Over 75% of marketers currently use outbound lead generation as their primary way of attracting leads. This is for a good reason.

Outbound lead generation efforts have an excellent return on investment (ROI), making it an effective tactic to drive more conversions.

But around 68% of B2B businesses struggle with outbound lead gen. So, if you’re facing the same issue, you’re not alone.

Outbound lead generation is a particularly challenging tactic as it requires your sales team to spend a lot of time earning the trust of potential customers.

This type of lead generation can also be complex, and you may not have a big budget or outbound sales team to handle your marketing.

The good news is that there are some practical outbound lead-generation techniques that you can use in 2024 and beyond to boost your business without spending a lot of money.

In this article, we will share our top outbound lead generation strategies, methods, and tools to help you reach your business goals.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

What Is Outbound Lead Generation?

Outbound lead generation involves creating campaigns that get your target audience interested in your brand. Once you’ve attracted these prospects, your sales team steps in to contact them and turn them into paying customers.

Outbound lead generation is done in a way that does not rely on waiting for prospects and customers to come to you, which is also known as your inbound marketing tactics.

Let’s look at an example of inbound lead generation. If someone signs up for your newsletter, they’ve shown interest in your brand, and you now have their contact details.

But before they can sign up, they must first be aware of your product or service—and this is where your lead generation strategy comes in.

Typically, an outbound lead generation strategy employs tactics such as:

• Cold calling.
• Cold emailing.
• Paid advertising.
• Campaign marketing.
• Social media outreach.

Your sales reps connect with them to tell them more about your product or service and, ideally, convert them into customers.

What Are Outbound Leads?

Outbound leads are prospects who have shown interest in a company’s products or services but have not yet converted into making a purchase.

An outbound lead is qualified and can be further guided down the outbound sales pipeline. We’ll go into more detail about this a bit later on.

There are two types of outbound leads: marketing-qualified and sales-qualified.

Both leads have advanced to the stage of potentially converting, but they represent different levels of readiness and engagement. Let’s take a look at what that means.

➡️ A marketing qualified lead (MQL)

This is a lead that shows interest in your company’s products or services based on your marketing activities. They are usually in the early stages of the sales journey.

They’re potential leads because they meet the qualifying criteria you’ve laid out as your ideal client or customer—we’ll tell you more about identifying ideal customers later in this article.

This type of lead may not be ready for direct outreach just yet. Instead, they may need further nurturing and engagement to become a customer.

➡️ A sales-qualified lead (SQL)

Sales-qualified leads have usually been vetted by both your sales and marketing teams. They are more likely to make a purchase from you shortly.

They usually indicate higher levels of engagement than an MQL, which means they’re more inclined to make a purchase.

Inbound Vs. Outbound Lead Generation Campaigns: What’s the Difference?

There are several differences between these two types of campaigns, so let’s unpack each of them in more detail:

🗣 Customer engagement

As mentioned earlier, an outbound strategy takes a proactive approach by initiating the first interaction with potential leads within your target audience

Marketing and sales teams reach out to prospects—via the methods we’ll outline shortly—-to capture their attention and introduce them to your products or services.

Inbound marketing strategies, on the other hand, are more about creating campaigns to attract new customers organically. The idea is that leads come to you and not the other way around.

⏰ Campaign timing

Outbound campaigns will often target potential leads who aren’t necessarily actively looking for your product or service yet.

On the other hand, inbound lead generation targets consumers who are currently researching or showing interest in your offering.

🤝 Trust and rapport

With outbound campaigns, your sales development representatives will have to spend time earning the trust of the potential leads they’re reaching out to.

These are cold leads who may have never heard about your business before, and it will take some time to build rapport with your brand.

Inbound campaigns aim to build trust and engagement with people who are already interested in the product or service. This kind of campaign will usually target people who have advanced further in the buying process.

📁 Lead qualification

There’s usually a more extensive lead qualification process involved in inbound lead generation campaigns.

You don’t know much about your leads, so you will have to put effort into filtering them into groups that are more likely to convert.

Inbound leads are mostly already qualified based on how they’ve engaged with your business.

🔄 Conversion rates

Although outbound leads typically take longer to convert because the process of building trust initially requires more effort, this is not to say you won’t get the conversions you need.

Typically, inbound lead generation leads to faster conversion rates as these potential customers are further along in the sales process.

Outbound Lead Generation Strategies and Techniques That Work in 2024

Successful outbound lead generation involves starting with a strategy. How will your outbound lead generation team know what to do and who to target if you don’t have a plan in place?

So, step one is to develop an outbound lead-generation strategy where you outline crucial points for each stage of the funnel, including:

• Your target audience and buyer personas.
• Marketing messaging and brand positioning.
• Specific tactics.
• Your sales and marketing objectives.

To help you build a rock-solid strategy, here are the outbound lead generation tactics we believe work the best.

📧 Outbound or cold emailing

One of the best outbound strategies for generating leads is cold emailing. This is a less intensive and more cost-effective tactic compared to direct mail or cold calling. You can also reach a large number of leads within your target audience quickly and with ease.

Your email marketing campaigns can be automated and sent at specific times during each day when your prospects might be more open to hearing from you.

However, consumers are becoming savvier than ever, so it’s crucial not to send out generic messaging to potential leads.

This is where outlining your ideal customer demographics and developing several customer profiles come in handy. They ensure your messaging stays consistent and relevant to new leads.

Once this targeted strategizing is done, the first step to a successful cold email lies in your subject line. You only get one chance to make an impression, so don’t waste it.

Here’s an example of a catchy subject line for a cold email:

Once you’ve grabbed a prospect’s attention with your killer subject line, the goal is to keep them engaged.

Your message should be clear and concise enough to leave the prospect wanting more.

To accomplish this, it’s going to take some creativity to stand out from the dozens of other sales pitches that arrive in your prospect’s email inbox.

This is where tools like Hyperise are useful to help you create and send personalized images, GIFs, and videos to include in your outreach emails to prospects.

Here’s an example of how we reached a potential lead by using a personalized image in our cold email outreach campaign:

Once your message is out there, it’s time to follow up.

For every outbound email you send, ensure you have at least one follow-up campaign strategy in place. This, for example, can entail following up on unanswered emails with another message.

An outreach email follow-up strategy is essential to ensure that quality leads don’t fall through the cracks.

☎️ Cold calling

If you thought cold calling was dead, think again. Cold calls create the opportunity for direct interaction with your potential leads, where you can work on building trust and rapport. Cold calling is believed to be faster and more direct than other outbound lead generation tactics.

This strategy involves reaching out to potential customers who may not yet know about your business. These leads may show interest in your offering if they are contacted telephonically about your products or services.

Before modern-day sales technology, cold calling often involved sifting through phone book pages and dialing randomly.

However, cold calling is a much more efficient practice today and tends to focus on calling only qualified and high-quality leads. Sales reps can instantly scale cold calling by leaving hundreds of voicemail drops to qualified leads.

📪 Campaign marketing

Direct mail is a common type of campaign marketing for outbound lead generation, and this is another tactic that is still effective in 2024.

However, marketing strategies that involve direct mail campaigns can be tricky to master. They tend to work best in conjunction with other outbound lead gen strategies.

When done properly, direct mail campaigns can be effective due to the level of personalization and creativity you can employ.

For example, by using a tool like Hyperise, you can create and send personalized postcard images with QR codes to interlink your online and offline campaigns.

Here’s a great example of a personalized direct mail campaign for outbound lead generation:

If you’re not sure what direct mail is best used for, it can work in any of the following scenarios:

• Closing key target accounts.
• Moving key target accounts further down your sales funnel.
• Sending meeting or demo requests.
• Introducing new leads to your company.
• Sending personalized invites to an event.

📱 Social media outreach

Almost any outbound marketing team can benefit from leveraging social media to connect with leads and prospects.

LinkedIn, in particular, has proven to be a powerful platform for outbound B2B and SaaS sales and marketing teams in particular.

After all, there is a reason that LinkedIn is reported to be 277% more effective for lead generation compared to other social media platforms.

One way to successfully generate leads is by connecting with prospects on LinkedIn and sending them personalized messages.

Remember that your LinkedIn prospects see hundreds of ads and notifications daily. For this reason, spending some time strategizing your approach is well worth your time.

There are also a number of LinkedIn tools available that you can use to automate your prospecting efforts to avoid being glued to the platform all day.

Another excellent way to engage with prospects is via Facebook and LinkedIn groups. You can reach hundreds of leads in one go if you target the right group.

💸 Paid advertising

If you have more of a budget for lead generation and you’re willing to make an investment, paid advertising might be a strategy you’d want to consider.

Of all the outbound lead generation methods out there, paid advertising is more costly and sometimes risky. But if you do it right, you can quickly turn your leads into paying customers.

The great thing about paid advertising is it allows you to reach a very specific audience with your marketing message, which may be more effective in prompting them to take action.

Here are some of the most common paid advertising campaigns that you can run as part of your outbound lead generation:

Targeted ad campaigns

You can use what you know about your ideal client to create targeted ads to engage them. These ads let you choose from demographics like gender and location, or you can use keyword targeting based on their level of interest in a particular search term.

Take a look at the example below from the New York Times. It has targeted people in their 20s and provides them with health advice:

Source: Hubspot

Lead generation forms

Your ads can take leads to a form that captures their contact details. Paid advertising platforms usually feature a form that is integrated into the ad itself.

You can also offer what is called a lead magnet, which is something of value that you provide in return for contact information. Your lead magnet could be:

• A free demo or trial.
• An e-book, whitepaper, or report.
• A spot at a webinar.

Below is an example of a lead generation form advert from Salesforce on LinkedIn. it gets users to download a lead magnet in the form of a report in exchange for their contact information:

Source: Zapier

Here’s what their lead generation form looked like:

Source: Zapier

Retargeting campaigns

Also known as remarketing campaigns, this type of paid advertising allows you to re-engage with prospects who have visited one of your platforms but didn’t convert.

With retargeting campaigns, you can show relevant ads to nudge leads back into your sales funnel.

Here is an example of a retargeting advert run by Fossil that shows the visitors who had viewed the brand’s products on its website and offers them free shipping to get them to return:

Source: Mayple

5 Outbound Lead Generation Mistakes to Avoid

Here at Hyperise, we’ve seen B2B companies use outbound lead generation for many years, and along the way, we’ve observed some of the most common mistakes people make.

❌ Not identifying your target audience

If you haven’t spent time identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP) while developing your strategy, your outbound campaigns may fail.

Not knowing who you want to reach through your efforts wastes time and resources.

A sales development business was able to help a cellular connectivity brand generate $5 million in monthly revenue by clearly mapping out the profiles of the prospects it wanted to target.

You can use everything from LinkedIn to Google to find exactly who you want to target and identify what stage of the funnel they’re potentially in.

❌ Not using the right tools

There is a huge amount of data involved in the outbound lead generation process. You not only need somewhere to store all this information, but you also need to be able to analyze, track, and sort it efficiently.

This is where outbound lead generation tools come in. They’re designed to handle the bulk of customer data you work with within your outbound sales process, and they can help you automate much of your cold outreach.

These tools can also help your marketing and sales teams work more effectively, as they’re typically designed to boost productivity.

Some great outbound lead generation tools we recommend include:

• HubSpot.
• Unbounce.
• Intercom.
• Pipedrive.
• Salesforce.

❌ Your teams aren’t aligned

If your marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned, your lead generation and content marketing efforts will fall flat. These teams shouldn’t be operating in silos like they often do.

Instead, these two teams should collaborate to generate the best quality leads for your business.

❌ You’re not incorporating a demand strategy

Outbound marketing shouldn’t be your only strategy. You’re losing out if you’re not pairing your outbound efforts with a good inbound demand strategy.

So, while you’re spending time cold calling and emailing your prospects, you should also be running demand campaigns that educate, inform, and inspire your target audience.

Prospects who already have a good understanding of your product or service when you contact them are more likely to convert. This is why inbound lead generation strategies are also important to consider.

❌ Not personalizing your marketing message

Your prospects are bombarded with marketing messages every day. You’ve got to do something to stand out from the rest and grab their attention.

Personalization is key when it comes to your outbound marketing. Customized messages are more likely to catch your prospect’s eye and less likely to get lost in their inbox.

One lead generation company generated 1.5 outbound leads per day for 12 weeks for a blockchain development solution brand. They did this by hyper-personalizing their LinkedIn connection requests, which is something you can do with ease using the Hyperise toolkit.

Personalize Your Outreach to See Big Results with Hyperise

The success of your outbound lead generation campaigns comes down to having a solid strategy, a deep understanding of your ICP, and using personalization in your marketing messages.

Now that you know just how essential personalization is to your campaign’s success, you might be wondering how you can get this right.

With the Hyperise editor, you can create and add highly personalized text, images, GIFs, and videos to your outreach with just a few quick clicks.

Personalization doesn’t have to be rocket science. Visit our website to find out how Hyperise can help you achieve outbound lead generation success.