5 Steps for Getting Great Results With Automated Cold Email Outreach – Part 2
In Part One of 5 Steps for Getting Great Results With Automated Cold Email Outreach, we covered current benchmarks that quality cold email campaigns are achieving, as well as the importance of identifying your target audience (Step 1) and segmenting your lists (Step 2). This week, we’ll cover the final three steps you need to take in order to make your cold email campaigns give you the warm fuzzies that only a true revenue-driving marketing tool can give. After all, 320% more revenue is driven from automated emails than non-automated emails.
Step 3: Create Personalized Drip Campaigns
Once you have your targets in sight and you’ve divided your list into the segments that you want to pursue, it’s time to create highly personalized drip campaigns. The role of a good drip campaign is to build a relationship over time through brief, but relevant communications that pique your target market’s interest. B2B data provider, SalesIntel, shared research on cold email campaigns that revealed, “a sequence of four to seven emails is the optimum number for increasing reply rates, as long as a sequence is carefully executed and not simply a flood of messages over a short time.”
Planning a Drip Campaign That Delivers
To ensure your messages are optimized for replies, create and follow a general content outline for your drip campaigns, such as:
Drip Email 1: Introduce a problem your target has and share an impressive result your solution brings
Drip Email 2: Share a quick success story your product/service achieved for your target’s industry
Drip Email 3: Reiterate the problems your solution resolves and invite the audience to learn more via an informational video
Drip Email 4: Invite your target to get free long-form content on the problem you mentioned in the first email
Drip Email 5: If no interest has been shown by your target, ask if there is someone at their company you should be talking to
In addition to having one objective per email in your drip campaign, you will want to keep the content concise, as in around 125 words, which is the approximate length of this paragraph, minus this sentence. Brevity ensures that more people will not only view, but read your email. It also demonstrates that you are respectful of your target’s time and attention.
Connecting Tech for Better Personalization
The only way to scale highly personalized emails for a variety of segments is through automation. But of course, the only way to automate the personalization of cold emails is to ensure quality data is both accessible and minable throughout your martech ecosystem. To accomplish this goal you will need to connect all your data sources, so that your message orchestration tool can pull the right content for the right segments and send it at just the right time. If you’re looking for motivation to connect data sources across your enterprise, so you can engage in high-performance campaign personalization, there are loads of reasons to pull out all the stops, according to research by WPForms:
- Personalized email messages improve open rates by 26%
- Segmented personalized emails can increase sales revenues by 50%
- Personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates
To enhance the open, click-through and reply rates of your cold emails, as well as their overall deliverability, consider adding a variety of personalized fields, such as a person’s name, title, industry, company size, primary challenge or pain point, location, purchase requirements, stage of the purchasing cycle, subject interests, purchase history, etc.
Step 4: Test Campaigns and Segments
If there’s one thing you can predict with complete confidence, it’s that people are unpredictable. Sometimes we marketers can become so immersed in the benefits and results of our products or services that we become convinced that only a certain approach or buzzword works, and yet we puzzle when the same tactics we used yesterday don’t work as well today. This is why it’s critical for you to regularly engage in A/B testing, which can increase your open rates by 49%! According to the Harvard Business Review, “A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of something to figure out which performs better.” In the realm of marketing, A/B testing allows you to see which words, images, subject lines, CTAs or other elements of personalization used in your cold emails are working best in your campaigns. To ensure you derive the most benefits from your A/B testing, make sure you only change one element at a time. This way you’ll know for sure what is working and what isn’t.
Step 5: Track Metrics
Our final step for getting great results from your cold email campaigns is to track the following metrics:
Open Rate: This is the number of people who opened your emails. Note: Make sure your tracking software differentiates between the open rate, which should connote individuals who opened your email and the re-open rate (when an individual opens an email more than once). The average open rate for a cold email is 22 percent, so aim to meet, or better yet, beat this number!
Response Rate: This is the number of responses received out of the total number of emails delivered. A response is any positive action a prospect takes in engaging with your email, i.e. clicking a button, subscribing to a blog, watching a video, etc. The average response rate of a cold email drip campaign is 12 percent.
Conversion Rate: This is the number of target audience members that became customers via your drip campaign. The current average conversion rate of a drip campaign is 15 percent.
Bounce Rate: This metric connotes the number of emails that failed to be delivered. It’s important to pay attention to this metric because anything greater than 2% may cause you to be black-listed as a spammer by email service providers.