You likely know what marketing automation (MA) software is, and you’re probably also familiar with the concept of an outreach email. But in case you don’t know: Marketing Automation (MA) is the application of technology in campaigns that aim to maintain a personalized contact with the customer based on the immediate and progressive response to achieve a final conversion.
This marketing technique is used to personalize and streamline the company’s online interaction with its customers, using software that adapts the content and automatic actions to the data we already have about them. Now let’s talk about Outreach Email Automation, is what you get when you combine both ideas: a new strategy that enables marketers to leverage the power of email lead generation.
It’s an exceptionally powerful way to boost your lead volume. Let’s dive in.
What is Outreach Email Automation?
When you picture marketing automation software, you’ve probably got a clear concept in mind: a platform that enables you to manage a database of contacts and automate your marketing campaigns, particularly with regard to email.
Outreach email automation is like that, but for cold emails rather than communicating with opted-in leads. Think of it as the other side of the marketing automation coin.
Like marketing automation, outreach email automation is based around making managing a contact database easy and providing you with the tools to market to those contacts.
Learn more about Finding the Best Outreach Email Tool to Grow Your Business.
What’s The Difference?
Well, for one thing, marketing automation software is focused on opted-in contacts and inbound marketing. Outreach email automation is the opposite – it’s specifically aimed at cold contacts, and the whole point is to get them into your MA software.
Where a good MA platform gives you tools for all kinds of multi-channel activity, like blogging, social media, and so on, outreach email automation software is laser-focused on making your email lead generation efforts the best they can be.
Learn more about How to Send Email to Cold Contacts.
Why Use Separate Software?
After all, you can totally send emails from within your MA platform, so why bother with a whole other tool?
Simply put, you can’t send outreach email campaigns from your MA. The reason is simple: they don’t allow cold contacts.
Since outreach email is all about sending campaigns to cold contacts, that already puts a lid on that idea. However, it’s better that way.
It might not seem obvious, but there’s a world of difference between sending a newsletter to a couple of thousand opted-in subscribers and sending a cold campaign to, say, a hundred thousand contacts.
Sure, both involve loading up a list of contacts and sending an email campaign, but that’s where the similarity ends. On a technical level, cold outreach is much more challenging. That’s because with cold email you need to contend with modern spam filters, which are cutting-edge and can get aggressive.
In both cases, you need to write awesome content for your campaigns, but cold outreach requires you to also follow a whole lot of other best practices just to get your emails to reach inboxes and not end up banished to the spam folder.
Or worse, accidentally getting your IP address or domain blacklisted.
If all that sounds intimidating, don’t worry. The whole point of outreach email automation is to handle that for you.
Learn more about How to Avoid Spam Filters and Get Results.
How Does It Work?
Clickback’s Email Lead Generation software enables you to automate your cold outreach campaigns and manage your contacts easily, but it also handles the technical challenges of cold emailing for you. Here’s a good example.
To run outreach campaigns, you need contacts to reach out to. That means purchasing a list, so make sure you’re getting a high-quality list from a reputable data provider.
Even the best list decays gradually, however. It’s natural. People change jobs, for example, or change emails. Sometimes, previously valid email addresses get repurposed as spam traps. There are a lot of ways your list can (and will) degrade slowly.
That makes it super important to get your list cleaned and verified before you send it to it. Usually, that’s a third-party service you’d pay for. Clickback, however, does it automatically (and for free) when you upload a list, running each contact through a series of rigorous, in-depth filters and hygiene checks to leave you with a clean, CAN-SPAM and GDPR-compliant list, ready to send.
That’s something that marketing automation platforms don’t do because they don’t need to – they’re only meant for opted-in contacts, after all.
Clickback also has a lot going on under the hood when you create and send a campaign, all with the single purpose of getting your campaigns where they need to go. That includes checking your content in real-time for words, phrases, and formatting that might make spam filters clamp down on your campaign.
That’s the idea behind outreach email automation: it’s like MA, but for cold contacts.
Benefits
We’ve talked about the software itself, but on a broader level, what are the benefits of sending cold campaigns in the first place?
For starters, it’s far more efficient than many other lead generation tactics. When you can reach tens of thousands of people in the time it takes to write and send one email, efficiency takes on a whole new meaning.
It’s also much faster than inbound marketing. Inbound is great, and it works, but it takes a lot of time. You need to spend the effort to consistently publish high-quality content for inbound marketing to do its job, and even then, leads tend to come in at a trickle.
The ratio of time spent to actual leads generated often isn’t that great. There are of course other benefits to inbound, such as building authority, but in a direct comparison of how many leads you can generate in a month with email outreach versus inbound marketing – especially when you factor in time investment – cold email is the clear winner.
