Isn't cold email dead? The short answer is: no, it isn't. It’s one of the best converting channels when done right.
And the right way = to have a greater offer than your ask.
That’s why, in this strategy, we’ve focused our messaging on the benefit of the receiver. Furthermore, to increase the value we offer, we’ve written an eBook and send it to our email audience afterward as a follow-up campaign.
We'll explain to you what we call the Trojan Horse strategy and surprise you with the numbers, so read on.
Yes, you have, of course, received one of those poorly structured, salesy, and spammy cold emailing campaigns in your inbox. You hated it, we know, and therefore, you think other people will hate it too. But hold on, because of a few unskillful marketers, you can't say "cold email doesn't work".
Here is your current perception:
- People hate cold emailing.
- If I do a cold emailing campaign, it'll hurt my brand's reputation.
- If I do a cold emailing campaign, my brand will lose its credibility.
Well, in this article we’ll try to change your view on Cold mailing. One of our B2B Service companies scheduled 70+ video calls and got a 58% reply rate from their cold emailing campaign. Step by step, we'll walk you through the process of how we increased their leads in only a few days’ time. Now before we get into the details of the tactics, let's briefly define the brand and its challenges first.
The brand
- Experts in IT security & Infrastructure
- Pain point: they want to find a new audience and start a conversation with them.
The brand's needs
- Increase in leads
- Schedule more face to face meetings.
- Collect data and understand the pain points of their target audience.
We came up with a strategy that included:
- Creating an outreach strategy
- Writing nurture emails
- Automating the process
- Writing a lead magnet
CTA BOX: If you have similar challenges and want to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads, feel free to call us for a non-binding consultation.
Why do we call this cold emailing strategy the Trojan Horse?
As you know, remote working at COVID-19 times became the new reality. We work from home, as a result, we are more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. With that, cybersecurity also became a more important topic.
So we came up with the idea of "The State of Security and Remote Work 2020". A research paper where we ask our target organizations how they are dealing with challenges that came with COVID-19.
In return, they would
- Have a chance to win a team activity valued at €500.
- Get free advice to improve their security and remote-working environment.
- Have priority access to the research paper and be able to benchmark themselves with other companies.
Once they accept our 15-minute survey, our foot will be on the door. We would then ask our interview questions in the video call and feed the sales team with concrete insights from the conversations. That’s why it's called the Trojan Horse, our sales questions were disguised as industry research.
A closer look at the cold email sequence
The email sequence contains four emails. Most people think the number is too high, but in reality, your emails can get lost in the clutter of daily chaos. Or some people think being persistent is not a nice thing, but the video calls we had proved the opposite.
In fact, we had most of the interactions from the third and fourth emails. The leads also mentioned in the video calls that they haven't noticed emails or were distracted by something else on their agenda; they were glad that we reminded them about the research.
B2B email marketing best practices
Some of the best practices we used in this email drip sequence
- Keep it short and on point.
- Leave a lot of whitespace for readability.
- Talk about them, not about your company.
- Emphasize your value and offers, be direct.
- Use bullet points if you have multiple points to explain.
- Personalize your emails with info like company name, name, etc.
- Write a killer subject line, nobody will read your emails otherwise.
- Write more than two emails, people are busy, your emails can get lost in the clutter.
Here is how our cold emailing sequence looks like
For this campaign, our conversion copywriter composed four emails. Value-driven strategies, subject lines, and of course every word was carefully selected. Above that, we made sure not to sell anything before having a conversation. Let’s build a relationship first!
The first email: Introduction and offer
Short and to the point. We mentioned the new remote working and cybersecurity challenges. After a little boast, we invited them to our research and listed the benefits.
The 2nd email: Condensed version of the first email
The 3rd Email: Reminder email
The 4th: Goodbye email
Extra step: LinkedIn marketing automation
This might be the secret success sauce of this campaign. Here is a marketing fact: the more touch points you have with your prospects, the more likely they will reply to your campaigns. Therefore, since we have our cold audience's data, we’ve set-up LinkedIn marketing automation with Phantombuster.
We’ve sent our audience a LinkedIn connection request and a personalized message on LinkedIn, all automated. Our strategy looked like this.
Step 1:LinkedIn connection + personalized message
Step 2: Wait two days
Step 3: Start cold email sequence
This way we already had a connection with them before we reached out with a (cold) email.
Some of them already checked us on LinkedIn, browsed our profile, and thus met the sender of the emails beforehand.
This way we were able to warm up our cold emails. 🔥
The results of the campaign
This company had a 54% open rate and scheduled 70+ calls with their potential customers. In 5 of these calls, prospects immediately wanted to jump on a second call with a cybersecurity consultant.
On top of that, with the data gathered from surveys, we've written an eBook to re-engage the same list of people. Furthermore, Agisko had a powerful lead magnet to use for their upcoming marketing campaigns.
Agisko, an ICT company scheduled 70+ calls and it's not a one-hit-wonder. They now have a lead generation blueprint, which they could use with other target audiences repeatedly. They'll be able to replay the strategy and schedule calls when needed.
Here we conclude this specific case for this B2B client of ours. Of course, every case is different, so we change our approach and create different strategies each time. We deliver results in weeks!
If you have similar challenges and want to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads, feel free to call us for a non-binding 15 minutes call.