Turn Old Leads into Gold - How to Use Email Marketing to Generate Fresh Leads from Dead Leads

You have hundreds of past customers or old prospects in your database, or maybe you bought a few hundred aged leads.?

How do you turn those into revenue?

The classic marketing saying goes: “the money is in the list.”

Let me assure you that is so very true. So in this brief article, I will show you how to get the money out of the list with email marketing.

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Cleaning your list

Before we start writing and sending emails, one critical step is to clean and verify your email list.

Many of the people on your list will have changed or abandoned the email address they initially gave you. If you send emails to these addresses, they will register as bounces, and too many bounces can negatively impact your ability to send emails in the future.

So, let’s unapologetically slash those from our list.

Our number one goal in email marketing is to build a high-quality, responsive list. High deliverability rates combined with high open rates equal perpetual revenue.

>>> Learn more: Interesting email marketing statistics

I verify all my email lists with Validity (formerly BriteVerify). There are others, but this is the only one I have personally used.

You only need to do this process once. After you have initially verified your database of old emails or a fresh set of purchased aged leads, you will maintain a clean list through best data hygiene practices.

Best practices in data and list hygiene

Once you have an active database or email list, it’s critical to keep it warm and healthy.

1. First things first, email your list as frequently as possible. How often you send is entirely dependent on the value you deliver. If you can write and send a valuable and exciting email every week, then do that. If the best you can do is once a month, then do that.
2. Purge or quarantine emails that bounce. Most email providers will do this automatically — more on email tech in a bit.
3. Only email people who are engaged – have opened one or more of your emails within the last 180 days.
4. Once or twice a year, send a warmup sequence (2-3 email sequences with a killer offer) to your entire list and try to pull back in some of those inactive email subscribers.
5. Automatically unsubscribe people who have not opened your emails within the last year.

If you consistently execute this simple 5 step data hygiene plan, then you’ll always have a healthy and highly responsive email list.?

Add a great product (compelling offer) and some good copywriting, and you have just created a cash register ??.

Your Email Tech Stack

Getting your tech right is a significant part of success and failure in email marketing.

Discussing email technology can get deep, but I’m going to keep it as simple and actionable as possible.

If you‘re consistently using a CRM system, you can program most of what I describe within that system. If you can, I recommend keeping everything in the same system. Using a single system will give your prospects and customers a more cohesive experience and better visibility into their behaviors as they naturally cycle from active to inactive and back.

Your email marketing system needs to support two different email lifecycles - short-term outreach and long-term nurturing.

Short-term outreach

For short-term outreach, you need software that facilitates sales automation. You want to be able to send emails that look (to prospects and email servers) like a salesperson sending out one-off personal emails.

In a nutshell, these will be a series of short and to-the-point emails, strung together into 2 - 5 email sequences, which are triggered by initial email acquisition (or warming up an aged list) and changes in sales statuses.

For this part of my email marketing strategy, I have used one of two email software: Mailshake or Quickmail. Both are excellent.

Long-term nurturing

The second component of my email marketing system is long-term lead nurturing.

Most people think of these traditional content-driven, newsletter-style emails when they think of email marketing. This mindset is also the number one mistake folks make in warming up or marketing to aged leads.

Never upload and start emailing aged leads or a cold email list through a traditional email service provider - designed to send bulk email newsletters.?

There are many technical reasons this will frustrate you and kill your list from the start. I don’t want to distract you with that rabbit hole here. You’ll just have to trust me - don’t do it!

Every person in this long-term nurture segment should be here because it transitioned from your short-term outreach campaign(s). These should all be active email subscribers.

That doesn’t mean they have to have bought anything from you yet, but they should be opening and ideally clicking through your emails.

The emails you send in your nurture campaigns need to lead with content. Often this content is tangential to your product or services but still needs to be highly relevant to your customer.

Some examples might be:

• Home improvement project ideas and tips for mortgage leads
• Investment trends and ideas for life insurance leads
• Healthy living tips for health insurance leads

Regularly compile and email out a list of these kinds of links to articles and videos, or better yet, link to your own. Then, every so often, send out an offer for your product or free consultation to generate some fresh leads.

For this part of my email marketing strategy, I use MailChimp or ConvertKit. If you want to get more sophisticated, you can use ActiveCampaign, but the other two are catching up fast on their behavior-driven automation game.

Who’s on your list, and how did they get there?

The first step in designing any marketing campaign is understanding your audience.?

You need a clear picture of whom you’re talking (writing) to and what they will find valuable from you. Let’s walk through an example of building an email marketing strategy.

Let’s say I just bought 500 aged life insurance leads. I start by asking and getting the answers to a few simple questions.

• How did these folks get on this list? They probably searched for life insurance rates online or saw a Facebook Ad and requested a rate quote.
• When did they do this? Most aged leads and leads in your database will have the date the person inquired or, in the case of your database, the date of the last contact.
• What has (most probably) happened from the time they inquired until now? Whether these leads are from your database or purchased aged leads, the experience is probably about the same. They did a couple of different searches, talked to a handful of agents, and then either got a new policy, didn’t find what they were looking for, or got distracted or frustrated and went unresponsive.

Now, we have a pretty clear picture of who’s on our list with these three simple questions.

Here is an example persona - the person I’m writing to:

Bob or Susan is of the age and earning potential to get them thinking about life insurance. Maybe they need a more significant policy or a better rate. They’re probably are somewhat internet savvy and shoppers. As a product of that, they probably get a fair number of calls and emails from insurance agents.

That’s the individual we’re going to start writing personal emails to.

Introducing (or reintroducing yourself)

Now we’re ready to write some emails.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people making with email campaigns and aged leads is rushing in to close the deal like these are fresh new inquiries (leads).

Instead, treat these folks like old friends or people you might meet at a networking event - you know you have common interests, but you need to start with polite conversation.

Here is a typical warm-up outreach sequence I use:

Subject Line: Just checking in…

{first_name},

A couple of months ago, you requested an auto insurance quote online. We never connected.

I just wanted to check in and see if you got the rate and policy you were looking for?

If not, I’m always happy to review your policy and see if I have a better option.

{signature_block}

Subject Line: Schedule your policy review

Stop wondering if you have the best available coverage and rate for your situation. I do a six-month review with all my clients to ensure they get the very best from me. It’s 15-20 minutes and ends in complete peace of mind.

Schedule your review - pick a time that is convenient to your schedule {{scheduler_link}}.

If you’d rather just ask a quick question - hit reply and ask away!

{{signature_block}}

Subject Line: Save my contact info as your {{product}} guy/gal

We haven’t connected yet, but I’m here to be your go-to person for any questions or needs related to {{product or service}} - so save my contact info and reach out when you need me.

{{signature_block}}

If it’s more convenient, you can also always schedule a time that works for you directly on my calendar: {{scheduler_link}}.

This campaign is super simple but effective. In my years of testing, the secret is keeping the emails as short and specific as possible.

• Checking in
• Here’s what I can do for you
• Make it as frictionless as possible to start a conversation

No selling or bold claims about having the best rate or deals. Use the; I’m an expert approach.

Lead nurturing for endless revenue

Now that you have your list warmed up or at least introduced to you, it’s time to move them to lead nurturing.

There are many different ways to transition them to your long-term nurturing list. My preferred method is to use Zapier to automate the posting of leads from my short-term outreach software to my long-term nurturing software once they have met my warm-up criteria.

Here is my simple criteria and process:

• If they have responded to me, I take over the conversation, and my outreach campaign terminates
• Then all leads that open during the outreach campaign go into the long-term nurture list
• Contacts that never open any of the first three emails get an extended but lower tempo warm up over the next 3-6 months

Once the contacts are on my long-term nurture email list, my primary objective is to keep them engaged by sending them valuable content that is often tangential but relevant to my product.

Then once every couple of months (depending on the product), I will send out an offer or sales email - you need to continually remind them what you sell and that you’re their best expert.

I accomplish that by using content from my blog to populate weekly newsletters. It positions me as their expert and continually brings them back to my website to potentially re-engage as a form fill or inbound call - fresh lead!

If you’re not a great content creator, don’t despair. I’ve seen tons of folks aggregate exciting articles from news sites and accomplish the same objective. They just generate leads as replies to the emails themselves.

One cautionary note with this approach: Make sure that you aren’t sharing links to lead generation websites. They often look like news sites.

In my case, I use a technology called RSS-to-email to automate the aggregation of blog content into my weekly newsletter, and then once a month, I write a custom, personal email to the list. This email has at least one call to action and is essentially my sales letter, producing most of the leads from the list.

That’s how I do it. What questions do you have?

That’s how I have been creating email marketing cash registers for clients and myself for years. Give it a try and if you have any quick, specific questions - send me an email at [email protected].

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