Send Fewer Messages To Get More Calls

Everyone wants more for less. How can you do less work when it comes to messaging but get more booked calls? Well, it’s possible, and we’re doing it daily! You need to consider three factors when working on sending high-quality messages to a small number of people.

1. Data
2. Messaging
3. Dialogue

The first thing we’re going to dive into is the data. How do you find it, and what should you look for?

The first thing you need to do is have a general persona. This is what your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) should be. You should have the following information you want to find already mapped out for the general persona.

• Person- Decision Maker, i.e., CEO, COO, CMO, President, or VP
• Information about the company
• Number of employees
• Total annual revenue or funding
• How old is the company
• Location
• Are they hiring
• What are their marketing and advertising specialties?

You can get as specific as you want. The more data you gather about a business, the better your messaging and dialogue will be (we’ll get into that later).

Drilling down to the nitty-gritty of your ICP will help you focus on high-quality, low-volume messages. If you have a very general persona, you can still send emails, messages, or texts, but you can’t customize your outreach. You are stuck going off of assumptions (and we all know what happens when we assume).

If you focus on a super targeted niche, you can create custom messages based on webinars, blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, and more. When you have hyper-custom messages, it will increase your open rate quite a bit. Having messaging that talks about a person specifically is much more meaningful to the person reading your message. Your open rates will skyrocket when you have a genuinely custom message. Creating a super customized messaging campaign starts with a very well-defined ICP.

Once you have your ICP, what are the next steps? Let’s jump right into what comes next.

Through your ICP research, you should be able to identify the best way to reach out to your target audience. There are many different ways you can reach out to your target audience. Maybe it’s cold calling, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, email, or even text. For now, we’re going to look at LinkedIn and email since that’s what we focus on at Boundless Media. When we’re looking at LinkedIn, first off, you want to make sure your profile is optimized and informative. Once you’re good to go there, you can send messages to your prospects. If they don’t respond or tell you they’re not interested; you simply take them out of the campaign. If they respond and want more information, you’ll start a drip campaign with resources that add value to your offer. This can be case studies, blogs, resources, etc. You’ll do the same thing with your email campaigns. If they don’t respond, try to get them signed up for a newsletter so you can keep in contact with them once a month. If they do respond, you’ll move on to getting ready to book a meeting. Now that you know where to reach your ICP, how do you craft the messaging to send? That’s what we’re going to talk about next!

With your messaging, you want to get hyper-custom with your message. If they’re in a specific city or state, ask about a sports team or another significant event. You can also find information about the business on social media, clutch, Google, or the company's website. Mention something special about the company. Maybe they have five stars on Google, or they just celebrated an anniversary, or they were in the news. Whatever information you find, use it to your advantage. You’ll always want to start your message with the information about them. Don’t jump in talking about what you do and how amazing you are, then mention them as an afterthought. Make them the star of the show, and then show how you can add value to their already great company. When people feel like you’re trying to connect with them instead of just being another email that was sent from a template, they are more likely to respond to you. Your value prop in your messaging can be the same, but make sure you customize the first part of your message. You want to engage the reader right away, so show them that you researched their company before sending the message. This will increase your open rates to up to 90%!

So, you defined your ICP, you know what platform they’re on, and you’ve crafted your messaging and sent it. Now what? Now, you have a conversation with them. This dialogue is super important. You don’t want to make it all about you yet, but you still need to add value to their company. Once you get a reply and they either want to learn more or book a meeting with you, you don’t just wait until the day of the meeting and hope they show up. Start sending them tidbits of information and resources that will help them lighten their workload. If you’re a company that specializes in website development, maybe you send them over a video about increasing SEO or an audit of their website showcasing how you can improve user experience. Perhaps you have a great article on why it’s essential to give your website a facelift every so often. Whatever the resources are, make sure it makes sense for that person to get it. Ask questions that are relevant to their company. Keep top of their mind until you have that meeting. Doing that will almost certainly guarantee a closed deal.

So let’s recap. You need to have a well-defined ICP before starting any kind of outreach.  Once you know your ICP, you need to pinpoint where you’ll send your messaging. Now that you know the who and the where you start to craft super custom messages geared towards your ICP. Once your message is created, you start sending your campaign. Before we dive into the numbers, let’s take a look at a mass-marketing campaign.

You send 1,500 emails a month. An average open rate for cold email is 25%, so of the 1,500 emails, 300 people open your email. Your reply rate will be extremely low when you send out a generic email. So if 1% of people that opened your email reply, that’s only three people who reply out of 1,500.

We’ll take a totally customized campaign that is only sent to 150 people. We’ve seen 80-90% open rates, but we’ll play it safe and say you’ll see a 50% open rate. So from 150 emails, 75 will be opened. Because you caught their attention and made it about them, your reply rate will be closer to 10%. Out of 75 opened emails, 7-8 people responded. By creating a custom campaign, you see double the responses. And you only sent 150 emails.

Campaigns that are this custom can be some work and take time to set it up. If you want to see these results without doing the work, contact Boundless Media today. We have a team ready to take your custom cold messaging campaigns to the next level.

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