One of the major challenges faced by B2B sales companies is finding the best suitable person.
(a) who can understand your offering and
(b) have decision-making power in the company.
Lead generation is the first step in any kind of sales. cold-emailing is one of the best practices generating leads. It is an invaluable marketing tool to target leads at a low cost.
Top marketers confirm cold emailing is the major source of their leads. Most of the small businesses leverage on cold emailing to grow their business. It is effective to boost sales, scalability, affordability and gives higher ROI.
Here’s how you can leverage cold emailing to generate leads. Grow your business by following these 8 steps:
- Generate a high-quality lead list
- Make it look real
- Provide a Strong Call-to-action
- Personalize your email
- Provide high value to the prospect
- Followup emails
- Use different templates to see what works
- Keep on adding leads to the platform
1. Generate High-Quality Lead List
To start prospecting via cold email campaign, you need to a list. A list built with a rock-solid contact list with valid email IDs.
It means you should be varied, of who are the exact target prospects for your company. Without knowing the target prospects, your email list will be ineffective in results.
But first, you should understand your value proposition. This can be anything you could offer to the leads by selling your product or service. Once you’re done with identifying the ideal prospect for your firm, you’re ready to build a rock-solid lead list.
There are certain factors that help you to understand the ideal
prospect list.
Do you need to know which specific industry you’re targeting?
What is the title of the contact looking for?
What is the headcount of the firm (like 50-200 or 201-500 or above 500)?
What’s the position and seniority level of contact in the firm?
How much annual revenue the targeted company is generating?
Understanding all the above factors helps you to create a superior client list.
For building the client email list, you need to have a tool to apply all the above filters and automatically generate the account’s email ID.
Intandemly offers emails with a 100% deliverability rate. There are a lot of companies offering the same service, but the bounce rate for them is high, and at Intandemly you will get the tool access for pre-generated contact list and setting the campaigns, unlike the other companies who offer only email IDs.
2. Make it look real
The cold emails you are sending should be perceived as an email that is sending directly from your account with the company domain address and not as an email from a bulk campaign. There are a lot of companies out there to help you set these cold email prospecting campaigns but all won’t work as they send HTML emails that look like blast emails.
Each prospect needs to be followed up by 6 to 7 times before closing the deal. It means you need to send a personalized email at the beginning and start followup the contact a week later, with a sequence of 5-6 emails using the platform. It feels like you are not a person sending random bulk emails, but you are a serious person to follow up to make contact with them.
As I said above, Intandemly offers the same features where you can set a campaign with “n” number of followups. It allows choosing a specific date and time for each followup and if the person replies it will automatically stop the campaign.
3. Provide a Strong Call-to-action
Simply sending an email to the prospect doesn’t help much until we ask for a specific action they should take after viewing our text. At first, you should have a specific goal for each outbound cold email you sent. Let the prospects know that if they are interested they should call you, or attend a webinar, or reply through the mail, meet over a coffee. You should be able to drive the prospects to take a specific CTA. This is possible with the hyper-personalized email and each part should explain why they need to take informed call-to-action.
It is very important to include a strong CTA that allows prospects to call you back, or to meet you, or you want them to meet someone else to request a quote and to close the deal.
4. Personalize your email
Even you are sending a cold email campaign outreach you need to personalize it as relevant as to the lead. It is important to mention their name and company if that is relevant to your product offering. Don’t make it as a mass campaign by making simple mistakes like referring to Mr. in the case of the female lead and vice-versa. This will tarnish your company reputation also by misspelling the contact’s last name. Always use the prospect’s first name to avoid these mishaps. And many tools offer you to use the first name for your campaign template by using the tags {{contact.firstname}}. It makes it look like you’ve written from an original email address. This highly personalized cold email prospecting campaign increases the open rate and helps to set a demo session, which ultimately closes as a confirmed deal.
5. Provide high value to the prospect
Mostly many cold emails focus on what’s in it for their company instead of on what’s in it for the contact. These campaigns are more than just setting up an appointment or demonstrating about your product or company. So, focus on explaining the importance of the meeting and the benefit they get by using your product.
As your prospect is receiving a large chunk of messages every day, all you need to do is personalize to stand out from the others. Usually, in these cold email campaigns, you should provide high value in the form of free reports on their industry, free webinar offers, and case study reports, etc. You can ask them to use your website for a week with no cost to make familiarize them with your service if that’s relevant to your prospect. Offer value to grab their attention.
6. Followup emails
The closure of a sales deal takes place only after a dozen touches to your initial mail. It means you need to send five to six followup emails to close a deal. This is already mentioned above, but to be identified as a real person you need to followup. This is a well-known tactic for every salesperson, but they feel demotivated after not getting the reply to the personalized email they sent initially.
But, if you send the followup, you’ll stand out from your competitors as most of the people won’t follow up on the prospect. Also, there are certain things to follow while sending followup emails. We need to avoid sending the emails too quickly or robotic lines as it may hurt the chances of response from them. You will get appreciation and response when you send the followups promptly, i.e., a minimum of 3 to 4 days between each followup email.
In the first two followups, reply that “Hey, we are unable to catch-up. Tell me the best time to connect”. And ask the best address to send the case study reports or weekly books or another offering relevant to them. After the two followups, change the entire strategy by writing a new email in a different manner with a new offering. This feels to them like you’re a real person and persistent to start a relationship with them. This increases your chances of engaging with the client.
7. Use different templates to see what works
Once you’re ready with the email list, you can split test the emails. This is possible through the cold email prospecting system.
This will enable you to observe Metrics. You can learn about open rate and reply rate for the campaigns. All this is very important in selecting the best subject line which converts.
Another benefit of split testing the emails is to find the actual offer that sparks interests in prospects.
Try different templates with offers to the contacts. “A free subscription for a week” or “Win free books” or “weekly magazines” etc.
In the initial stages, this will help us to measure the actual reply rate. The same can be used until it works in the market.
8. Keep on adding leads to the platform
Never stop doing the cold email campaigning process.
Always add new prospects to your list with your cold email prospecting system. Apply different filters in the tool and update your database with a new list. Go campaigning with smaller counts.
Send to limited prospects daily, which will allow you to focus on personalizing email.
Once you’re done with a specific group, the switch to other groups with different industries and focus on it. This helps to increase your reply rates and leads to a higher conversion rate. So, keep adding the lists all the time.
Conclusion
That’s it! Setting a prospecting email campaign is a cool idea to generate leads.
This 8 step procedure helped you in generating leads
Now craft your own successful email marketing campaigns.