Skeptical about email marketing for lead generation campaigns? Read on.

There can often be some confusion over whether businesses should be concentrating their marketing efforts on LinkedIn or email. When we suggest adding email into the mix along with LinkedIn, sometimes our clients aren’t entirely convinced on its usefulness within B2B marketing.

LinkedIn is the social media platform for B2B marketing. Aimed at professionals and businesses, it’s highly effective for making connections within your industry and broadening awareness of your organisation.

Email marketing is very useful when you want to target many people simultaneously (and with the advent of flows: automatically). Whether it’s a ‘cold call’ or an email to an already engaged newsletter audience, one of the main benefits is having that direct access to consumers’ inboxes.

We all know that in marketing, choosing the channels that are right for you are dependent on your unique objectives and goals. We’ve found that using a mix of LinkedIn and email is an ideal approach within B2B for lead generation, as they do different (but equally valuable) things.

The benefits of LinkedIn for lead generation:

LinkedIn can be very useful when you’re first starting out in prospect research. You can easily search for and network with potential clients in the most relevant industries – and crucially, those that are in the right positions, i.e. Marketing Managers or CEOs.

LinkedIn adds a more personable touch – people are typically very open to connecting with like-minded professionals, and adding a face to the name inspires trust and memorability. They are exposed to your offering in a more organic and less overt way via posts on their home feed, which can be a great way to carefully build awareness and generate interest over time. For example, we post on behalf of clients on their business page and then encourage their employees to share the content, as well as posting for an individual (like the CEO) on their behalf.

Additionally, LinkedIn Messaging is a good tool to try to get an initial rapport going with a prospect. Though one of the downsides of LinkedIn is that when you post you can’t guarantee that the intended audience will see it – which is where email comes in…

The benefits of email marketing for lead generation:

Email is very effective for people who are a bit further along the funnel.

Think about it: you probably only sign up to the newsletters of your favourite brands – the ones you’ve purchased from in the past and have a significant desire to continuously buy from. Those are the ones you’d give up your precious inbox space to and genuinely want to see emails from.

Similarly in B2B, the people who sign up to newsletters tend to actively want to hear from you, and therefore have already identified a potential need and interest in your service. They just need a bit more warming up, which is where consistent email campaigns along with automation comes in.

This is who will be most interested in reading your longer-form content, and when bringing in segmentation, it becomes even more powerful, as you can tailor the content to be the most relevant and timely, nudging the prospect even further along to being ready to schedule a meeting or make a sale.

The results give you named individuals to follow up with, and a trackable journey, so you can start an elevated conversation. It also helps keep your database up-to-date – knowing if people have moved jobs for example, enabling you to research new incumbents.

So, when we’re structuring your campaign, this is why we usually always incorporate both LinkedIn and email marketing – when used together, it makes for a very effective and solid approach to discovering and nurturing the right prospects at the right time.

Are you looking for a flow of continuous quality leads to help grow your business? Our experienced team are ready to implement a bespoke approach for your business. Get in touch to find out how we can help you.