Use AI-Driven Cold Campaigns to Drive Revenue in 5 Simple Steps

Did you know that cold emails have the power to generate an ROI that is 4,400 percent more than any other tactic or channel in your marketing arsenal? Of course, we need to clarify that we’re not talking about the deeply impersonal, mail-merged, spam-wannabees of yesteryear. We’re talking about highly-personalized cold emails that work hard without you hardly working on them at all — in other words, automated cold emails. In today’s blog, we’re championing the positive possibilities that data-infused and AI-driven cold email outreach offers your business.

Current Cold Email Stats to Get Excited About

If you and cold emails have a tricky past, colored by expensive lists and lackluster performance, it’s time to reset your expectations. According to research, cold emailing is still the top outbound tactic in 2024 for B2B marketers. This is likely because it is a highly cost-effective tactic when compared to other prospecting efforts, such as direct mail or cold calling. If you want to see how your cold results are measuring up, here are the latest stats on cold emails that will help you know where your expectations should be with your cold email outreach results:

• 24% — average open rate
• 8.5% — average response rate
• 28% — increase in response rate by sending three follow-up emails
• .17% — unsubscribe rate (anything below .5 is good)

Now that you know that automated cold emails have the potential to boost your marketing numbers, let’s talk about how to turn them into viable revenue drivers.

Step 1:  Identify Your Target Audience

It may be tempting to purchase a list and send a cold email to everyone on it to see what sticks — don’t give in to that temptation. The trick to getting cold emails to be engaging is to make them personal. This means you need to invest time in identifying your target audience, and make sure you keep an open mind as you narrow your sights.

An easy strategy for identifying your target market is to capture the characteristics of your current top customers and then use those qualities to hone in on your target. However, it’s also important to be open to new audiences. ZenBusiness, a consultancy for entrepreneurs, recommends asking yourself the following questions when searching for your ideal target:

• Who has the greatest need for your products/services?
• Who gains the most benefits?
• Who are the decision-makers and influencers involved in a typical sale?
• Who are your competitors targeting?
• What geographic areas are producing the most revenue for your business?

Step 2:  Segment Your Lists

Once you have identified your target market, divide the people on this list into smaller groups (segments) that share multiple commonalities. The Harvard Business Review recommends segmenting your lists based on five increasingly complex criteria. Listed from simplest to most-involved are:

1. Demographics/Firmographics: Examples include industry, company size and location.
2. Operating Variables: Examples include company technology preferences, product and brand preferences, customer capabilities such as known operating, technical, or financial strengths and weaknesses.
3. Purchasing Approaches: Factors in this segment include the people and power structures involved in a purchase, the buyer-seller relationship, and general purchasing policies and criteria.
4. Situational Factors: These require detailed knowledge of the customer and include the urgency of order fulfillment, product application, and the size of order.
5. Buyers’ Personal Characteristics: You can segment markets based on the individual people involved in the purchase. Characteristics to consider here include buyer motivation, individual perceptions, and risk-management strategies.

Depending on the size of your budget, staff and time available, you can segment your email lists based on one or all of the aforementioned segmenting criteria.

A Good Segmentation Strategy Requires Good Data

It’s important to note that the ongoing success of your segmenting strategy is wholly dependent upon the overall quality of your data. Clean, complete and enriched data enables you to segment your target markets with both confidence and laser precision. To ensure the data for your segments is ready for use, you need to be able to control the flow of your data by connecting data sources, such as your marketing automation platform (MAP), customer relationship management system (CRM) and any other tools in your martech stack that are receiving, storing, using and sharing customer data.

Step 3:  Create Personalized Drip Campaigns

With your targets in sight and your list divided into (niche) segments, 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. 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, including:

• Personalized email messages improve open rates by 26%
• Personalized emails can increase click-through rates by 14%
• Personalized emails can increase conversions by 10%
• Segmented personalized emails can increase sales revenues by 5.7X or 760%
• 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
• 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 24 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 8.5 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.

Key Points Recap

1. Define your target market.
2. Segment your list.
3. Use clean data to create highly personalized cold campaigns.
4. Integrate martech to enhance personalization.
5. Use a drip campaign approach to boost response rates.
6. Continually A/B test both campaigns and segments.
7. Track your metrics using cold email averages as your baseline.

Sureshot has a long history of helping organizations get better results from their marketing strategies by automating data processes and message personalization, and empowering customers to create coordinated customer journeys that delight at every touchpoint. If you are ready to unlock the full potential of your cold campaigns and other marketing endeavors, start by taking our FREE Martech Assessment.