12 ways to ace your email marketing for B2B lead generation

Email marketing lead generation is one of the most effective ways of driving new business: 86% of marketers have said it generates good to excellent ROI.

With a remarkable ability to make a real difference, mastering cold emails involves endless improvements, best practices, and golden rules for success.

Luckily for you, we’ve compiled our expertise into this handy guide. Here, we explore 12 tips to help you improve your email marketing strategy and get more new customers on board.

We also look at some common mistakes to avoid so you can review your current processes. But before we dive into our tweaks and hacks, let’s see six reasons your B2B email marketing needs to be at its best.

Why does your email marketing B2B lead generation need to be perfect?

An agile email marketing strategy is intrinsic to B2B lead generation due to its cost efficiency and effectiveness in building brand awareness and relationships.

Here are six reasons why you need to maximise your business-to-business email marketing campaigns:

1. Direct, personalised communication: Email sends let you create targeted, personalised messages that resonate with specific business needs and interests. Answering potential customers’ questions and addressing pain points.

2. Measurable results: Email marketing platforms offer robust tracking and analytics, which can be leveraged to measure success and optimise your strategies.

3. Preferred communication channel: According to Mailmodo, 77% of B2B buyers prefer to be contacted through email.

4. Targeted outreach: Email campaigns enable you to segment audiences based on demographics, behaviours or past interactions, so you can personalise and increase the effectiveness of communications.

5. Cost-effective reach: Unlike other marketing channels, email is relatively inexpensive, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.

6. Scalability and automation: Email marketing strategies can easily be scaled and automated, helping you improve efficiency and save time.

12 steps to designing the best email marketing campaigns for B2B lead generation

1. Refine your targeting

You can only begin to think about building an email list and sending emails to prospects once you understand who you are selling to.

Whether you examine your existing customer base or research new audiences, you must understand who will benefit most from your solution. 

Understanding your ideal customers is the first step to success. This includes information about industry, company size, and location. Once you have built your customer profiles, you can better understand how to target them by creating B2B buyer personas. 

If you want to know more about how these two marketing resources work together to help improve your targeting, messaging and more, check out our guide below.

Once you have these two in place, you can map your market to understand how many potential customers you can reach.

2. Craft an enticing opt-in    

Before diving in head-first, the easiest way to collect data and elevate your email lead-generation strategy is by using opt-in forms on your website. But this is a subtle craft!

Asking for too many details can profoundly affect your conversion rate. Customers don’t want to spend a long time filling out a form – and if you ask for too much, they might leave your page altogether. 

Stick to asking for name and email, and at most, either a job title or company name.

3. Gather your data

Next, you must build your data and get ready to send your email marketing campaigns to the perfect prospects.

Most companies will have an existing list of contacts, like website visitors who’ve signed up for emails and prospects who have exchanged their email addresses for a whitepaper, maybe even users who have signed up for a free trial of a service.

These prospects can be included in your email lead-generation campaign. But you’ll also want to grow your email list to include new prospects. You’ll need to be cautious here: buying leads and data can be dangerous for your reputation and success, so tread carefully.

Our detailed report on database building is a good resource for understanding the different methods of building an email lead gen list. It highlights that more companies are developing their own lists (or enlisting the help of professionals!).

Regulation is tightening, so your finger needs to be on the pulse. To do this, enlist a friendly (and award-winning!) B2B email marketing agency like Sopro.

4. Improve technical setup

Don’t let your campaign fall flat before it’s off the ground: consult your tech team before you go any further.

You can spend vast amounts of time and money on data, targeting, and everything that comes after. However, your email lead generation will fall flat if your technical setup isn’t on point.

There’s a lot to get right here. First, you’ll need to consider the email marketing software that will be perfect for optimising your campaigns. 

You’ll then need to avoid spam filters and blocklists, protect your IP and domain reputation, and ensure you send to verified email addresses. And that’s all before you start writing your personalised emails.

To dig into the details more, read our complete guide to email deliverability.

5. Automate your email lead generation

If I’d made Wall-E, the whole film would have consisted of a future robot still sending the perfect prospecting emails to a desolate planet. Complete with witty subject lines and killer calls to action.

Thankfully for us all, I don’t work at Pixar.

But unless your business is in its very early stages and sending bespoke messages to three people a day, you need to send fairly large volumes of emails for a successful campaign.

95% of your target audience is not in the market at any one time – they’re tied into a contract, don’t have the budget, or are happy with their supplier. So, some form of marketing automation will be required (and it’s more ethical than an army of unpaid interns).

Automation can take many forms, whether it’s sending emails based on schedules or behaviour-triggered email journeys. Part of this email automation will include dynamic data insertion, making emails feel personal.

Automating your lead generation email marketing strategy can also help with lead scoring. Lead scoring allows you to sort through and categorise prospects based on their overall quality – how likely they are to convert into paying customers.

This, in turn, will enable you to segment your email list further. Divide and conquer: Deliver groups of emails over time to specific buyers or opportunities with a distinct area of interest. By sending relevant and highly personalised emails to leads, you will build credibility and trust. 

6. Ramp up the personalisation 

Hyper-personalisation is helping companies set themselves apart from the competition. Data from our latest prospecting report reflects this.

Our survey of 377 top B2B sales and marketing decision-makers discovered that 57% of companies rate their personalisation as basic or intermediate. It’s time to step up and stand out. 

From personalised subject lines to email content, there are many ways to make the experience more enjoyable for potential buyers and heighten authenticity and trust.

Check out our in-depth guide to personalisation in cold emails to make sure you’re leaving no stone unturned.

7. Make emails mobile-friendly

The mobile revolution is not exclusively a B2C concern. Smart Insights reports that 80% of B2B buyers use a mobile for work.

Therefore, making email lead generation campaigns mobile-friendly is just as important. There are two ways to do this:

• Optimising HTML emails: consider your pre-header text, images, videos, attachments, device detection, button design and placement, and more.
• Going back to basics and just sending plain text emails. Spoiler alert, our guide explains why plain text still deserves credit! 

8. Send multiple emails

Generating leads from email campaigns is more complex than firing off one well-written message and waiting for the big bucks to roll in.

Piquing that interest will generally take more than one email. Three follow-up emails are generally considered the sweet spot before the results drop drastically, and you start annoying people.

77% of our responses come from chaser emails. Sometimes, people need time to think or a little nudge to remind them.

9. Consider what happens beyond email

You must look beyond email to support your email marketing lead-generation efforts.

Combining other channels with email can boost campaign results. Multi-channel prospecting is taking the lead among many outbound lead generation strategies, and for good reason! 

Our report shows that more and more companies are using more than one channel for their outreach – and it’s being received well. Buyers are now saying they’re happy to be contacted on an average of 2.8 channels, which has increased 22% from the previous year. For more lead generation statistics, read our full guide.

While you need to refine and improve your lead generation through B2B email marketing, it’s important to integrate other channels. Buyers are ready to receive marketing material from LinkedIn InMails to personalised direct mail.

Use PPC ads to run remarketing campaigns and direct prospects to relevant landing pages. Use the same campaign design and copy on your social media marketing. Display ads can be visual reminders of the campaign, keeping you front of mind.

A captivating headline, perfect picture element, clear calls to action, and a well-informed lead magnet make the perfect landing page. Need a little help with understanding what this valuable content might look like? HubSpot offers a free and easy-to-use landing page builder.

To get a clear picture of those popular channels and the most promising ones, head over to our State of Prospecting Report for 2025.

10. Sending at the right time

Buyer intent is a newer way to improve email lead gen success. From helping you identify potential buyers to elevating your targeting, personalisation, and content, it can help improve customer journeys.

As we’ve discussed, lead scoring is an excellent method to help make the most of sales reps’ time. Getting the hang of sales triggers and buyer intent data can go a long way in helping with this.

Buyer intent can also help with your marketing efforts. It’s a great tool to identify what content resonates with your target audience the most.

Making the most of buyer intent should be part of your lead generation best practices. 

An adaptive insight, it can be used across multiple channels to improve your email marketing lead generation success. Leverage social media, optimise calling or even add in gifting. 

The right tech can ensure you are on hand to answer any queries at the perfect moment. If a potential client is browsing your website, intent alerts allow you to fire off a message at the right time.

11. Monitor results          

Marketing, in general, and email marketing, is nothing without results.

And we’re not just saying that: we publish the results of all our client campaigns (anonymised, of course) for full transparency.

Closely monitoring results allows you to prove and improve the return on investment. Don’t be afraid to test and learn. Here are some of the metrics you need to keep an eye on:

• Deliverability rate
• Open rate
• Response rate
• Click-through rate
• Lead rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Bounce rate
• Number of leads
• Number of leads qualified
• Number of closed deals
• Lead to close rate

12. Import to CRM

Finally, you want to connect your email marketing lead generation with your CRM to get the most from your campaigns. This has the following uses:

• Your CRM automatically sends alerts when a call is scheduled
• Importing target companies and contacts so you can monitor all communications in one place
• Importing email prospecting campaign activity
• Creating deals in the CRM when a successful campaign event happens.
• Assigning deal owners and lead sources
• Helping you conduct lead scoring to improve your sales pipeline

If you want a second opinion on your emails before sending them, remember to use our free Email Awesomeness Checker. Just paste your email content in the box, and we’ll help you ensure it’s in tip-top shape before you send it.

Common mistakes to avoid in B2B email marketing

Now we’ve imparted 12 nuggets of wisdom that can help you take your B2B. Here are a few things to avoid. These common mistakes can negatively affect your email marketing efforts, so consider evaluating your current strategy to see if you’re guilty of any of these things.

1. Overwhelming content: Lengthy, convoluted emails can be overwhelming and easily disregarded. Instead, try to prioritise conciseness that can easily be scanned and presents valuable information accessibly.

2. Poor targeting: If your content doesn’t resonate with email subscribers, they’re likely to leave your mailing lists. So, you need to make sure your target audience is refined and segmented based on data.

3. Misleading subject lines: Clickbait and irrelevant subject lines that don’t match an email’s content are a big turn-off. Make sure your subject lines accurately reflect the content of the emails.

4. Lack of personalisation: Addressing the recipient by their name is only the tip of the iceberg. Proper personalisation means tailoring content to subscribers’ needs and behaviours.

5. Ignoring feedback: Remarkably, sending campaigns from a ‘do not reply’ email address puts people off getting in touch. This stops you from receiving customer testimonials, key feedback, and engagement.

6. Not optimising for mobile: How many emails do you read on your phone? It’s probably a lot. Not optimising for mobile means excluding a large percentage of your audience, so make sure your campaigns look exceptional regardless of how they’re viewed.

Sopro’s lead generation service has been revolutionising prospecting since we started in 2015, with the sole aim of helping brands sell more. Want to read more? Check out our ultimate guide to B2B lead generation.