Not necessarily. I recently read a blog post that explains why more companies in the UK are using email to sell to other companies. The post, “Direct marketing on a budget: Is B2B email the answer?” on the ThomsonLocal.com blog, makes the following point:

“While it is fair to say that the vast majority of organisations already have a significant presence on the web, there are still many companies relying solely on offline channels of communication with clients. But marketers buying business mailing lists to fuel B2B direct mail campaigns may be encouraged to venture down the digital route, after one expert recently said the internet offers the ‘most effective’ marketing opportunities.”

In other words if you are relying solely on your salespeople, mailing packages, or other tried-and-true techniques, you could be overlooking the power that emails have to generate sales leads.

Now, I need to send up one caveat here, which is that you don’t want to become a spammer by sending out unsolicited emails to companies that have not opted in to receive content from you, or from companies like you.* But with that caveat aside, here are some reasons why emailing potential clients can work well and cost-effectively:

• It is inexpensive. You don’t need to hire a call center to generate leads, or print up marketing packages, or pay for postage.

• You may already have a large list of contacts to email. Hopefully, you will have captured a number of usable, opt-in email addresses from customer inquiries, customer service interactions, and other internal events. Even if you have not, your employees’ email address books may yield more usable contacts to email than you expect.