Are you satisfied with the amount of business you currently have? Do you have enough time to focus on your core business, or are you constantly delegating arduous prospecting to your sales reps?

Regardless of how hard you work at balancing your business and bringing in sales, you will only be wasting marketing resources if you’re forced to divide your efforts.

For most businesses, lead generation is the life-spring from which sales or service transactions begin. Leads can be generated for such purposes as:

• • List building
  • Email marketing
  • E-newsletter acquisitions
  • Attracting a new customer base

When referring to digital marketing strategies, lead generation occurs when a potential customer signs up for an advertised offer, including contact information and demographics. The two types of leads in the ‘lead-gen’ market are:

• • Sales leads
  • Marketing leads

Obviously, the more people who come to a product landing page/website, the more potential there is for increased lead generation. If a company is looking for a cost-effective sales strategy and marketing plan, it could partner with an outside marketing consulting firm to generate leads for them. B2B sales and marketing consulting firms can help companies meet and exceed sales and marketing goals.

With email marketing, you can generate an increased response, lower costs, improve turnaround time, track your campaigns and get better information on hot prospects.

The first step is getting started. For most, the key to successful email marketing is a combination of effectiveness and ease. You want to ensure that your email gets delivered to your top prospects, but you don’t want to hire an entirely new staff of web designers and programmers to build email lists. The good news is that you don’t have to.  Because cold emails help you to solve email marketing hurdles.

1 – All it takes is a Click

It’s not always easy to respond to a marketing campaign. How many times have you gotten a piece of direct mail that sparked your interest, but never actually got around to checking out the offer? Email is different. When a prospect gets an email that sparks their interest, they don’t need to file it in the right place and remember to call: all they have to do is click.

2 – Reduce Your Budget

Postage. Printing. Envelopes. Paper. A big chunk of your current marketing budget is probably going toward these seemingly unavoidable costs. But with an email campaign, these costs just don’t exist. So some of the thousands of dollars that you currently send to the post office, the printer, and your paper manufacturer can now be kept in your pocket.

3 – Now, Not Later

Email turns around fast. Campaigns can be created, sent out, and tracked in days, not weeks. There’s no need to wait for proofs from the printer, and no need to wait again for another set of proofs when things don’t look exactly as they should. And there’s no lag time while the piece is in transit; the electronic superhighway gets your piece there in seconds.

4 – Stop Guessing

How effective are your marketing campaigns? Sometimes, it can be pretty tough to tell exactly what works and what doesn’t work. With an email campaign, it’s easy to track the effectiveness of campaigns. You can immediately see how many clicks are being generated – there’s no more guessing. Not only can you track responses, but you can also test different messages, offers, and headlines to see what gets the most traction.

5 – Know Your ‘Maybes’

There’s no way for you to gauge how many ‘maybes’ your direct mail campaigns generate. You don’t know how many prospects take a look at your piece and say, “looks interesting…maybe,” but don’t actually go on to buy. With an email campaign, you can actually figure out who these ‘maybes’ are. These are the prospects that don’t buy after seeing your campaign; they’re the ones who click to your site to register. And with the email you can now target for quick responses, to turn their ‘maybe’ into ‘yes’.