What Makes Outbound Marketing Successful

Outbound is a form of marketing and outreach that can’t be overlooked. However, it can be one of the most challenging forms of outreach. Customization can take your outbound outreach and catapult it to new heights. Our CEO, Nico De Bruyn, and COO, Larissa LaMaster, sat down and talked about all things customization. At Boundless Media, we can help you with your outbound marketing. So why are we going to tell you some of our secrets? It’s simple; we want to leave people better than we found them. If sharing our knowledge helps just one person, that’s good for us! Now, let’s dive right in to what we’re here for—talking about outbound marketing.

Before you can have any kind of successful outbound campaign, you need to start by understanding your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP).

Your ICP will vary depending on what kind of business you are, what customers you want to reach, and other factors that can affect your ICP. You can’t optimize anything in the backend, i.e., templates, messaging strategies, automation, etc., until you know who you’re reaching out to, where you’re reaching out to them, and how you’re going to reach out to them. If you don’t know the who, what, where, when, why, and how for your campaigns, they won’t be successful.

When you are coming up with your ICP, you want to think about who you would enjoy working with, what they do, what kind of services or products they offer, and how you can structure your messaging towards them. Where they are online is important as well. Just because a company is on a social media site doesn’t mean they are monitoring those messages. Whatever niche you are going for, make sure you find out the best way to reach them in your research. Are they on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or is email the best way to communicate with them? Larissa had some words of wisdom on reaching out to your ICP, “If you’re sending messages to accounts they never check, you’re basically screaming into the wind.”

You need to keep in mind two other things when defining your perfect customer. Who can you actually provide resources for, and who can afford your services? If you’re a web developer and are reaching out to a business that has a web team and is running a shoestring budget, don’t spend too much time trying to bring them on. Focus on the companies that actually need and can afford your services.

Once you’ve done your research and found out not just who your ICP is but where they are, it’s about crafting a message that is compelling to them. In your research phase, you should find out what platform will be best for your outreach. Is it LinkedIn? Cold email? Instagram? Wherever you’re sending your campaign, make sure it is geared directly to your customer. Just because you are reaching out to multiple marketing agencies doesn’t mean each message will be the same. Your messaging could change depending on the business and the niche.

As you start to send out your campaign, you need to track the success of your messaging. What’s working and what’s not working? If something isn’t working, can you modify it?

Sometimes modifying your messaging slightly can bring in more significant results. It doesn’t have to be a big change. You could simply change a phrase from “I help companies….” to “I help companies like yours….” or you can even just change one word. Testing the different copy you send out is extremely important, but if you’re not tracking the success of each message, then it won’t matter how successful it is. Make sure you are using something to track progress. This will also help with your customization.

Just because you are customizing your outreach, you don’t have to send a different message to each cold lead. You can still mass-produce a customizable campaign. During the research phase, really dive into where your niche is. Are you targeting companies in a specific state or city? What about a particular region? Use that info to help you customize your campaign.

Let’s say you’re reaching out to marketing agencies in Dallas, TX. You could ask about their sports teams or an event that’s going on in the area. Adding those details in the email or messaging can go a long way for people to feel like you took time to find out a little about them. When someone feels like you went out of your way for them, they are more likely to respond to you. A google search of what’s going on in an area isn’t too difficult and won’t take up too much time, so take a few extra minutes and add the customization to your outreach. You can definitely do more, especially based on industry or each company. Look at their reviews or social media and use custom points from that so you really up your outbound game. If you want to use a hyper-custom approach, you can look at social media posts and stories. If you’re targeting a younger audience, they will most likely be on Instagram. See what their stories are about and reference that in your campaign too.

So, what challenges will you face if you try to scale customization? Well, many companies will have trouble scaling the data acquisition and copywriting. Although pulling a list of marketing agencies in Dallas, TX, isn’t difficult, looking through each account to find those hyper custom points to add into the messaging can take time. Then you have to plug those into each message that you’re sending. This can take a lot of time to craft individual messages. So as you’re getting data gathered, you should also create the copy as you collect the information.

You’re probably asking, “How can I send out a ton of cold emails if this process takes so much time?” That’s a great question. The answer is, you don’t send out a ton of emails. This process is quality over quantity. Sending out fewer emails with hyper-focused customization to a smaller niche will garner better results.

Let’s break down what we mean by quality over quantity. If you send out 1,000 non-custom mass-market emails per month and they’re really good emails, you’re still only going to get about a 25% open rate, or 250 people that opened your email. From those 250 people, only 1% will respond. So from 1,000 emails, you’ll get 2-3 people that respond to you. Now, if you take a super custom campaign and only send out 100 emails. Your open rate is typically better because you don’t end up in spam folders, and your domain will last longer because you’re not sending out so many emails. We’re going to keep it small and say open rates are 50% on your custom emails (our open rates are actually in the 80%-90% range). So of the 100 emails, 50 people open them. Now looking at reply rates, 5%-10% of those 50 will reply. So even at a 5% reply rate, you’re still getting 2-3 people who respond to you. If you hit that 10% mark, you have five people responding to your emails. That’s almost double the number of responses from your mass-market emails, and you only sent out 10% of emails compared to mass market! The people from your custom campaign will also be a warmer lead than your mass-market campaign.

Yes, creating a super custom cold outreach campaign can be a lot of work. However, the reward you get is oftentimes worth it. It’s not always great to just cast a wide net and see what fish you catch, and sometimes, you need to drill down and find the best place to cast your line. At Boundless Media, we have cold outreach down to a science. Contact us today if you want help with your cold email campaigns or just want someone to run your campaigns for you. We’d love to show you how we can help you increase your revenue through a successful outbound cold email campaign.