“What’s the right way to market my business?” This is always such a tough question! Honestly, there are as many ways to market a business as there are businesses in the world. In other words, no two businesses are going to be able to market themselves the same way. This explains why the answers to so many marketing questions on the internet start with, “Well, it depends…”

This makes it pretty overwhelming, right? All anyone wants to do is market their business successfully. Why does it have to require so much guessing and testing? Why is it all so dependent on varying factors?

Now, we do have good news: There is one strategy we’ve consistently seen work for many different types of businesses, whether they’re business-to-consumer models or business-to-business models. And that marketing strategy is a combination of two methods—it’s a one-two punch of lead generation ads followed by strategic, high-quality email marketing.

Why Does This Combo Work So Well?

If there’s one thing we know about marketing, it’s that rarely do you ever find just one method that works well all by itself. You usually need to rely on a combination of two or more. We’ve talked in the past about how organic and paid marketing should be used in tandem. In this case, we’re taking a similar philosophy with lead generation and email marketing.

The idea here is that you attract interested audience members (that is, potential customers) with a great opportunity. This part of the strategy is what’s known in marketing as lead generation. You usually use something free you can offer, such as a free download.

To get this freebie, your leads have to sign up for your email list. You can then follow up with them and directly market your business to these leads that you know are interested in what you offer. (Hey, if they’ll take advantage of something for free, then it’s only a matter of convincing them you’re worth spending money on.)

With this strategy, there are three reasons we see it work so well…

Facebook Lead Generation Ads are Inexpensive

You want an email list you can use to market to people who are interested in you—and you want to grow it fast! We get it. An email list is a valuable tool for your business, but whether your business is just opening up or whether you’ve been holding off on giving email marketing a try, it can be a slow process.

That is, unless you run lead generation ads. And these aren’t the expensive kinds of ads you think they are. In a digital advertising landscape where new internet privacy measures are making outcomes very uncertain, every dollar you spend matters.

But those dollars go farther with lead generation ads, which are usually low and steady. (For a general idea, we’ll share that our team at Till usually looks for lead costs below $3 each.)

Email Marketing Is A Long-Term Advertising Opportunity

When you bring in a bunch of fresh leads, not all of them are going to end up making a purchase. As much as we’d all love to believe everyone who takes advantage of a freebie is going to end up spending money, that’s not usually how it works.

(This is the idea behind marketing funnels, wherein you bring in as large a pool of potential customers as possible, with the idea that you’re going to lose some along the way as you market people toward making a purchase.)

Email marketing is about a long-term advertising opportunity. It gives you a chance to earn people’s trust, demonstrate your value, offer opportunities, and ultimately close the sale. Many businesses, particularly service-based businesses, need more time to warm up the leads in their funnel before people are ready to make a purchase, and a smart email marketing strategy gives you that opportunity.

You’re Advertising to People You Know Are Interested

The best thing about email marketing? You know that your audience is interested, at least to some degree. They took advantage of your lead gen offer. They signed up to hear more from you. You aren’t advertising to cold traffic here—you’re advertising to people who are aware of you, who have some level of interest, and are willing to listen to your message.

High Return for Low Cost

One final reason why we love this strategy: you don’t need to have a huge ads budget to find success. Remember how we talked about how lead ads were so inexpensive? With this relatively low cost, it doesn’t take a huge amount of spend for a platform like Facebook to be able to optimize your ads and start delivering efficient results.

In fact, we have seen clients get success with a lead generation budget as low as $5 per day, which makes it a pretty low-stakes way to try your hand at digital advertising with a potentially huge payoff.

The Least You Need to Know

Advertising isn’t a one-and-done kind of thing most of the time. It would be great if every person just needed to see an ad once and then become a paying customer. But most people need to be exposed over and over again—and they need to build a relationship with your business. Combining lead generation and an email marketing strategy  is a cost-efficient, reliable way of doing exactly that.

Want our help creating a great lead gen campaign to build your email list? We love lead gen—and we’d be happy to come up with a great idea for you. Let’s book a discovery call today! Contact us now and we’ll be in touch.