What is an Outbound Lead?
Uzair Rasheed
Publishedat
As businesses seek to grow and expand, one of the key aspects that they focus on is lead generation. While there are many strategies and marketing channels to generate leads, the most common terms that we come across are inbound and outbound leads.
Inbound leads are potential customers who show interest in your product or service by taking some action such as signing up, downloading an eBook, subscribing to your newsletters, or sending a message directly via chat support.
Outbound leads, on the other hand, is the opposite approach in which businesses identify their target prospects and reach out to introduce their product or service. The sales process and marketing strategies for both inbound and outbound leads are different.
In this blog, we will discuss what channels sales and marketing teams can use to convert outbound leads into paying customers and why they should adopt these strategies.
Outbound Lead Generation
Outbound lead generation involves identifying your target prospects and reaching out to them to convert them into paying customers. Sales and marketing teams need to do some research on their target audience to execute their outbound lead generation strategy properly. Reaching out to the wrong prospects or audience for outbound lead generation will result in a failed campaign.
Therefore, outbound lead generation can be very effective if you reach out to prospects that are facing the exact problems or pain points that your product or service can resolve. The only thing that's holding them back is that they are just unaware of your business. You need to reach out and introduce your business or product to convert these prospects into paying customers.
There are various outbound marketing techniques like cold emails, cold calling, direct mail, advertising campaigns, and other outreach methods.
Inbound Lead Generation
Inbound lead generation involves the pull marketing approach where businesses create and share valuable content with their audience. The main purpose of inbound lead generation is to attract your potential customers and then bring them into your sales funnel via sign-up forms, subscriptions to newsletters, following on social media, or contacting the business directly.
Inbound leads are mostly product-aware prospects and most businesses convert them into paying customers by providing them value through their content. This content includes blog posts, social media posts, videos, webinars, marketing emails, and newsletters.
Inbound Marketing Strategies
Marketing teams use various inbound marketing strategies to attract more leads to their business. Some of the most common ones are listed below
Content Marketing
One of the best inbound marketing tactics that work for most businesses is content marketing. This strategy involves producing and sharing valuable content with your target audience. Content marketing includes blog posts, videos, infographics, and other forms of content. With this strategy, you can easily attract more leads if your content is relevant and helpful to your target audience.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is a very effective inbound strategy that can help your business in the long run and will generate leads on autopilot. Search engine optimization is optimizing the content on your website for search engines so that your business ranks better in search results when people search for keywords relevant to your business.
Search engine optimization is a great way to bring organic traffic and attract leads to your website. Most people optimize their web content and post blog posts to make their website’s search engine optimization better.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an inbound marketing channel where businesses build an email list by getting their prospects subscribed to their emails or newsletters. Sales and marketing teams then communicate with their subscribers and nurture leads to convert them into paying customers. This is by far the most common inbound channel that is used by most businesses.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a very mainstream channel for inbound lead generation these days. Businesses are using different social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Twitter to engage with their target audience.
Social media marketing is all about sharing content that will attract people to buy your product or service. If you have a good reach and followers on social media, your chance of generating leads with social media marketing is very bright. In fact, you can generate tons of leads on autopilot each month just by sharing valuable content consistently on Social media.
Outbound Marketing Strategies
Outbound marketing strategies are often referred to as traditional marketing techniques where the sales teams send messages to their target audience and introduce their product to generate leads or sales.
Some of the outbound tactics have gone obsolete these days like door-to-door sales, direct mail, and trade show events. However, there is still one outbound marketing strategy that can turn out to be a game changer for your business and can generate tons of leads.
Cold emailing
Cold emails are unsolicited emails that are sent to prospects that had no prior contact with you. These emails are meant to introduce your product or service to your potential prospects. There are many businesses that aren’t too sure about the process and find it hard to execute it.
However, cold emails if done the right way can prove to be the best outbound marketing technique that has the potential to grow your business and can help you reach your targets easily. One of the reasons that cold emails stand out from many other marketing channels is the ability to personalize your cold email campaign for each specific prospect.
You can generate tons of leads and can reach out to your potential customers with a personalized cold email to increase your chances of getting a response. There are many outbound lead generation tools like Nureply that can automate the whole cold emailing process and can decrease your outbound marketing efforts with the help of AI.
Cold calling
Cold calling is an outbound sales technique where a sales representative makes unsolicited calls to potential customers who haven’t shown their interest in your product or service. The goal of cold calling is to generate leads and makes sales by convincing your potential customer to purchase your product or service.
Cold calling is a common outbound marketing channel that works for some businesses but can be challenging for most depending on the niche and target audience. The reason is that many people find these cold calls very intrusive and annoying. That’s the reason cold calls have a very poor conversion rate too.
Cold calls vs Cold emailing
Most people find cold calls annoying and want to be approached by the sales reps via cold emails. That’s the reason a well-written cold email converts way more than a well-scripted cold call.
Besides cold calls can’t be automated and need a telemarketer to constantly reach out manually, which adds up to the costs of business and can be very daunting if the conversion rate is too low. On the other hand, you just need to write a good cold email sequence and can automate it using an outbound marketing tool like Nureply.
Why Startups should go for Outbound Lead Generation?
While inbound marketing channels are no doubt the backbone of your business and will help you in the long run, there are several reasons businesses should also go for outbound lead generation.
Reach a broader audience
Outbound lead generation can allow you to reach out to audiences that are probably not going to consume your content because of their location, interests, and other demographics. With outbound marketing strategies, you can reach out to people who belong to any country, any language, or any niche.
You can run targeted campaigns that will gain your business the exposure you need and will give you the push you need while your inbound leads are still nurturing.
Quick conversion
The conversion rate for the outbound sales team may vary depending on your outbound lead generation approach. For example, if you write a good personalized cold email, it will convert more. However, if your cold email is generic and doesn’t stand out from others, your chances of conversion are lower.
Since outbound lead generation is more of a yes-no approach, a well-crafted cold email can convert your potential prospects quickly. That’s something you can’t do with inbound lead generation since that’s a long-term approach and doesn’t have any set time period of conversion.
Wrap Up
Both outbound and inbound lead generation strategies can prove to be very efficient for business growth. Whether you are a startup that needs a quicker lead generation tactic, or an established business looking to grow and find more clients, cold emails can turn out to be a game changer for you as an outbound marketing strategy.
Bare in your mind that cold emailing doesn’t serve the purpose and will not convert if you aren’t personalizing the email content. Now that you have AI, you don’t have to write unique content for each specific prospect manually. Nureply’s AI can study your prospect’s business website or LinkedIn and generate unique cold email content for B2B communication within seconds.
If you haven’t yet tried us out, try it for free.