Brian Carroll Brian Carroll is founder and CEO of InTouch, a B2B marketing firm and one of the first companies to provide lead generation services for the complex sale. Brian is a recognized expert in lead generation and author of the popular book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw Hill, 2006).  Brian's been profiled and regularly quoted in numerous publications and he speaks to thousands of people a year on improving sales effectiveness, marketing and lead generation strategies. His acclaimed, B2B Lead Generation blog , was named the Best B-to-B Marketing Blog by MarketingSherpa readers and is read by thousands each week. Follow Brian Carroll via Twitter

Many marketers with slashed budgets are looking to get more done with smaller investments.

If you're a B2B marketer you're probably using email marketing. According to the CMO Council’s Marketing Outlook 2009 report, email marketing will be the top area of marketing investment this year (cited by 45% of respondents). Another recent study by the Aberdeen Group, “Recessionary Marketing: How Best-in-Class Companies Are Weathering the Storm," (Jan 2009), found that 47% of marketers plan to increase their email marketing budgets.

My objective is to share how firms are creating good quality B2B sales leads with email marketing and the telephone.

Targeted email combined with outbound calling is the ideal 1-2 punch for increasing leads, sales activity and revenue. It has long been accepted that combining outbound calling with direct mail marketing dramatically increases results in B2B programs.

Now, B2B marketers are doing the same with email and combining it with outbound calling to get immediate results and feedback. Every day leading companies are replacing or supplementing their direct mail with email programs.

Alone, a targeted email campaign yields most of its results within two days. In most instances you get feedback from your prospects immediately via reply, web visit or phone call.

Numerous studies show that personalized emails coming from a real person the recipient knows are most likely to be opened and read.

I recommend you also setup a series of easy-to-use email templates for your team to personalize rapidly and send to a prospect while they are still on the phone so your message can be reinforced in real-time. Your target prospects will get to see and hear your position and this will help you build mind-share faster. This has been a huge help for my sales team.

The killer application of email marketing and phone calling is the ability to prioritize phone calls based on the actions of the email recipient. With tracking capabilities you now know what link your prospect clicked on and where they went to next. Plus, you can track many other elements as well.

This gives us a bit of marketing ESP (extra-sensory perception) to combine our shared knowledge from various mediums such as email newsletters.

Peter Davidson, "Cold Calling Tips," BeConnected, (BeTuitive), writes,

One of the best ways to pre-qualify your leads is to work off a list of those contacts that have subscribed and clicked through on the content of your email newsletter marketing efforts. Properly written and distributed, an email marketing campaign can provide incredibly detailed information and [client] intuition that will help you know what your [clients] are interested in.

We need to be judicious in the use of that information. Don't say, "I wanted to speak to you about [topic they clicked on] because you clicked that link a dozens times." You want to be relevant in your communication.

At my firm we've found that using email is a great tool to "nurture" sales leads. We often use email fulfillment for pre and post telephone call follow up. This combination has been tremendously effective, at a minimum doubling our response rates.

As part of our nurturing programs we schedule and send emails on behalf of the appropriate sales team member or teleprospecter. It's important to personalize email content, not only with prospect information, but also by ensuring the email comes from the person assigned to manage the relationship. Of course the content needs to be relevant too.

We've developed a series of email templates from our system and then send fully trackable emails that help our sales team prioritize their follow-up calls.

Some sophisticated marketers are even tracking when their email message is forwarded. You may get phone calls from people who simply got a forwarded message. Our clients are getting qualified sales leads that weren't originally on our radar because we sent email to someone else and that person forwarded that information.

A few words of advice. If you plan to tie an outbound calling program with email, you need to be aware that the email message and phone calls need to be tied closely together. Just like direct mail, you can't wait more than one or two days before your message is lost because email boxes are getting just as clogged as our other boxes.

Also, if you plan to do this yourself, remember that your colleagues need to be trained on the dynamics of utilizing email. This includes timing their outbound calls appropriately and guiding a prospect through a review of web-based information "on the fly."

If used properly, email marketing will increase your response rates and shorten your selling cycle. The bottom line is that you can know what's going on in real-time.

Please share any suggestions or comments about this article, or let us know other topics you'd like covered in future articles. bcarroll@startwithalead.com