Businesses are built on relationships — you’ll find this quote or variations of it plastered all over the internet. Everyone recognizes this fact and swears by its effectiveness.
What most don’t talk about is how to build relationships with potential customers and nurture that relationship to turn prospects into recurring customers.
Businesses get new customers either by attracting them or reaching out to them. Inbound marketing is where prospects come to you after stumbling across your content. This form of marketing has shot through the roof in recent years, and most companies are doing it today.
If everyone’s doing inbound, what makes you different?
When you ask this to yourself, you’ll realize not many companies are doing the other form of marketing – good old cold outreach. Reaching out to potential customers and enticing them is both science and art. You need solid data and a touch of human warmth.
Cold email outreach has the potential to fetch you the biggest ROI in your outreach campaign. After all, for a dollar spent, emails give you 4000% ROI.
In this article, we’ll look at raw data behind the success of emails in cold outreach and how you can implement a 5-step strategy to get your outreach game on point.
Reasons why email is one of the most effective channels for building relationships with potential customers
Email marketing can do wonders when done right. But it’s much easier to show you than just tell why it works. Here are a few numbers that should draw your attention to the power of cold emails:
- 59% of consumers think emails influence their buying behavior – SaleCycle
- $8.5 billion is the projected global email marketing revenue in 2021 and it will shoot up to $15.8 billion 5 years later in 2026 – Statista
- 29% of companies rate email marketing as an “excellent” revenue channel, the highest among marketing channels and more than SEO – Econsultancy/Adestra
- 4 out of 5 marketers would go with emails if they had to choose between email and social media marketing – Litmus
- 90% of content marketers say email is their benchmark for content engagement – Content Marketing Institute (PDF)
Here are the steps that will help you engineer a high-quality email outreach campaign:
1. Perform prospecting to find potential customers
Before hitting that send button, you need to find the right decision-maker to send your email to. Prospecting is the process of finding leads who are most likely to turn into customers. The first step here is to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
ICP helps you visualize a hypothetical identity. Properly analyze your business plan, the product, service, or solution you offer, the pain points you’re trying to solve, and the market you’re operating in. Based on the data, build an ICP most likely to buy from you, and in the shortest span of time. The ICP should also be able to strike a long-term partnership with your business.
Once you have an outline of ICP, now it’s time to find them in the real world. Qualified leads that fit the ICP have three attributes:
- They have the budget for your service
- They are actively looking for your service
- Funneling them through the sale cycle is smooth and fast
Finding where your leads hang out is as crucial as building ICP. If you’re in the B2B space, there’s a high chance your potential customers are active on LinkedIn and Twitter. Follow their content, see how they engage with others, and use hashtags as keywords to find relevant discussions. Don’t try to sell the moment you get a chance, it usually doesn’t end well.
LinkedIn is a great way to start your prospecting process. With over 300 million active professional users, the chances are the key prospects working in B2B companies have their profiles on the platform.
For instance, a simple LinkedIn search can give you access to a lot of prospect’s information. Simply type a desired company in a search box and find the employees working on the key positions.
Leave a curiosity-inducing comment that can spark a healthy debate surrounding the solution you offer. The same thing can be done in other social channels as well.
If you’re an e-commerce business, you’ll find more success connecting and understanding consumers on Instagram and Facebook. Pinterest works particularly well for graphic design and Quora, on the other hand, works for both B2B and B2C.
In the prospecting stage, it’s important to stay flexible. People and their expectations will vary according to their location, industry, and buying patterns, so it’s necessary to create multiple ICPs.
After finding potential customers, you need to find their email addresses to build your email list.
2. Build an email list with potential customers
Now that you have emails of people you want to reach, build a list for outreach campaigns. Not all email addresses are actively being used so you need to verify them before sending out emails.
It’s important to send emails to quality addresses only. When you fail to trim your list, your campaign will be affected in three ways:
- Bounce rate: Mailing to email addresses that have been deleted from servers will increase your email bounce rate
- Spam rate: Mailing to addresses that have not opened your emails in a while will automatically trigger spam alerts.
- Reputation score: When your ISP sees that you’ve been sending out spammy emails with low engagement, your reputation score will take a hit.
By verifying email addresses before sending mails, you stay away from spam triggers and non-qualified leads. Also, remember to manage your multiple inboxes effectively, so you don’t miss a single reply.
3. Segment your email list
List segmentation often creates the difference between successful outreach campaigns and the failed ones. But why does segmentation work?
The simple answer is relevancy. When you send relevant mails to relevant people, containing relevant solutions, they’re more likely to warm up to the outreach.
Imagine you’re commuting to your office on a Monday morning in New York and an email pops up in your inbox with the subject line:
‘Top 5 New Restaurants You Need to Check Out in Tokyo this Month.
You love exploring new restaurants in New York but this email doesn’t help you at all. Straight to spam.
Why did it happen?
In all probability, the sender didn’t segment the email addresses at all.
Segmentation is all about grouping email addresses based on shared characteristics. If you have found emails of potential customers from a LinkedIn group talking about a new B2B automation tool and another group of emails from Twitter talking about ways to improve ARPU, you’ll need to segment the lists and reach out with relevant content, regarding defined personas’ profiles: their goals, frustrations, etc.
4. Personalize your email communication
While segmentation is all about the shared interests of a group, personalization dives deep into each potential customer’s preferences.
Here are a few ways you can personalize emails to nurture the relationship:
Be honest in the subject line: The subject line is one of the smallest, yet most crucial parts of an email. Your entire outreach campaign hinges on how compelling the subject line is. There’s no standard rule to craft subject lines. If your audience is fashionable and young, you can use emojis, if you sell embedded PCs, you might want to be more matter of fact. Regardless, always be genuine and creative enough to spark curiosity, but don’t over-promise to an extent that you get automatically placed in a spam folder.
Address recipient by their name: In an inbox full of ‘Dear User’, receiving an email with ‘Hello, James’ seems like a breath of fresh air. And it generally is. When you make an effort to come across as genuine, recipients take notice, especially the cold ones.
Use a reference: Far too many cold emails start on the wrong foot by mentioning things that have no connection to the lead. If you’ve built a list after careful prospecting, you should lead with the reference or a recent incident that evokes curiosity.
Format the email body: Companies often restrict themselves to a “business-y” tone to sound authoritative. But all it does is alienate potential customers, or worse, make them feel dull. When you’re trying to build a warm relationship with a customer, use simple and clear language that flows nicely. People look to skim emails in the beginning. Using short paragraphs, blank space, power words and conversational tone gives them a reason to read the body.
Make it work in mobile: Considering almost 55% of global website traffic comes through mobile, it’s a no-brainer that you should incorporate smartphone dimensions while creating an email. Poorly optimized emails will have broken elements, moving parts, obscured content, and a badly placed CTA button — none of which is ideal when a lead is getting to know your business for the first time.
5. Provide value in your email content
When you have the email of a lead that fits your ICP, it’s hard to resist selling to them immediately. But restraint is the key here.
In any kind of relationship, two parties exchange values and find a middle ground that benefits both of them. Businesses blatantly pushing a product to a person who doesn’t know them is not the right way to start a conversation.
First, be honest. Tell them who you are and what you do. Second, give them social proof. Third, provide value. Providing free value is one of the best ways to build trust, authenticity, and warm relationships. It can be an ebook, a free SEO audit, a free trial for a creative subscription or anything that you think the lead could benefit from.
And lastly, be persistent (in a non-threatening way, of course). Far too many marketers fail to nail the follow-up game either because they give up too soon or persist longer than they should. Ideally, 3-5 follow-ups, each with a space of 2 days should be enough. With each follow-up email, you should make the person feel comfortable and valued. And once they’re convinced, they’ll buy from you.
Summing up
When done right, cold emails often lead to warm customer relationships. The precision and one-on-one aspect simply can’t be replicated in other forms of marketing.
However, it’s important to remember that even though the business knows a good chunk about the lead, the lead doesn’t have any idea about the business. Trust and value must be nurtured before selling comes into the picture. And if you can actually time your sale, leads will be turned into customers swiftly.
About Author: Antonio Gabrić
Antonio is an outreach manager at Hunter. He is passionate about testing different outreach tactics and sharing results with the community. When he is not connecting with industry leaders you can find him on his motorbike exploring off-the-beaten paths around the world.
