Email blasts can be a great way to promote a new product or make a company announcement to a large group of clients or prospects. However, it is usually not the best approach. Here are 3 downfalls of sending blast emails:

1. An email blast is an event

We all know that a single event doesn't create a relationship. This requires an ongoing dialogue, or series of well-timed events.

This article is featured on SalesPractice.com

Over the past several years, email has been one of the best lead generation tools I’ve used for making sales. However, the problem with the emails that most salespeople send is that they all tend to resemble SPAM. Do away with generic sales messages and never email a brochure or marketing piece to a cold prospect.

While there are numerous times you can use email for lead generation, I've found there are 4 key points in the sales process where I use it most:

A lot of companies have a monthly newsletter they mail or email to clients and prospects as a way of keeping in touch. Once a month, the marketing department sends an email blast out to the world, and everyone gets the same message. But does this approach actually generate leads for the sales force?

If you don't use a newsletter but think you need to have one, this article should save you a lot of wasted time. Here's the thing: newsletters are dead. In fact, recent research shows that less than 10% of people even open them. There are several reasons for this:

Most salespeople dread the idea of cold calling, and it can often help to send a pre-call letter or email. We have tested literally hundreds of different email formats--some with long copy and some with only 1 sentence. Here are 5 rules to think about when creating your pre-call email campaigns:

1. Avoid being self-promotional

You may think the purpose of a pre-call email is to educate the prospect about your company and services. It's not. Overly-promotional messages create anxiety with the prospect and sound like spam. Oftentimes, the less you say about yourself the more a prospect wants to talk to you.

2. Create familiarity in the messages

Instead of telling a prospect about your company, tell him what you know about his company or industry. Do you know about a trend or current challenge? Are you working with similar companies? If so, let them know in the first sentence of your email.

Video is quickly becoming a mainstream medium for the internet. Just look at the popularity of sites like YouTube, and you'll quickly realize that video could also be an effective lead generation tool.

Video is still an emerging tool for lead generation, but I predict that within 3 years marketers will be sending out more videos than they send company newsletters or sales brochures. And as Google learns better ways to help people search for video content, videos will start to show up more frequently in search results--driving more traffic to your website.

The big question is: How can you use video as a lead generation tool?

First, I'd recommend that you put videos on YouTube and several pages of your company website. Then, get the word out through email. I'll show you how to create a targeted email campaign and send the video to your entire contact database.

If you design your email message correctly, you'll find that a video email will often have more than 3 times the response rate of a normal, text only email message. There is also the "wow factor" when people receive an email with a video in it, since this is still not common.

Here are a couple ways in which you can insert a video inside an email message:

This article is courtesy of MarketingSherpa, from a recent case study.

SUMMARY: A long-term, strategic lead generation plan is essential for complex sales. But when market conditions change rapidly, you might find opportunities for ancillary campaigns that help address your customers’ immediate pain points.

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