Best Lead Generation Digital Agency: Top 8 Choices for 2023

The best digital agency for lead generation for businesses is the one that promises you leads, gets them for you, and charges you exactly for the results. 

Unfortunately, such digital agencies are hard to come by. Most companies charge you based on the work they do for you and the lead generation process they use — instead of the results they get for you — and also bind you in some 3 to 6 months contract where you pay per month without so much of a guarantee for your ROI. 

We fix that. Our digital agency, Nerdy Joe, only charges you based on the results we get for you and you won’t have to sign any contracts. 

Plus, we create cold email campaigns that are so compelling that the recipients can’t help but acknowledge our greatness before making us offers. See for yourself: 

Yeah, that’s Ross Simmons, CEO of Foundationinc.co. Here is another example from ex Hunter.io CMO, Irina Maltseva. 

Here is another example. 

We can go on. But you get the idea. 

In this article, we've compiled a list of the 8 best lead generation marketing agencies in 2023, and we'll start with our own lead generation service, Nerdy Joe.

Four things a lead generation company does for you

A digital lead generation agency is a company that creates and implements marketing plans to help businesses attract more qualified leads — prospects that show interest in a company’s products or services and are likely to become paying customers. 

Depending on your business needs, they can perform different functions that are essential to the growth of the business. Some of these functions include:

1 - Expand your market

When you start your business, you probably target a small group of audience. But that isn’t the only people you can target. Lead generation agencies enable you to learn about your prospects. 

Based on data-driven decisions, they conduct research on your ICPs, which can stem from various industries. This results in getting opportunities to expand into new markets. 

2 - Boost revenue

Lead generation enables you to reach out to the right prospects. Before you can do this, you have to implement various strategies such as the right messaging, content, and offer to pique interest from them. 

When done correctly, you can easily capture the attention of qualified leads and also convert them. This action has lots of revenue growth potential, which you can use to scale your business.

3 - Improve lead quality

Creating and posting generic content on the web can get you tons of traffic. But if they aren’t converting your visitors into leads, it is only a waste of time. 

A lead generation agency can implement a highly targeted approach toward content creation. Everything they will craft for your brand, whether email marketing campaigns, LinkedIn posts, or messages, will cater to a specific group. 

This makes it easy to craft messages that resonate with your audience. Subsequently, this improves the quality of your leads and boosts conversions, and drives sales.

4 - Build brand awareness

If you are a startup that recently launched in a new market, or perhaps, you already have an established business that requires more exposure, you will need to create brand awareness. This is where lead generation agencies come in. 

They can help to identify your target audience that is interested in your products or services. Then, they can create engaging content and distribute them through the most effective channel to reach them.

As time goes by, they will get your company into the eyes of people that matter the most.

8 best digital agencies for lead generation

Now that you know what lead generation agencies do, here are the eight best digital agencies you can consider for lead generation. 

1 - Nerdy Joe

Contrary to most digital marketing agencies which are Jack of all trades, Nerdy Joe only focuses on email marketing and outbound lead generation services (i.e., cold emailing)

Our team uses proven strategies to attract and engage potential customers through cold outreach strategies. We will closely work with you to understand your unique needs and tailor our services to deliver the results you’re looking for.

We believe we differentiate from most digital agencies due to our unwavering commitment to quality. In our opinion, generating leads is only half the battle; the real challenge lies in converting them to loyal customers, which is what we aim to achieve for you. 

This is why we generate leads who are both interested in your product and likely to make a purchase.

Our customized lead generation solutions are tailored to meet your specific needs because we understand your business is unique. 

Whether you're a startup or an established business looking to expand, we have the expertise and resources to help you achieve your goals.

When you work with us, you don't have to commit to a certain number of months, and you know exactly what you're getting.

So if you're tired of wasting time and money on ineffective lead generation strategies, our team of experts is here to help you take your business to the next level by generating high-quality leads that convert. 

Why Nerdy Joe is the best digital agency you need to consider

We are an ROI-focused lead generation agency: You’ll pay for the results that makes sense to you, not for the work we do

This might be a little confusing to you “you’ll pay for the results that make sense to you”. But let’s unfold the analogy we put behind this so that you actually understand what we mean by that. 

There are lots of digital agencies out there, but all of them can be classified into three categories.

1. Digital agencies that charge you for the quantity of the work they do and not for the results they bring to your table. For example, a content marketing agency will charge you for the number of content they create, and not for the number of LEADS they bring you. Or, a lead gen company will charge you for the number of emails they send, and not for the leads you get from their campaigns. 

2. Digital agencies that promise you a certain lead quality, charge you a monthly fee for it, but always come short of their promise or fail to deliver altogether. For example, a lead generation company that calls everyone who’s downloaded an ebook or PDF a LEAD and charges you for that, while the lead never buys.

3. Digital agencies that charge you based on the ROI, the number of QUALIFIED LEADS they generate for your sales team. For example, they say you’ll get 6 sales-ready leads by the end of the month, and you’ll pay $999, you sign up  for it. They do the job it takes, bring you the leads, and your sales team closes them. 

From our experience, it’s only the last type of agency that truly cares about your ROI and brings you great results. 

We believe if you are looking for a lead generation agency, your main point is that you need more leads to sell to, and that’s why you were looking for a startup marketing company in the first place. 

So, given this, our priority and main strategy aims to bring actual results that make sense for you ROI-wise. That means that our service does not revolve around the number of emails we send or the work we do (nor anything else), but rather the results we deliver.

For example, we do not report on vanity metrics like open rate, bounce rate, clickthrough rate, etc. Here are some of the metrics we rely on to makes sense of the campaigns we run for you:

• Number of positive replies

• Number of meetings booked

• Lead to close rate.

For instance, if you want to work with us to increase the customer base for your SaaS product, we’ll report:

• The number of new sign-ups you get. 

• The number of positive replies we get.

• The number of demo calls we book for you.

• And the number of new clients we get for you.

If you’re a healthcare software company selling to doctors, we’ll only charge you for the number of appointments we set for your sales teams.

We run super-targeted and successful campaigns that are aligned with your brand and makes people love you

As you’ve seen from the introduction of this article, we take creating cold emails and running campaigns seriously.

As a result of this, some of our prospects love the cold emails we send them and take the time to show some appreciation. 

Now, here is what we mean when we say “we run super-targeted and successful campaigns that are aligned with your brand and make people love you”. 

Most digital agencies and marketers go about lead generation, especially when it comes to outbound methods like cold emails, the wrong way. It mainly has to do with the fact that marketers approach it as a numbers game. 

They devise outreach campaigns and strategies like: “we’ll send 1000 cold emails per day for every week and before the weekend, we can convert 0.01 percent of them and get a few clients.” In most cases, it sounds like a solid approach and could even work. 

Here are some stuff business growth experts preach on Twitter.

And some more.

Basically, you have to send 1000 cold emails per day to get new leads. But here is why we hate it. 

That means blasting too many people with cold emails to only convert a tiny-tiny percentage. That’s ideal.

It also means that you won’t take it seriously to research your prospects to create personalized cold emails relevant and meaningful to each of them; that’s not ideal as well. 

Worst, doing outreach that way comes with many consequences for you, the client. 

• Getting flagged as a spammer: ESPs and ISPs will flag your email and IP addresses as spammers.  

• Damaging both brand and sender reputation: They’ll kill your company’s reputation, and you’ll get a bad rap on social media. 

• Poor leads quality: The quality of the leads you get will be subpar, and you can’t convert, at least not easily or in a short timeframe. 

• Pissed prospects: Some prospects can be mean to you, saying things like “Remove me from your list”, “Don’t ever email me again,” or worse, “Really? Your cold email sucks”. 

• Deliverability issues: Your domain will face severe deliverability issues, and most of your future emails, if not landing in the spam folder, will be bouncing.

Basically, doing it like this will simply make your churn rate skyrocket and damage your reputation in the same wave. 

So, we believe that’s not how you want your company to be represented and that’s why we avoid this by being super-specific in who we target and creating personalized messages, to very short prospect lists, and guess what? It works like a charm. 

We target very short prospect lists, and the most important part of our work is to spend time learning about your ideal customer profile (ICP) in and out before we send a single email. 

We want each recipient to feel like you know them and take you seriously and not just another spammer in their inbox. 

The ideal scenario we strive for is to send 20 personalized cold emails, get 15 replies, 10 positives, and get you 4 sales-qualified leads or sign-ups. For most people, this is not conceivable, and that’s because they do it the wrong way. 

Now, don’t get this wrong. By personalization, we mean we make each email relatable, meaningful to the prospect’s unique personality, and timely. We don’t just add [[First name]] and other variables to the email subject lines. 

Just for some context on how this works for us, here’s an example of a reply we received as we reached out to a VP of Marketing who has historically blocked or reported SPAM to anyone who’s sent him a cold email.

Here’s another example where we pitched a Head of Marketing, and here’s the response. 

Contrary to what most digital agencies think, we target very many people. Like 10 or 15 people, not 1000. And this gives us time to research each individual and craft completing emails.

That’s why most of the responses we get are:

• “Wow, such a nice email.”

• “Your email is well-done, partener”

• “Thank you for the nice words and compliment.”

• “Love your cold emails. Wanna write for us?”

• “Let’s catch up next Thursday.”

• “Love your email. Can you follow up on the 20th?” 

We believe the best marketing approach is the one that promotes trust and relationships. That’s why we always put in the extra work and patience it requires. 

You might wonder what we mean by researching the prospects and where we get information about each prospect or member of your target audience we use for personalization? Among many things, here are a few things we do. 

• We listen to podcasts your potential customers have been on.

• We read blog posts they wrote. 

• We read their LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon posts.

• We read discussions on forums they’re in.

Using the data we collect, we craft first lines and icebreakers customized to each individual.

Here’s what it looks like in real life. We pitched CoSchedule’s Head of Content, Ben Sailer, and asked him if we could write for them.

Here’s what he replied 1 hour later.

Here is another successful example from a similar strategy.

As you can see from both screenshots, the cold emails sent to the prospects were so compelling that they couldn’t help but acknowledge it before offering to hire us. 

Top-notch data quality and accuracy: we only run our campaigns with manually-built lists and data

You probably can tell by now that we’re very meticulous about the data we use and how we target people. 

You’ll be surprised to learn that our team manually builds all the data we use when targeting prospects for our clients.

And this includes list building, prospect research for personalization purposes, and everything else. 

We know there are data intelligence tools like LeadsEngine, ZoomInfo, or Lusha that we can sign up for, and they’ll quickly scrape up the net to build us lead lists, including 1000s of targets we can send emails to every day. 

But as well, we know the level of accuracy and customization it takes to cut it into someone’s inbox with an unsolicited cold email and get their attention. 

That’s why we do not rely on data intelligence tools. In most cases, such tools only compile technographic and demographic data from companies.

For example, using these tools, it’s easy to find data such as: 

• The company is in the healthcare industry, 

• They have 500 to 1000 employees,

• Are series B-funded companies,

• Are in India,

• Use Freshworks or Salesforce as part of their tech stack.

• Etc.

The problem is that this type of data can’t serve for quality personalization. Anyone can easily guess those, and they are not unique enough to make the prospect feel you actually researched them. You can only use it to devise poor first lines like:

Subject line: Freshwworks integration

Hey [[First name]],

Hello. 

I hope this email finds you well. You are a software engineer. You’re using Freshworks; come buy. 

Yours faithfully.  

So instead, we want to generate high-quality leads and data that we can use to create personalized emails and make the prospect feel like you know their day-to-day and more. So, we make use of psychographic data and other types of data.

For example, after signing a new client, we ask them about their ICP.

We ask questions like:

• Which type of client has the highest lifetime value?

• Which type of clients is easiest to close?

• Which type of clients churns the fastest?

• What are the top 3 objections you hear from prospective clients during sales calls?

• Why did you start your company? 

• What pain points were you trying to solve?

• Etc.

By getting them to answer these questions, we can pinpoint precisely who we should target and why — and it gets easy to do it manually. And this type of information makes the difference between: 

“We’re targeting series A tech companies,” 

And 

“Our ICP is a CTO at a software company selling to DevOps, and his main pain points are lack of organization, time management, and team collaboration. He often refers to XYZ podcasts to get insights as to how to manage his team efficiently.” 

Once we have a clear understanding of who the ICP is, we proceed to manually build our list, and that’s what we use to run our lead generation campaigns.

No long-term and retainer contracts: only pay to get results and renew only if you’re happy

When it comes to lead generation, we think it should be that we charge you for the leads we get you. And as displayed on our website, you choose which plan you want, you pay, and we bring you your leads — no contract, no retainer.

But what happens with most digital agencies is that they will ask you to sign a 3 to 6-month contract before you start working together. They’ll explain it by saying they’ll need to do some testing and that the purchase journey is long. 

This scheme makes you pay every month for the results you are supposed to get — even when you don’t get them.

So, you invest a lot of money, and at the end of the day, you may not have anything to show for it. That’s why our services are subscription-based. 

We promise to offer you results exactly from the first month, and you’ll have to choose whether to continue to pay and get the results or whether you want to stop working with us — depending on how satisfied you are with our service and your budget. 

We eliminate the stress that comes with long-term and binding contracts and let you decide. Here are the benefits you can enjoy from this. 

• Flexibility: A retainer contract usually requires you to commit to a fixed period of time and payment, regardless of your satisfaction with the service. In contrast, you are free to choose when to subscribe and when to stop. It’s all based on whether you are satisfied or not, which means that you won’t have to stay committed while you are not getting the results you want. 

• Risk mitigation: If you are dissatisfied with the service, you can stop the subscription without incurring financial and legal consequences. You take on less risk than with a retainer contract. 

• Accountability: The system rewards us for maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. We know you have the option to stop your subscription if you aren't satisfied. The opposite is true with a retainer contract since the provider is already obligated to pay for the service regardless of your satisfaction.

Pricing

Our marketing service’s pricing is crystal clear. We have three plans:

• Silver: It costs $499/month and only gives you two warm LEADS.

• Gold: This is the plan we recommend, as it gives you the biggest bang for your buck. It costs $999/month and gives you 6 hot and sales-qualified appointments or LEADS.

• Platinum: This plan is for mid-level to enterprise companies willing to fuel their sales team with up to 15 sales-ready leads on a monthly basis.

Our email marketing pricing includes the following:

• The tech stack we use to build your prospect list and send and monitor your campaign.

• A complete list of prospects that fit your buyer persona and ICP.

• The campaign setup fees.

2 - Single Grain

Single Grain is a full-service digital marketing agency that provides lead generation, content marketing, and other services to various companies and helps them to generate revenue online.

They specialize in generating qualified leads for various SaaS companies such as Bluehost, Nextiva, Drift, Axure, Streamlabs, and more.

Thanks to their innovative digital marketing strategies and modern tech tools, their digital marketing specialists find, nurture, and convert qualified leads to scale businesses. 

Their goal is to drive more site traffic, target qualified leads, convert, and ensure they become paying customers. They make data-driven decisions and constantly tweak and test them to ensure their effectiveness. 

Contrary to Nerdy Joe, Single Grain’s pricing details aren’t displayed on their website. You must contact them to get further information. 

3 - Neil Patel Digital

Neil Patel Digital is a digital marketing agency that offers digital marketing services to small and medium-sized businesses.

They are an audience-led and data-driven agency that connects brands to their customers and provides unique experiences. 

Some notable brands they have worked with include ConnectWise, Contentful, SoFi, CNN, Adobe, Western Union, LinkedIn, Nexcess, Party City, and more. They offer integrated search marketing solutions and deliver lead generation services based on three categories:

• Digital IQ – strategy and planning, data analytics and insights, persona development, dashboard development, conversion rate optimization, and more.\

• Earned Media – Search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, influencer marketing, app store optimization, organic social media, link building, and more. 

• Paid Search – Paid search, display and native, affiliate marketing, digital audio, and more.

They also offer the latest software tools that help to drive efficiencies for their team and scale businesses. Some of these tools include UberSuggest, Answer the public, ROI calculator, and Ads grader. 

Unlike Nerdy Joe which displays pricing details, Neil Patel Digital doesn’t display its pricing details on its website. You have to contact the company for their pricing information.

4 - WebFx

WebFx is also a lead generation agency that helps brands to generate qualified leads and drive sales. They also offer content marketing, email marketing, SEO, and paid ads services.

According to their website, they have generated over 7 million leads for their customers and have worked with companies such as Arrowquip, Kangol, Stanley, Sysco, Virginia Lottery, and more. 

If you choose to work with their company, you can contact them on their website. 

5 - Pearl Lemon Leads

Pearl Lemon Leads is a full-service UK lead generation service that generates qualified leads and drives revenue to grow businesses.

They have partnered with various notable companies, including TEDx, Appsumo, SemRush, Oracle, Upwork, and more.

They offer B2B lead generation services for B2B companies of all sizes to generate more qualified leads, increase brand awareness, and boost your online presence.

They implement varieties of B2B lead generation strategies to meet the needs of each client and generate revenue.

Some of these strategies include inbound marketing, content marketing, lead scoring, lead management, cold email, sales nurturing, and more. 

They also offer appointment-setting services to generate warm leads and close deals. They set up appointments with qualified prospects who have enough budget to buy from you and streamline the sales process. 

In addition, they offer outbound lead generation service — cold calling and cold emails — to generate leads for you.

Their team of email specialists writes effective emails that engage your prospects to “warm them up” and boost conversion. They also have a cold calling team that handles cold calling lead generation campaigns from scratch to produce results.

To get the pricing details of this company, you will have to book a call with them on their website.

6 - Cience

Cience is a B2B lead generation service that provides sales development and appointment-setting services for various B2B companies in over 150 industries.

They offer both outbound and inbound sales development to improve sales pipelines and generate revenue for different companies. 

Their outbound sales development service enables them to validate your ICP, target highly qualified leads through a multi-channel approach, and optimize SDR activities to generate sales opportunities. 

Meanwhile, their inbound sales development service involves validating your ICP, identifying your needs, developing well-structured messages that engage your inbound leads, and setting up a meeting for your business. 

Contrary to Nerdy Joe’s pricing plan, Cience offers a contractual plan — a minimum of 3 months — for their clients.

Although they don’t have an exact price for their websites on their services, you can use their ROI calculator to calculate and give an estimate on how much you will spend with the organization. 

7 - KlientBoost

KlientBoost is a performance marketing agency that provides various marketing services (paid advertising, search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization, and more) to grow businesses.

They have worked for various agencies such as Upwork, Lytx, Juniper, Airbnb, Stanford University, and more.

One of the prominent marketing services they deliver is email marketing where they use emails to generate revenues for businesses. They research and build campaigns to bring your prospects closer to your marketing funnel. 

Whether it is crafting various types of emails to A/B testing, they manage your email marketing services through the heat ladder approach to get more opens, have a higher CTR, and generate more revenue.

They also perform email audits and ensure it performs well.

If you want to know about their pricing details, you have to use their ROI calculator to get an estimate. 

8 - Milia Marketing

Milia marketing is a digital marketing agency offering lead generation services for B2B and B2C companies.

Their goal is to give their clients a solid presence across all digital presence, build brand awareness, increase audience engagement, and drive more sales for businesses. 

They offer both long and short-term solutions, based on creative and innovative approaches to create relevant content that suits the needs of their clients.

They also use high-quality tracking tools to improve content optimization, search performance, and website conversion. 

They also work within your budget to deliver personalized services that maximize ROI. If you want to know their pricing details and work with the company, you have to schedule a 30-minute call with them. 

Why you need to outsource lead generation to a digital agency

As a business owner, you may find lead generation to be challenging and time-consuming, especially when you have a lot of tasks to handle on your desk.

In this case, you have to assess your capabilities and determine whether you should hire in–house marketers to do it for you or outsource your lead generation efforts. 

Although the struggle behind making the decision is real, there are numerous advantages you can derive when you outsource your marketing efforts.

In this section, we will explore the benefits of outsourcing your lead generation efforts to a digital agency. 

1 - Evolve with current trends and experts

The world is always evolving. If you want to be in the race and stay updated with current trends, you may have to outsource your lead generation efforts.

Outsourcing efforts enable you to stay aware of the latest technologies in the market. You also connect with experts that can use these technologies to improve and achieve your goals. 

Lead generation companies may specialize in one area. However, they are multi-facet experts who provide different services such as content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, content creation, and SEO.

Evolving with these experts allows you to improve visibility and stay updated with the changes in the marketing world.

2 - It saves time

Targeting the right audience is extremely important if you want to drive revenue. Your in-house team can spend more time researching the right audience for your company.

But by outsourcing the efforts, you can achieve such tasks within a smaller time frame through the data your outsourced team already possesses. 

Lead generation agencies only target your ideal customer profile or prospects who are interested in using your products or services.

This prevents your in-house team from wasting time on irrelevant leads that won’t yield results. 

3 - It minimizes workload and stress

When you outsource your lead generation efforts to a digital agency, you can have your in-house team concentrate on those leads and convert them into paying customers.

Not only does this process reduce workload, but it also decreases stress in the work environment. 

Less stress equals better mental health which can subsequently increase workforce productivity.

Besides, accomplishing your goals and avoiding irrelevant targets boosts their morale and improves their satisfaction. This enables them to feel motivated and more dedicated toward their following goals.  

4 - It is cost effective

If you plan to hire an in-house team to collect leads yourself, you have to pay for the visible costs — salaries, sick days, software, insurance, office electricity bills, and more.

However, outsourcing your lead generation efforts strips away some of these expenses. You can spend the saved money on other departments or other expenses that can contribute to your overall ROI.

5 - Access to the right technologies

If you want your in–house team to carry out lead generation, you must have various software and technological gadgets. However, outsourcing to an agency implies that you don’t have to worry about the tools they will use. 

They have all the tools you need to get the job done. This encourages productivity and contributes to the growth of your business.

6 - You don’t have to hire someone

Lead generation is the lifeline of many businesses. Creating a sales funnel, setting up an email, launching offers, or capturing lead assets may be some of the tactics you must implement before you can generate leads.

But the truth is that all the aforementioned factors require significant investment and expertise. 

Most times, it takes time to train someone, at least three times. In some cases, it takes a longer time for the trainee to develop the skills required to achieve success for your business. 

But outsourcing your lead generation efforts to another team doesn’t allow you to go through this process. You don’t have to waste time training someone.

Most digital agencies already have experts that will focus solely on your company. As soon as you give them the job, they jump on the board right away and bring you qualified leads.

7 - You can evaluate their results

Outsourcing your lead generation efforts means hiring a team that understands data management.

Irrespective of the service you pay for (inbound or outbound lead generation), they will present their results as a detailed report and evaluate it against your marketing goals.

This means you can see whether the campaign run by the outreach team is a success or a failure. 

You can also review the performance of their B2B campaigns and ensure there is improvement in their activities (numbers and quality of leads).

This doesn’t only help you to generate more and better-qualified leads, but also helps you to create a successful marketing strategy. 

Let Nerdy Joe generate sales qualified leads for you

There are a lot of great companies featured in this list and you can choose based on your needs. We are a digital marketing agency specializing in outbound lead generation. We use cold emails to generate sales qualified leads for companies. 

So, if you are looking for:

• An agency that uses cold email to bring your qualified leads

• An agency that charges you for results, not tasks.

• An agency that doesn’t require you to commit to a contract.

• An agency that does not waste your time and that’s affordable.

• A group of experts that care about your company's reputation and relationship with prospects.

Nerdy Joe is the digital agency you’re looking for. 

calendar with 6 meetings with high-quality leads at only $999. Let’s fill your calendar now!