Lead generation, as we know it, identifies and cultivates your next potential clients and customers, to establish a business relationship.
While most businesses invest in their lead generation strategies, not all can land the results and foster a connection with their recipients.
In a recent article from Intellistart, it is found that B2B companies with mature lead generation processes garner 133% more revenue than average companies. These mature B2B businesses also enjoy 174% more revenue versus the least mature ones.
Are you struggling to get qualified leads? Do you consistently find it hard to start conversation with your prospective customers? What could you fix to improve your lead generation strategy?
Find out why the top-performing lead generation companies keep their formulaic approach a secret, and how you could start generating the results that you want with our quick list.
1. Nailing your targeting is the foundation
Most businesses undermine and underestimate the power of knowing their customers first. And this is why they generate a bad list of leads that are either unqualified, uninterested or just plainly ignore their emails.
Creating a buyer persona is paramount to targeting the right demographics that you want to send emails to and foster relationships with.
While most lead generation companies randomly take leads from their sources, the best lead generation agencies take time to nit-pick and select only the qualified leads.
It’s like cooking. If you have bad ingredients, nothing good will come out of your kitchen.
Here’s another hard truth:
79% of your leads won’t ever convert to sales. And although this might sound disappointing, it sets a realistic expectation. If you are targeting the wrong people firsthand, you get less and less chances of generating sales.
2. Lead Generation Doesn’t Have To Focus on Quantity
You can have 1,000 leads and not a single one will respond. It does happen.
The common misconception about B2B lead generation is that you have to get as many leads as you can, to see which ones are interested in what you are pitching.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The best lead generation companies have their own formulaic framework to generate qualified leads and filter out the underperforming ones.
3. Lead Generation Is Better Outsourced
The experts have spoken. Outsourcing lead generation beats handling it on your own (and not knowing how your metrics are working).
Research from Fearless Competitor made a shocking revelation.
Outsourcing your lead generation processes creates 43% better results than having it done in-house.
In light of this research, it’s no surprise why finding the best lead generation agency to work with exponentially increases the chances of reaching out to qualified prospects.
4. Lead Generation Must Be Done Only By Experts
As it takes rigorous research to filter out qualified leads and send out cold emailing campaigns to prospects, lead generation must be left in the hands of people who know how to do it right whether you outsource it or do it inhouse.
A report from Hubspot pointed out that 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one struggle.
Apart from its time-consuming nature, lead generation requires a sophisticated amount of fact-gathering. Cold emailing, on the other hand, relies heavily on the use of consumer psychology and the use of formulas to approach a prospect without sounding salesy or spammy.
5. You Can’t Bombard Everybody With Emails
The unsolicited nature of cold emails makes it seem like an unexpected guest.
Let’s say you have an entire list of prospects. Each of different interests, different pain points, and different ways of approaching them.
Sending cold emails that are copy-pasted dwindles your email’s capacity to get a response.
Cold emails that are generic and are not personalized to the recipient often are ignored, or marked as spam.
In a post written by Elijah Masek-Kelly for Business2Community, Kelly pointed out that businesses leveraging email personalization generate a higher conversion rate of up to 40%.
Personalizing your cold emails based on common ground with your prospect definitely increases the likelihood of your outreach receiving the response you are looking forward to.
6. For Lead Generation to Be Successful, You Must Have Compelling Cold Emails
You expect about a 14-28% open rate for every cold email you send, depending on which industry you are targeting.
The chances are relatively slim, but the right cold emailing strategy will definitely get you past the gatekeepers.
The more personalized your cold emails are, the more likely they are to be opened by your prospects. Studies show that ⅓ of your receivers will open an unsolicited email if the subject line is intriguing enough.
You may improve your reply rates using hyper-personalization strategies, such as putting your subject’s name on the subject line.
Custom snippets such as{{first_name}} or {{company_name}} can help your recipients distinguish an unsolicited, poorly-written spam mail from your actual cold email.
Hyper-personalization of your emails can also mean:
Writing a unique intro line for every single prospect to really strike someone's attention, and thereby increase the chances of getting a reply.
Using Lemlist or similar tools to insert personalized images.
Adding voice notes on LinkedIn to give them a more “customized” feel.
In part of our experiments sending cold emails, we found out that the AIDA copywriting formula stands out for getting the best results.
AIDA is a proven technique to engage your readers and get them to take action.
AIDA stands for
A-ttraction
I-nterest
D-esire
A-ction
With the AIDA formula framework, you can effectively attract your recipient to read your entire email, keep the reader engaged by using their curiosity or pain points, build a “want”, and encourage them to take action or to reply positively to your email.
And since AIDA formula directly tackles the recipient’s pain points and their overall struggle, the best lead generation agencies enforce the use of this framework in almost all of their emails.
At The Scalelab, we also came up with our own copywriting framework, SIVA:
Subject Line
Intro
Value
Action
With the SIVA framework, we create an attention-grabbing subject line, create a hyper-personalized intro, inject value into the content of the cold email to entice the readers to respond, and inspire them to take action.
Over the course of 2021, this framework has allowed us to generate over 5000 leads for clients and a combined sales pipeline value of over 50 million USD.
Need to know more about the SIVA formula? Find out here.
7. Cold Emails Must Be Short and Straight To The Point
Cold emails shouldn’t be a whole essay to tell your recipients why you are emailing them.
The unsolicited nature of cold emails only allots 20-30 seconds of reading time, which is why it’s a must to send out concise emails with no fluff.
A lead generation company wouldn’t try to sell any product or service without the recipient not knowing anything about why they are sending cold emails. Instead, highlight something unique to your prospect
Notify that you understand what unique benefit they are looking to achieve
and avoid pitching your service.
Another experiment from CloseIq also found out interesting statistics about keeping your cold emails short. Decreasing your email’s word count from 500 to 100 dramatically increased the reply rate up to 300%.
8. Lead Generation Emails Should Always Be About The Recipient
It’s never about what you do or what you sell.
The only way you could command attention from sending out a cold email is by writing an email focused on your recipient.
Catchy subject lines that are laser-focused to your recipient, such as including their name or telling something closely related to their business increase your chances of having your cold emails opened by 30%.
Meanwhile, personalized emails that revolve around your recipient’s pain points, curiosity, or interests improve your chances of getting a reply by up to 70%.
Successful lead generation campaigns from top-performing lead gen agencies usually follow a pattern to share a common touchpoint or a familiar interest and a concise way of telling what the email is for.
9. Email Follow-Ups Are A Must
Contrary to the popular belief that you should wait for your recipient to respond actively to your previous email, following up on their responses makes them feel like your campaign is personalized towards their goals rather than your own emailing intent.
Omni-channel follow-ups increase your chances of receiving the results that you want. In an example cited from Woodpecker, it shows that campaigns with around 4-7 emails per sequence generated 3x more responses than short-lived campaigns with only around 1-3 emails sent.
Also, campaigns that feature longer sequences generated a reply rate of 27%, and shorter campaigns only got 9%.
The best lead generation agencies ensure that sending out emails is spaced out so as to avoid list fatigue. Best to avoid overwhelming recipients and give the sequence a halt once your lead responds.
10. Send Out Cold Emails In the Morning
Here’s the least-valued trick that lets you topple everyone from the space- send out your cold emails at 5-6 AM.
Your emails get a priority open when you send an email at the time when your competitors are still not in the office.
11. Personal Branding Is A Key Factor To Boost Buying Intent In B2B
Preserving your brand identity and brand authenticity increases the chances of making your cold email campaign successful.
Brand authenticity is a deal-breaker that more than half of customers (57%) think that less than half of all the brands create personalized content that’s authentic and personalized to them.
12. You Don’t Have To Choose Between Inbound Versus Outbound
Businesses today struggle with weighing which type of campaign should they focus on to amplify their lead generation results.
Basically, growth is not a matter of choosing whether you should focus on inbound or rather outbound. It’s a matter of being able to combine both successfully. Top-rated lead generation agencies mix both approaches in order to generate the results their clients would want.
While outbound allows you to engage proactively with leads, inbound can help warm up your outbound and also scale your lead generation further.
Here’s how to summarize it:
If you do only outbound, then you choose to only be proactive.
But if you do only inbound, then you choose to only be reactive.
Combining both these lead generations and lead nurturing strategies can be extremely powerful
Example:
Use Inbound methods such as targeted ads to a list of leads you prepare to engage with using outbound (cold emailing, cold calling) in order to first warm up the leads before cold approaching them.
Use outbound to engage with a variety of personas and gather the first layer of feedback. Once you see which persona responds best, you can selectively double down on ads towards this very persona.
And because 63% of your leads who respond to your emails or inquire about your business would not convert for at least 3 months, using both inbound and outbound approaches increases your chances of broadcasting your business to the right audience.
13. If Done Right, Lead Generation is Actually PROFITABLE.
A survey back in 2018 study commissioned by the Content Marketing Institute revealed that 79% of B2B marketers ranked emails as the most effective tool for demand generation.
Lead generation agencies who nitpick on their clients’ emailing lists bring consistent revenue if paired with the correct cold emailing strategies.
Businesses that fine-tune their lead generation and demand generation strategies enjoy exponential returns and better connections with their prospects. Nurturing the leads is proven to be profitable that companies who send out value-driven emailing campaigns to their list generate 50% more sales at 33% lower costs.
Can Lead Generation Agencies Actually Help Me Convert Leads?
While not all lead generation agencies fine-tune their approach to generating high-quality leads and creating thought-provoking cold emails to nurture them, every business needs a thorough personalization.
Here at The Scalelab, we put rigorous end-to-end research on finding qualified leads that boosts your business’ overall reach to qualified prospects and partners.
Our results-backed lead generation strategies will help you reach out to high-performing prospects. Paired with our creative cold emailing campaign copywriters, we help you scale your company and achieve your desired results.
Ready to start unleashing the power of laser-focused lead generation? You can speak to Arnaud here, or send us an email at hello@thescalelab.com