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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:

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:

In today's economy, a lot of sales forces and marketing departments have had their budget cut. Meanwhile, they're being asked to generate more revenue than last year. There's good news, though: a lot of your sales and lead generation efforts could be automated, saving you both time and money.

Here are some of the ways you could use email to create an automated lead generation machine for your organization:

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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