2 emails to a contact introducing your core offering with no success, why not let them know about your other services, facets or features/benefits in stage 3 and beyond?

Proven Concept is an email lead generation agency based in Portsmouth, United Kingdom. We are a small and boutique business, delivering highly effective and professional services.

Every business processing personal data needs to familiarise themselves with the guidelines that apply to them and make their own decisions. In the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) regulates data protection and lays out the 6 lawful purposes under GDPR regulations through which data can be processed. 

Proven Concept relies upon lawful purpose number 6; Legitimate Interests for processing the personal data of email prospects. 

Legitimate interests says that a legal entity such as a business has a legal right to pursue profit. Our interpretation of the guidelines are that, provided a business has performed the complied with the following, then legitimate interests is lawfully achieved. 

1. Defined its target audience (B2B contacts and companies)
2. Balanced its interests against the individual’s interests (through a legitimate interests assessment)
3. Explained the reason for the communication
4. Provided the opportunity to cease communications
5. Acted in a fair, transparent and ethical way

Information on legitimate interests can be found at:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/legitimate-interests/

There can be many reasons why an email can end up in a spam folder.  Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Outlook have extremely advanced algorithms that are constantly monitoring the content, domains, IPs and behavioural trends of emails and batches.  The most common reasons why emails may end up in spam include:

• Spam keywords in the email that commonly feature in spam or phishing emails sent by other others
• Domain maturity: if your domain and/or IP is new, ESPs will be suspicious of your emails until you build a positive reputation
• Unauthorised sender: If your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are not correctly aligned
• Blacklists: If your domain and/or IP is on the major blacklists 
• Email cadence: If you send too many emails too quickly, or show spikes in send volume
• Reputation: If your domain and/or IP is known for sending spammy emails
• Complaints: if a significant enough number of contacts complain about your emails
• Poor engagement: if a lower than average percent of your recipients engage with your emails 
• Unsubscribe links: If your unsubscribe links use a blacklisted or low reputation domain
• Content repetition: If too many of your emails are too similar
• Too many links: If your content contains too many hyperlinks
• Too many images: If your content contains too many images 
• SVG files: can embed javascript, presenting a potential threat
• Click tracking: typically creates hyperlink masks, which ESPs don’t like

This is possibly one of the most important questions, because if an email lead generation campaign is not profitable, or does not present much hope of being profitable, there’s probably not much point doing it. 

We’ve built a handy tool which helps customers understand the returns they should be expecting an email lead generation campaign:

ROI Calculator

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

• a suitable contact at a suitable company (as defined by the Customer in their audience profiling)
• that has understood the offering and
• has followed the call to action or asked to engage with the Customer’s business within the following 28 days (a positive expression of commercial interest)

Inbox or domain warming is a process that prepares for an email lead generation campaign and supports best performance and high but safe send rates. It involves starting with small send volumes and gradually increasing over time.  Each case can be different and there are factors that affect how long it takes to warm a domain. For a new or cold domain, we typically find 30 days as a suitable timeframe.

We are fortunate to work with customers in almost every sector and corner of the globe. Some sectors that have been particularly successful include:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Business and management consulting
• Human resources
• Market research
• Website and app design/development
• Recruitment
• Videography
• Wellbeing services
• Marketing agencies
• Creative agencies
• Business utilities & facilities
• Professional training
• Real estate
• Business products & services

CPA calculations under our campaigns are calculated on the basis of:

Customer spend divided by number of MQL’s generated

At last review, our average customer CPA was $66 / £58 / €67.

As a leading provider of B2B email lead generation services, we understand that all customers have choice. And it’s important for us to demonstrate why customers should choose us and trust us to represent and serve their business.

Our Guarantee is one of the features under our service offering that shows customers we are professional, reliable and committed to their success.