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Imagine increasing your business contacts without lengthy product development or complex distribution plans. That is what a lead generation agency is all about, and here is how to turn it into a successful business for cold email marketing.
Business is about people. Even if you are a business selling to other businesses, at the end of the day, you are selling to the person in front of you. As a consequence, being successful is all about making a personal connection. To achieve this, consider taking a course from Modern millionaires as the first step.
Lead generation for cold email marketing works similarly: the secret to success lies in personalization. However, before we dive deeper into the subject, it is important to understand what a lead generation business does.
- What Is A Lead Generation Business?
- Why Personalization Is So Important
- How To Personalize Emails Successfully
- How To Start Your Lead Generation Business
What Is a Lead Generation Business?
Lead generation businesses or agencies acquire leads for other businesses that then use those leads to sell a product or a service. As a lead generation agency, you sell qualified leads to your clients.
This is more than passing on names, job titles, and email addresses. To qualify a lead, you assess their interest in a product and readiness to buy. The process of finding and qualifying prospects used to be time-consuming, which is why many small businesses have started outsourcing this part of their sales process.
Over the past few years, technology has taken much of the ‘legwork’ out of the lead generation process. That is why now is a fantastic time to consider starting your own lead generation business.
One of the most lucrative areas for this type of business is providing leads for cold email marketing. Using your agency as a test run, you generate leads for your own business and then apply the lessons learned to your clients.
Why Personalization Is So Important
Cold email marketing may seem like a thing of the past, but it is not. Hear me out. Email marketing has the potential to reach virtually anyone.
Many small businesses deal with customers who are more comfortable working analog than digital. However, most of them are happy to receive marketing and sales propositions by email. Granted, generic mass emails no longer deliver returns. The secret to successful cold email marketing is personalization.
LinkedIn research has discovered that emails that are personalized well outperform their generic counterparts. According to their findings, click-through rates are 14 percent higher for personalized emails, and conversion rates increased by ten percent.
As a small business, this can make the difference between breaking even and being profitable. And if those numbers have not convinced you yet, trust our customers at lyne.ai. Some have reported response rates increasing by 300 percent following hyper-personalization (more about that in the next section).
How To Start Your Lead Generation Business
- Pick Your Niche
- Harness Technology
- Nurture Leads and Clients
- Review Your Results
Pick Your Niche
Generating qualified leads for small businesses works best when you pick a niche, both geographically and in terms of a specific type of business. If you are starting your lead generation business from scratch, choose an industry you are passionate about.
Consider the size of the market and how saturated it already is. Find out how many competitors there are, and be honest with yourself about the money you can potentially make within that niche.
There is no wrong niche as such. However, there is a difference between industries that will yield more and others that are tougher to enter. The distinction often depends on your local area.
Especially, if this is your first foray into lead generation, it is important to pick a niche you are familiar with. In order to generate high-quality leads, you need to be an expert in the field or at least be able to develop expertise quickly.
Harness Technology
Just as technology will eventually help your clients with hyper-personalization, it will also support your new lead-generation agency right from the start.
A few years ago, personalization meant using the recipient’s first name at the beginning of an email. A simple mail merge allowed you to do that. In 2021, technology can do much more to help you succeed. Hyper-personalization does more than that.
Lyne.ai is only one example. It allows you to send each of your cold email marketing messages with a personalized first line. It is the equivalent of someone in your marketing team spending hours researching your prospects and typing a suitable line.
If that sounds unrealistic, you would be right. No one has the time to do this by hand. This is where automation comes in. A personalized introduction is visible in the preview sections of email clients. Consequently, you and your clients stand apart from the crowd before the email has even been opened.
Personalized introductions are a great start. However, your cold outreach emails are made even stronger by personalized calls-to-action (CTA). Once again, this is an area you can automate to save staff time and costs.
Automation helps you achieve higher levels of personalization than previously possible. As a new lead-generation business, you can get started on a limited budget. As you grow, you can spend more to grow further.
Nurture Leads and Clients
The same is true for your clients. Small businesses in your area are an excellent target for your new business. As a relatively new lead generation agency yourself, you have a natural affinity, which will help you close that first deal.
Once the initial deal is in place, some of your client communications and nurturing can be automated once again. The same is true for the potential sales leads you are cultivating. In 2021, few sales are made immediately, after just one initial contact. However, regular follow-up can be automated and therefore does not take much time or money.
Review Your Results
Like every new business owner, you will make mistakes when you start your agency.
Regular reviews of your strategies and results help you quickly correct your course. Analytics software can support this process when it comes to identifying problems. Software tools will make it easy to try different personalization strategies for your cold email outreach.
Starting a lead generation agency is easier than ever before. With a fast-growing selection of personalization tools and apps at your fingertips, you can start small and scale up as your business grows. Technology will also help you assess the effectiveness of your strategies and allow you to change tactics quickly and effortlessly.
Key takeaways for building a successful lead generation business:
- Choose an industry or a niche in which you are an expert and start small
- Familiarize yourself with all the technology available to help make light work of your task
- Generate leads for your own business and apply your learnings to your clients
About Hans Dekker
Hey, I’m Hans, Co-Founder and CEO of Lyne.ai. I used to run hundreds of campaigns for clients when I ran my own cold email agency. Having to train and manage that many virtual assistants or SDRs can get very stressful, which is why we built Lyne. Now you can write thousands of personalized first lines for cold emails in less than an hour & all without being locked into a monthly plan.
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