You can’t scale your B2B business without a healthy dose of new leads entering the funnel. With the right approach, an outbound email marketing campaign can keep your brand top-of-mind with your customers and lead to more deals being closed.
To put it simply, outbound email marketing is one of the most practical and cost-effective ways to bring prospects into your lead funnel. When it comes to inbound vs. outbound marketing, it seems that inbound has been hogging the spotlight lately. But the nature of inbound marketing requires that you wait patiently for your potential customers to discover your content and opt-in.
On the other hand, emailing a targeted list of cold contacts can put your business in front of thousands of potential leads at once. This is an explosive and sustainable way to generate B2B leads for your sales and marketing teams.
In this post, we’ll provide some valuable tips for generating warm B2B leads using a prospecting email campaign.
Inbound vs Outbound Email Marketing
First, let’s be clear about the difference between inbound and outbound email marketing campaigns. The inbound method relies on your prospects to fill out a contact form on your website, to opt-in to receive your messages. You can use an email marketing software such as HubSpot or MailChimp to contact this permission-based list.
The prospects have agreed to receive regular communications from you whether that includes updates, announcements or an offer to purchase your product or service. The problem with inbound is, you have no control over the speed at which your list grows.
If you have identified your target customer, and their lifetime value justifies reaching out via a cold call or email – it’s time to leverage the speed and directness of an outbound email marketing campaign. Imagine this tactic like making hundreds of cold calls at once (and much less intrusive).
The biggest difference between inbound and outbound email marketing is that sending to a purchased list must be handled carefully. A dedicated email lead generation software will use its owns domains and IP’s to ensure that you don’t get blacklisted or ruin your sender reputation.
Stop Waiting for Prospects to Find You
The reason it’s called outbound is because this method requires that you actively reach out to non-subscribing people directly through email.
The slow process of organic list building will push new leads into the funnel, but not at the rate you’d hope.
By sending emails to cold contacts on a targeted industry-specific list, you have an opportunity to reach new leads that have not yet heard of your business. Those that choose to respond to your message can either opt-in to your marketing automation for nurturing or move directly to sales.
If you are truly looking to accelerate your B2B lead generation growth, outbound email marketing is one of the absolute fastest ways to keep the sales funnel continuously topped up with warm leads.
Where to Get a Quality Cold List of B2B Emails
You can painstakingly collect emails of your prospects on your own through research online. The emails can then be added to an internal spreadsheet for sales and marketing teams to track and maintain. This option is not ideal as it takes a tremendous amount of time to both build and manage the list.
Another option is to outsource the email collection task to a freelancer service like Upwork. This is a more cost-effective option, that will also save time. There are several personal assistant services that specialize in this very task.
The fastest and most convenient way to acquire a cold contact list is to purchase one from a reputable data provider. This way, you can be sure that the list is of high quality, and is targeted towards your specific industry. You’ll dodge many of the pitfalls of cold lists by sourcing it from a reputable provider.
Don’t “Batch and Blast” to One Giant Email List
Just because you have a million contacts doesn’t mean you need to send to them all in one fell swoop. That’s a very dated method that absolutely won’t get you the results you’re looking for. Instead, segment your lists as tightly as you can based on audience type, particularly any buyer personas you have set up.
When you’ve got a bunch of lists of similar contacts, you can write content that more narrowly addresses their specific pain points, and you’ll have much better results.
Spam filters will also look at you with less suspicion if you’re sending a number of smaller campaigns instead of one enormous one. It’s a better idea all around.
Email List Cleaning and Verification is Essential
Without scrubbing your email list first, you run the risk of damaging your sender score and negatively affecting your email deliverability. Outbound email marketing depends on a verified email list database, free of spam traps and inconsistencies. Email list maintenance is an often-underrated aspect of success.
An email hygiene check is the key to lowering your bounce rate and maximizing deliverability. Your IP reputation is at stake, which is why an email lead generation software like Clickback is recommended. Our software runs your cold contact list through a variety of health and anti-spam risk checks on import, which is generally a third-party service you’d pay for.
Don’t Rush the Subject Line!
A carefully crafted email subject line is your first impression with your audience. Without a compelling subject line, your email will quickly get lost in the crowded inbox of your prospect. The best way to get the attention of your reader is to offer a solution to a problem.
By addressing your prospects pain points, you peak the interest their interest because they can quickly relate to your content. If you’ve successfully identified a problem and aligned your content with the solution, you should see your open rates reflect this.
However, avoid making a statement in the subject line that achieves a higher open rate, but does not align with email body content. This will confuse and anger the reader as they may feel as if they have been misled. Clickbait will always backfire.
Combine an intriguing subject line with a high-value solution in the email body content. Premium content such as case studies, testimonials, and white papers are a fantastic way to provide value to your audience, and increase the chances that they opt-in or become a sales qualified lead.
Track your Campaign Metrics and Iterate for Improvement
Software such as Clickback offers tailored campaign reporting. This allows you to analyze key data and set benchmarks to improve your campaign performance. You’ll be able to analyze metrics that validate which type of content speaks to your audience.
By measuring the open rates and click-throughs of each campaign, you’ll quickly be able to identify what’s working, and what’s not. If you’re keeping track of what content you used and how it performed with which audience, you can scrap the things that didn’t perform well and iterate on the things that did.
Evaluate the results and re-test to continue optimizing your outbound email campaigns to their full potential – and keep scaling your lead generation. This can be anything from personalization in your subject line to what day and time you send your campaigns. It’s all worth testing to find the mix that gets you the best results.
