How to Sell more with Email Outreach Automation
Usually your email program is not going to help you tremendously to better communicate with your customers. Email is asynchronous and doesn’t lend itself to explaining complex matters. Still it can be very handy as a tool to open the dialogue.
For those situations it’s possible to send out emails manually and in some cases that might be your preference.
In most situations, though, making intelligent and creative use of email automation is more efficient and provides higher yields. Obviously there are several solutions out there, and most of those solutions will work well with Gmail/Google Mail.
If you want to any of the following email automation will help out:
- drive lead generation at scale;
- get back to your trial signups for your SaaS offering;
- simply provide new customers with a string of onboarding emails.
Email automation in your outreach process will have these two distinct benefits. On one hand you’ll achieve higher conversions and more customer success at scale. At the same time you will save significant amounts of time, allowing your team to spend time on other tasks. It’s just better business!
Successful Email Outreach in 10 Steps
Most of our clients will be interested in setting up automated email campaigns with the aim of acquiring new clients.
Here are the steps you should take to create a successful email outreach campaign:
- Set Goals
Given all the cost you’re about to sink into outreach and given the offering you’re doing it for, thinking about lead generation goals in advance is critical. These goals can be anything related to email outreach. Here to name a few:
View rates, reply rates in combination with reply intent types, click-through rates, and appointment set rates. - Design Your Outreach Process
Making sure to design your process BEFORE you select a piece of software ensures you get software that matches your sales process needs. If you reverse that process, you risk having software which won’t do what you need. This is especially true in multi-channel outreach. Keep in mind how to you plan on handling not just email, but also any other way of getting engagement. Here are a few you’re likely to use in the B2B sales process: email, phone call, personal video, sms, whatsapp, LinkedIn message, and/or LinkedIn mention.
- Choose Outreach Software
Outreach process in hand with clearly defined actions, now select the outreach software, which best enables your outreach process.
This list will get you started. - Choose List Building Software
Few startups have the luxury of having gathered extensive opted-in lists of precisely the kinds of buyers you’d like to have engagement from. Hence the need for building lists. Here are a few things to keep in mind for list-building software decisions: geography, industry, seniority, types of information, and roles.
Depending on your specific outreach, you might need to work with national list providers in order to get as good data as possible for the country you’re doing outreach in. - Validate All Emails
Validating all emails is important. Even if prospecting lists provide data, they don’t all always provide verified data. Instead they’ll provide an educated guess of the correct data. In addition, data gets old at an alarmingly rapid rate.
In order to make sure you’re successfully contacting as many buyers as possible in ways they’ll actually see, you need to validate the data you’ve gotten from your prospecting list building software.
Here are a few tools, which will help out. - Set Up All Your Software
Making all the software ready including potentially available automation between them.
- Write Your Copy
Get all your communication ready including all variables you’re pulling in from external sources. Setting up several different tracks to test which gets you to your outreach targets is helpful.
- Follow the Law
It goes without saying: don’t break the law. Follow required legislation for your outreach campaign.
- Start Sending
- Test and Review
Test your results. Review the analytics and do more of what works and less of what does not.