How To Boost Your Funnel with Cold Outreach Marketing
A study by HubSpot found that out of those cold emails (cold outreach marketing) sent, 33% get a neutral or somewhat positive response from consumers. This percentage is remarkably high considering that outbound marketing calls have a 94% extremely negative to a slightly negative response.
Cold emailing has gotten a bad rap of being called spam. The truth is, businesses are at many stages in their life cycle. Some are struggling with reaching influencers or social engagement, while others are expanding and need to maintain connections that can help them grow. So why do outbound cold emails work? They work because readers have control.
Here’s the thing: you don’t want your email to be labeled as spam. To avoid the icky feeling that comes with the word “spam,” follow these four key principles when sending cold emails:
- Build a list of potential clients
- A/B Split Test
- Use cold email marketing tools
- Provide value right away
Build A List Of Potential Clients
So, who are your potential customers or clients? One of the most crucial components of cold email outreach is choosing the best recipients for your emails. The idea is to know the target audience of what you are offering. How would you describe it, and how does it differ from other businesses in its industry? What questions do you answer for customers that competitors don’t? The more specific you are, the easier it will be to develop your cold email outreach list.
Quick Tip: By being more targeted with your prospecting, you will achieve a higher success rate than a generic persona. This is in addition to your regular client ICA demographics. A few other personas looking at are:
- Job titles
- Industry trends & where your PC hangs out at
- Geo Location
- Potential pain points you can solve
A/B Split Testing
If you’ve never done email split testing before, you’re not alone. Almost everyone who has never done it is intimidated by the idea, but it’s not as difficult as they think. Split testing is a popular strategy to improve email marketing campaigns, which has fallen out of style with most businesses. The main reason? They don’t know what to test and how to do it.
A/B split testing is just a way of evaluating and comparing two things with different elements to determine the clear winner. Entrepreneurs like you do this because they want to know:
- Which subject line has the best open rates
- Which button text makes people most eager to click
- What imagery in your email drives better conversions
- What preview text generates the best open rate
- And so much more.
In A/B testing, it’s all about going the distance. There is no end to what can be tested and what can be discovered by doing it. If something works well in a few A/B split tests, keep doing it and move on to another aspect of your email. Remember that what works today might not work tomorrow.
Use Cold Email Marketing Tools
Keep in mind that spam emails and cold emails are two different things. Spam emails are sent out at once to many recipients without any research and without investigating the email address’s validity. On the other hand, cold emails are sent to qualified leads and are tailored to the recipient. And before sending a cold email, the address is verified.
Sales are tough — and it only gets tougher when you have to send that hundredth cold email manually. That’s where a cold email outreach tool comes in handy. These tools help make sending cold emails easier by automating the process for you. They facilitate sending follow-ups and provide features like personalization, tracking, and preloaded templates. Some tools even automate other parts of the sales process, such as finding emails of prospects. Here is a list of the top five:
- Mailshake
- Lemlist
- MixMax
- SalesHandy
- Woodpecker.co
Provide Value Right Away
As we all know, value draws people to our online businesses. However, the challenge is how do you get people engaged with cold emails? I have the answer…ideally, you have them engage with your message by opening the email a few times or clicking on a link. Setting up a sequence of follow-ups to help convert prospects into customers.
A great way to keep a prospect interested is with a follow-up condition. For example, if a prospect opens your message and then opens it again within the next few days, they are much more likely to become a customer with just one more follow-up. However, if they open it only once or not at all, another follow-up is sent with a different copy to increase engagement.
The prospects you’ve engaged with are now at the conversion stage of the sales cycle, and the goal is to turn their attention into a sale. This is the time for a 1-on-1 chat with an extensive sales team. But if you’re doing your outreach solo or in a small group, setting up a dedicated landing page will help you keep the process personal and automated.
In order to be most effective, businesses should create a dedicated landing page for every segment they target with outbound campaigns. This way, they’ll keep the context and relevance intact and ensure that prospects feel they are receiving something exclusive. Your goal should be to make your prospects feel unique.
Do you need help doing this? Hire a virtual assistant team to help you navigate through all the processes.
So What Did We Learn?
- Build a list of potential clients
- Add in A/B split testing into your email strategy
- Put the tools to work! Use cold outreach email marketing tools
- Provide value right away & capture interested PC’s into your ecosystem
Cold outreach marketing is a lot of work, but you can make it easier on yourself. If your company doesn’t have the staffing to reach out to every prospect, there are a few things you can do to maintain a personal touch without scaling up your team.
First, automate the process by personalizing follow-ups and creating a dedicated landing page. Include use-case-tailored videos for prospects to more easily visualize your solutions. With these initiatives—and some more traditional outbound sales techniques—you should be able to contact prospects without overwhelming yourself or your team successfully.
Not sure where to start? Our in-house marketing experts are just a call away.
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