Most marketers are well aware of how email marketing works: First, you welcome them, then you nurture them with resonant content until they make a purchase. Unfortunately, though, breaking through the competition with standard email lead generation is very hard, if not impossible.
With hundreds of competitors fighting for your email leads, you need more than just a standard email sequence that gently pushes them toward your product. You need a data-driven lead nurturing strategy that is personalized for the recipient, well-timed, and takes into account their engagement across other marketing channels, such as your website or social media.
Being like all other brands means losing the email lead generation game. Not to miss out on the conversions you could’ve secured, you need to make email conversational, personal, and trust-based, and then you can build tech things on top of that, like automated lead distribution.
Below are the 5 steps to rebuilding your email lead generation architecture.
Step 1. Reframe your email lead generation goals around trust
Did you know that the email open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate are the three most preferred metrics by marketers for determining the success of email marketing campaigns?
Speaking of this, here are some basic email marketing benchmarks according to HubSpot:
- the average email open rate across all industries is 42.35%;
- the average email open rate across B2B industries is 39.5%;
- the average click-to-open rate across industries is 5.3%.
Without a doubt, metrics such as email deliverability, open rates, and click rates help measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. However, the core metric that underpins success, albeit hard to measure and quantify, is trust.
With over 7.8 billion spam emails being sent daily in the United States alone, fostering customer trust is crucial to keep your marketing performance high, not just email lead generation but the business across the board. If recipients don’t trust your emails, they will just ignore them, leading to a drop in email sender reputation and more of your emails landing in the spam folder.
Here are a few techniques to rebuild your email lead generation around trust:
- focus on quality instead of quantity. It’s one thing to capture as many email leads as possible at the lowest CPL; it’s another thing to communicate only with qualified leads who truly value your emails. It might be best to remove low-intent and dormant contacts from your email list;
- focus on metrics that reflect trust. Instead of optimizing your email marketing for metrics like list growth, opt-in conversion rate, and cost per lead, focus on trust-driven metrics, such as engaged subscriber rate, reply rate, unsubscribe rate, and spam complaints. High engagement with lower volume is better than high volume with no engagement;
- make sure you’ve built trust before selling. In high-ticket industries that require significant financial commitment (finance, insurance, health, and other YMYL industries), most purchases are based on trust, not instant hard sell. Therefore, take the time to nurture your email leads before sending them an offer.
Step 2. Build your email lead strategy around behavioral segmentation
It goes without saying that the more customer data you collect, the easier it is to reveal segmentation patterns, and the more in-depth the segmentation can be reflected in more email marketing pathways for different audiences. It’s not out of the question that you will have dozens, if not hundreds, of email sequences tailored to various customer profiles.
Take, for example, auto insurance, which is a highly regulated, time-sensitive, and price-sensitive industry with high churn rates and demand for trust. Emailing everyone the same rate would trigger spam complaints, low EPC, and likely carrier distrust, all leading to low deliverability and a plummeting email sender reputation.
Therefore, here are some email segmentation strategies to maximize engagement:
- Freshness-based segmentation:
- hot leads: Engaged in the past 2 hours;
- warm leads: Engaged in the past 24 hours;
- cooling leads: Engaged in the past 7 days;
- cold leads: Dormant for more than 2 weeks.
- Quote-based segmentation:
- hot leads: Recent quote completion;
- warm leads: Quote completion in the past 24 hours;
- partial quote completion or quote abandonment.
- Location and demographic-based segmentation:
- high-intent leads that accurately fit the ICP;
- medium-intent leads that partially fit the ICP;
- low-intent leads that might potentially be converted.
When it comes to granular segmentation at scale (thousands of leads daily), you’d like to use automated software that collects and analyzes hundreds of data points in real time, and then, based on this comprehensive analysis, automatically sends a matching email that fits the unique qualities of the customer in question. Doing it manually is nearly impossible.
Regarding automation, email marketing is automated by 58% of marketing decision-makers, making it the most automated marketing avenue, followed by social media (49%) and content management (33%). Moreover, around 41% of marketers described their customer journey as either mostly or fully automated, with 59% seeing the potential for further automation.
Step 3. Double down on the most successful timing
Did you know 44% of consumers in the United States check emails up to 3 times a day, 18% up to 9 times a day, 9% up to 15 times a day, 11% more than 15 times a day, while 18% check their emails less than once a day?
So not only should your emails be high-quality, but they should also hit the recipient at the right time to be opened and engaged with. In practice, all other things being equal, you’d like to send emails at the peak of business activity (possibly around 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.) while avoiding the first 15 minutes of an hour as the time when most other businesses send their emails.
But then again, there’s no single best time, because it all depends on the industry’s specificity, seasonality, time zone, the type of email you’re sending, how long it’s been since the subscriber received your previous emails, and whether they’ve engaged with it.
All these factors shape the recipient’s behavior.
Again, for teams that are new to email marketing, or when working with new subscribers, it’s reasonable to start with general best practices, such as sending emails around 10 a.m. However, as engagement data accumulate, timing can be refined to when individual users are most likely to open and interact with emails rather than relying on fixed send times.
Step 4. Leave room for unconventional email lead generation
Standing out among piles upon piles of emails is hard, and oftentimes, you have to be creative to break through the noise from thousands of pop-ups, gated PDFs, and generic newsletters. In addition, it’s wise to gauge the reaction first, making sure you’re sending only unconventional emails to audiences you expect to react well to.
Here are a few email lead generation ideas:
- educational emails. They are great for demonstrating your expertise, improving lead quality, and maximizing the lifetime value of your leads, especially for complex products that require significant financial commitment. Likewise, with extra nurturing, you can lower customer acquisition costs over time and improve your email marketing ROI;
(Source: Email from Moosend)
- no-CTA emails. With CTAs a staple of email marketing, sending emails without one seems counterintuitive. However, it makes sense in situations in which you want to build trust and long-term engagement without putting any pressure on consumers. Surprisingly, emails without a CTA can sell pretty well if they’re well-crafted and timed;
- apology emails. Whether the shipping was delayed, the product was out of stock, or there was any other mistake on your side, an apology email might be your secret weapon for fostering trust and engagement. Among other things, apology emails can reduce frustration, lower churn rates, and reinforce accountability and transparency, helping connect with customers on a deeper level;
(Source: Holistic Email Marketing)
- feedback emails. Undeniably, listening to your customers is one of the most important things in business, and feedback emails are a great tool for collecting the data you need to improve your products or services and address pain points;
- non-milestone celebration emails. Sometimes, you can find vibe in unexpected things, like non-milestone celebration emails that border on confusion. Instead of waiting for round numbers and prominent dates, you can celebrate random events to surprise the recipient and show that you care about them in a more human way, rather than just automated trigger emails, even if your non-milestone celebration emails are automated;
- bold unsubscribe emails. Sending an unsubscribe email might not be the most pleasant thing in the world, but even here, there’s an opportunity to be creative and re-engage some of the leads that would otherwise be lost. The key is to create a psychological re-engagement trigger based on your audience’s psychographics; see the email below.
(Source: Email Uplers)
The sky’s the limit to creativity in email lead generation. Other types of emails include direct emails from a founder or CEO, contrarian takes and counterintuitive facts emails, lessons-learned emails, prediction emails, teasers, polls, and before vs. after emails.
Step 5. Learn from the best emails that proved successful
Sometimes, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel; you can just adopt the best email lead generation principles, practices, and strategies of your competitors without changing too much as long as they match your marketing and business goals. At the very least, you can improve by learning from the best email lead-generation examples in your industry.
Here are some email lead generation examples that proved successful:
Social proof
(Source: Hostinger)
Social media marketing and email marketing are killer combinations when it comes to increased exposure, traffic, leads, and trust. Speaking of trust, adding social proof to your emails can be the final nudge that triggers conversions and sales, just as it’s done on the screen above.
Bring it to the forefront
(Source: Hostinger)
When you know which product a subscriber is interested in, it makes sense to show it to them as much as possible to create an emotional connection. For example, for cart abandonment emails, you can add a large 360-degree view of the product and, if possible, a sense of urgency via a time counter, limited-time offer, etc., something Hoka did at a basic level.
Make it about them
(Source: KlientBoost)
What consumers love most are personal stories, especially at times when it’s logical to look back on their path, achievements, and history, such as before New Year’s or at personal milestones. And if you can make it interactive, even better: let consumers enjoy their stories with your brand. This great lead-nurturing strategy helps foster loyalty and increase average customer lifetime value (ALV).
Make them feel a part of your company
(Source: KlientBoost)
Celebrating customers’ milestones is important, but it’s even better when you can make them feel like part of your company. This won’t necessarily generate sales immediately, but rather over the long term, driven by increased trust, engagement, and customer retention.
Lead scoring: Quantify your email leads for accurate distribution
It’s critical to know how likely your leads are to convert into paying customers. For this, a lead scoring system can be used, factoring in the lead’s validity, risk level, and purchase intent as they first enter and then move through the marketing funnel to conversion.
A lead scoring system may include dozens of parameters across categories, from fraud risk to engagement to revenue probability, all reflected in a single lead score on a 0-100 scale, with 100 being the most purchase-ready email leads.
Wrapping up
Without a doubt, email lead generation in 2026 must be data-driven. From the first welcome email to post-purchase follow-ups, every message should be tailored to the recipient’s unique needs and wants, well-timed, well-written, and on-brand.
There’s really no other way to beat the competition than to collect data across channels and coordinate email marketing with other touchpoints in the customer journey. The same person may use multiple marketing channels (website, blog, social media, phone calls, and emails), leaving plenty of data to collect and analyze. And you can do it with the right lead management software suite.
In general, marketers are quite successful in automating email marketing, with 96% seeing their marketing automation strategies as either successful or very successful in helping them achieve their marketing goals. Only around 4% reported not getting substantial benefits from automating their email lead generation, nurturing, and conversion campaigns.
The good news is that once you’ve covered your most essential marketing touchpoints, things get easier across the board. You know who your email leads are, where they are coming from, what they want, and how you can nurture and convert them best, not only with your emails but also across other communication channels, like website engagement and phone calls.