Outline:

1. Strategic planning

2. Lead generation

3. Lead verification and enrichment

4. Lead scoring

5. Preparing for a campaign

6. Creating the campaign

7. Sending your campaign

8. Managing replies & conversions

9. Forwarding warm leads to the sales department

10. Analyzing & optimizing your campaigns

The way companies utilize marketing methods has changed a lot within last ten years. Nowadays both online and offline businesses try to dive as deep into digital channels as they can.

The reason is quite simple – many of the well-known digital marketing channels have become saturated. If you have run Google Adwords and Facebook Ads campaigns you know how high bids are these days. As these are one of the best-performing direct marketing channels, businesses push enormous budgets into Adwords and Facebook campaigns, thus dramatically increasing average bids.

You could generate quite a lot of traffic and leads with a $100 budget ten years ago, definitely enough to test the waters. Now the Game has changed you should have at least a few thousand dollars for your paid campaign budget.

Saturated channels and moon-high bids are the reason businesses try to utilize as many other direct marketing channels as possible.

One of the most valuable players here is Outbound, or Outreach, marketing which has also changed a lot. If ten years ago outreach campaigns mainly consisted of cold-calling or bulk email campaigns, then what we see now is way smarter and more personalized methods of Outbound marketing.

In this article we outline a step-by-step guide on how to organize your outbound marketing department. We will show you how to run outreach campaigns on a daily basis to generate a stable and revenue-generating flow of leads and closed sales.

This advice is based on how Outbound departments work in an existing digital company. We encourage you to modify this method and optimize it according to your requirements and resources.

Let’s start!

Step 1: Strategic planning

Performed by the marketing department or a marketer

Theory first! Before starting any campaign, whether it’s an inbound marketing campaign, a outbound marketing campaign or a paid campaign, you should first define your target audience.

Creating an image of your target audience is easy when you have existing clients. Analyze their profiles – who they are, what kind of businesses they have and what are their unique parameters. Pay attention to all the details – their geographical location, company size, niche, and more. Once analyzed you will have a list of parameters of the most converting leads – you now have your targeting.

In case you’ve just started and don’t have any clients yet, try following a Buyer Persona method. Create 3 buyer personas that could be interested in the product or service you offer. This is quite a creative task, so apply your imagination and skills when describing these personas. Just like you did with analyzing your existing customers, pay attention to the details here as well – describe your buyer personas as much as possible.

Tips that will help create your perfect buyer persona:

Name them – give them names you like, for example John/Elizabeth/Steven. This will help you to present your buyer personas to the team. It helps a lot, believe us!

Create 3 personas – this will allow you to test 3 different target markets. You can separate them by niche, by size, and the product you offer.

Use one list of parameters for all your personas – using a single list of parameters will allow you to analyze and compare your personas better. If it’s company size then measure it across all three personas, same with Geo, Niches, Budgets, Decision Makers.

Visualize them – your created personas are real, these are the people who will buy from you. Persona is called persona because it’s more than just a target market – it’s a personalized pool of people or businesses that you will target.

Step 2: Lead generation

Performed by SDR departments or marketers

Once your targeting and buyer personas are created, you are ready to set up your Outbound Department.

It all starts with leads, so lead generation is one of the most important outbound marketing components. The more leads that are generated, the more campaigns you can send, and the more warm leads you can forward to sales representatives.

Lead generation can be executed in two ways:

By sales development representatives (SDRs) – these are specialists who generate leads from different sources manually, semi-manually or automatically with the help of tools and services. By Marketing Departments – in this case leads are delivered from marketing campaigns (paid campaigns, inbound campaigns).

Let’s discuss the first method here, when lead generation is executed by SDRs. Usually it’s a department of at least few people. One is definitely not enough, and I will explain why later.

SDRs generate leads from various sources – websites, social networks, third-party databases, and more. Their goal is to generate 100-200-500 leads every single day. Consistency is a very important factor – no leads means no new campaigns.

Some of the most popular lead generation methods for SDRs are the following:

Open directories. This approach is based on using open directories and catalogs available online such asYellowPages, Yelp, DMOZ, Manta, Local.com, WhitePages and Angie’s List amongst others. These are quite good places to acquire your potential clients – you can find thousands of companies filtered by geo location, business type and niche. Most of these directories will grant you access to the email addresses and phone numbers of the company. You can easily build your list of potential clients by extracting this data manually or automatically with the help of lead generation tools. Social networks. This method consists of finding leads through social networks. This includes searching for leads using two main approaches – Built-in Search (Linkedin Search, etc) or Groups (e.g. Linkedin Groups). So you can either do a manual search, which is more detailed and accurate, or search for a relevant group to contact its members. Modern lead generation tools can automate this process – from finding people by keywords or any other parameters, to extracting their contact details right from the social network. The social network most used for lead generation purposes is LinkedIn because it provides a lot of details and you can set a very precise target market via Linkedin Search. Websites. This method is based on visiting the relevant websites, or building a list of websites, and then extracting the contact data of leads associated with that website. It’s a very popular and accurate method. Modern tools and even email finding plugins allow you to see contact information (usually these are names and email addresses) of people associated with the website, or just extract email addresses mentioned publicly on the page or hidden behind contact or signup forms. 3rd-party databases. This method is the most expensive, but it can provide SDRs with a huge amounts of leads in no time. It’s based on using lead providers and their databases – basically databases with thousands and millions of pre-generated, pre-verified and enriched leads. Long story short, you just buy leads from 3rd parties, and then use them in your campaigns. It’s definitely the most expensive but the fastest method of generating leads.

Step 3: Lead verification and enrichment

Performed by a SDR department

When leads are collected and stored in a separate file it’s time to verify and enrich them – in that order.

Lead verification is a must – no matter how trusted the source was. You should get rid of invalid and non-working email leads to make sure your email messages will be delivered as planned. The more verified your email list is the better delivery, open and click-through rates you will see.

Lead verification can be executed with desktop tools or services, it doesn’t really matter. Some of the verification steps can even be done manually, but it’s a pain!

Here we will show you how leads are usually verified by email verification tools and services. This will help you to understand how it works and why it is important:

Syntax check – The first step of verification and a fundamental feature of all email verifier tools and services. Syntax check validates whether an email address is spelt correctly – has no commas, spaces, and all the @s, dots and domain extensions are in the right place. This can be done manually, or with the help of Excel or Google Docs tools. Domain check – The next important step of the email verification process. Domain check allows you to be sure the domain name the email address is hosted on actually exists, is registered and working. This can be done manually as well, but imagine how much time it takes to go through every single website and see if it is working or not. Email ping – The most sophisticated and the most important step of lead verification, which makes it possible to say the email address exists and is used with great reliability. Email ping is the technical process of a email verifier tool pinging the exact email address with a EHLO message – there is no sense in doing it manually, and that’s the reason to use email verification tools and services to check your generated leads.

Now you know how lead verification works, and all your leads are verified (it takes minutes to verify thousands of leads if you use verification tools or services), it’s time to enrich your leads. Lead enrichment is a very important step – this will allow you to segment and personalize your email campaigns and messages later.

Usually newly generated leads consist of names and email addresses only. That is not enough for the segmentation and deep personalization required for outbound campaigns. The goal of SDRs is to enrich leads by finding appropriate and missing data for every lead. This can be done manually or with the help of lead generation tools and services that generate already enriched leads. For example if you generate leads from Linkedin you get Names, Surnames, Titles, Company Names straight from the lead generation tool.

Lead enrichment is a sophisticated process, but it definitely should be optimized according to your needs.

Only enrich leads with data that are:

Important for your targeting and buyer persona .

Will be used for segmentation and personalization directly.

It makes no sense to get all the data possible, because it would be an endless process. Usually it is enough with some gold-standard data (in addition to Name and the Email Address):

Secondary contact method – for example, a phone number.

Geographical location – region, country or city.

Company data – company name, company size.

Title – the title of the contact person.

Niche – if you generated leads from various niches.

Source – the source the lead is generated from.

Remember, the more you enrich your leads (please do it wisely) the more you will be able to segment your list prior to sending, and the more personalized messages you will create.

Step 4: Lead scoring

Performed by a SDR department

Halfway there! By this step you have your leads already generated, verified and enriched.

Lead scoring is the next step you should perform – it is important, because it makes it possible to set priorities and pre-segment your leads.

Scoring is executed by SDRs, so there’s many steps as you can see. That’s why it’s a good idea to have at least few people in the SDR department. This is the key to consistent and productive work from the whole Outbound marketing department.

Leads should be scored according to your needs, for example, if you target B2B leads then companies that have bigger budgets or companies of a bigger size should be contacted first.

Before you start scoring, you should first prepare Scoring Parameters, some of the most-used scoring parameters are:

Company size

Titles

Budgets

Niche

Geolocation

Here are a few examples:

You have generated leads from English-speaking countries, but you know that US based leads converts the most. So score your list of leads and filter for US companies or individuals. You have a list of companies you want to contact with your offer. On the enrichment or lead-generation step you gathered information about their budgets. In this case you score the list by budget, and send campaigns to those with the biggest budget first.

Remember, scoring helps you set priorities and focus on leads that have the highest chances to convert into a closed deal.

Step 5: Preparing for a campaign (segmentation and personalization)

Performed by SDRs or marketers

You are really close to launching your outbound marketing campaign. Before creating your campaign you should segment your lists and upload them with the personalization parameters that will be used.

Segmentation is usually based on enrichment data or scoring data. This allows you to send more relevant campaigns, thus getting more replies and conversions. Segmentation can be called a shadow-personalization, because once you segment you are already making your campaign more personalized and relevant.

You can segment your list using the same enrichment or scoring parameters:

Geo location – to create campaigns according to local culture and time-zone.

Company size – to use appropriate tone and style in your campaigns.

Budget – to offer a more relevant product or service.

Niche – to send different offers to companies in different areas of interest

Segmentation is very personal and depends on your needs and goals.

When your lists are segmented enough (don’t make too many or too few segments) it’s time to upload your lists with all the personalization parameters that will be used in the email campaigns.

The must-have personalization is a person’s name and the company’s name, in addition to that you can personalize your messages using such parameters as:

Country or city name

Titles

Niche, and more.

The more personalized your message is the higher open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates you will get. Make sure you upload a list with all the personalization parameters to your email marketing platform or mailing tool. Here are few examples of a personalized subject line:

[NAME], does [COMPANY NAME] use a marketing automation tool already?



John, does Blue Star Management use a marketing automation tool already?

[NAME], try the marketing automation tool for [NICHE] at no cost!

Jennifer, try the marketing automation tool for restaurants at no cost!

You should personalize your email body just like you personalize your subject line – the more personalized it is, the more it resonates with the reader.

Step 6: Creating the campaign

Performed by SDRs or marketers

Now you are ready to create your first Outbound campaign!

It’s not just a single message, like how it is usually done in bulk mailings, but a campaign containing an email chain.

The goal of the campaign to get a Reply or Conversion (registration, sign up, application, call, etc). Once the goal is met the chain stops.

Your email chain should be focused on meeting a set goal. The number of emails in the chain depends on many factors, such as your product, decision making times, segments, and more.

Let’s take a look at the basic email chain you can use for your campaign.

Email 1 – Day 1 – you introduce yourself, describe your product or service briefly and put a call-to-action (ask for the reply, or put a link that will lead to a conversion page). You can also make this email short, by asking just few questions and thus pushing a recipient to reply to your email.

Email 2 – Day 2 – a second try, contact your lead the very next day. Ask whether they received your previous email, do a quick introduction and describe your offer again.

Email 3 – Day 4 – wait for a few days and send another message. If they didn’t respond to the two previous messages, then it’s good practice to ask whether it is the right person to contact, and can they advise you on the relevant person in their company to contact.

Email 4 – Day 6 – in a few more days it’s time to send the next message in your email chain. You can mention that you contacted them 3 times already, and didn’t get any reply. Remind them of your offer, and ask if they are interested or not.

Email 5 – Day 8 – send your last piece of email campaign in a few more days. That’s a “goodbye” message, where you should say you contacted them a few times before without any reply, and you will not bother them anymore. You can put a link to your offer or website in case they want to take a look. Goodbye is goodbye!

Tips that will help you create a better email campaign:

Your email chain can consist of 3-5-10 emails, just make sure you have more than 2 emails. All of your messages should use the same subject line, so they look like a natural conversation in the inbox. Make sure all your messages are personalized – not only the initial main one, but also all the following ones. Make sure all your messages chase a single goal – it should be a reply or the conversion. Your chain must stop automatically once the set goal is met.

Step 7: Sending your campaign

Performed by SDRs or marketers

When your campaigns are created, it’s time to proceed with the outbound marketing software.

Usually it is an online platform that allows you to upload your email chains and segmented lists, run campaigns and manage replies or conversions.

You can send emails with any email marketing software, but specific outbound tools are the best option, because it’s easy to send email chains and manage the replies.

To start sending your campaign you need to take just a few simple steps:

Prepare a from-address – usually outbound marketing tools use your corporate email accounts. Corporate emails on Gmail, Outlook and few other popular services can be connected automatically in just a few clicks. Upload your email campaign – upload all your emails as a single chain. For this step choose a schedule that will be used for sending emails (Day 1, Day 3, Day 5, etc). Upload your segmented lists – upload your lists with leads, and connect them to your campaign. Make sure the personalization parameters in your email list are the same as in your email copies. Finalize your campaign – check all your parameters, make sure the correct schedule is set, send a test mailing to make sure it looks good and hit “start”!

Step 8: Managing replies & conversions

Performed by SDRs

The great thing about outbound marketing software is that they usually do most of the work automatically.

The outbound tool will deliver every piece of the email chain according to your schedule, until you get a reply (or conversion) or the chain ends.

Another great thing is that most of the outbound tools classify replies and store them in different folders. In this case you will see replies filtered by interest:

Interested – these replies should be processed as soon as possible.

Maybe later – these replies should be processed with a lower priority, but you can still make a warm lead out of them.

Not interested – these replies mean a polite “No”, but you should still process them and see what’s the reason. Sometimes you can get a warm lead out of them.

Unsubscribe me – these are rude “No” or just unsubscribed recipients. Don’t bother them anymore or it will harm your email sender’s reputation.

All the replies are usually processed manually by SDRs. The goal of the SDR is to continue the discussion after the first reply and achieve one of the following:

An agreement to participate on a demo/sales call A conversion (registration, application, sign up, or anything relevant to your business)

Step 9: Forwarding warm leads to the sales department

Performed by sales representative

We are close to the final steps of your outbound marketing campaign!

Once the email campaign is delivered and SDRs start receiving replies and conversions, their goal is to process the warm leads, score them again if necessary and forward them to the sales department.

The common scenario is when SDRs process replies and then schedule demos or sales calls with sales representatives.

The more emails that are sent, the more replies are received and the more scored and warm leads can be forwarded to the sales department.

Sales departments run demo calls or sales calls and close deals. Also sales specialists pre-analyze leads and report to marketers and SDRs regarding how good the targeting is, and how well these people convert into deals won.

Step 10: Analyzing & optimizing your campaigns

Performed by marketers

Well, our outbound campaign is finished! Are you as excited as we are?

We have run it from the strategy planning to the first closed deals, but there is still a step that can be easily missed. This step is the last but not the least – analyzing and optimizing your campaigns.

You didn’t realize, but you made so many A/B steps since the beginning of the campaign:

You tested targeting with different buyer personas.

You tested lead sources while generating leads.

You tested your targeting again with segments .

You tested your email copies with different messages and personalization.

You definitely tested your audience again by processing replies.

And finally you tested your conversions while closing deals at the sales department.

Wow, you did so many tests! Now you should take a break and analyze what you did and what results you got.

Don’t stop analyzing your campaigns, and soon you will have a perfect targeting, perfect sources, perfect messaging and a perfect demo/sales script on the Sales Rep’s side.

Final touches & advice

In conclusion we would like to give you a few more words of advice that will help to organize your outbound department and run your campaigns with minimal mistakes.

Have at least a few SDRs – as you’ve probably realized, many tasks are performed by Sales Development Representatives. These are the people that generate leads, verify them, score them, prepare campaigns and manage replies and conversions. If you plan to send campaigns of 300-500 leads a day then having 2-4 SDRs is a must.

You can start with 1 sales representative – it’s really enough for the very beginning. 300-500 emails sent will generate 15-30 replies and up to 10 demos/sales calls daily. This is the number of contacts one sales rep can handle.

Make marketers, SDRs and sales reps work together – it’s a must that all these departments have daily synchronization. It could be a document where progress is tracked, or quick meetings or calls. Once a week make a longer meeting to analyze the bigger picture.

Do more tests – don’t get sad when something goes wrong or you get low conversions. Test your audiences, your emails, your demo/sales scripts. Usually an average company tests 5 email campaigns before the perfect email chain is found. The same can be applied to targeting, lead sources, sales scripts.

Track your progress – always track everything. Create a document where you will have a big table with all the numbers. Track how many leads are generated, how many of them are verified and valid, how many emails are delivered and opened, how many replies you received, how many warm leads are forwarded to sales reps, and how many deals are won or lost. This approach will help you to optimize your campaigns way faster!

Scale wisely – it’s not that expensive to start your outbound marketing campaigns if you do it wisely. It’s enough with few people and few tools. There are lead generation tools that generate email addresses from different sources, verify them, and send campaigns using a single dashboard. By using such an approach you will never spend more time than necessary. Scale only when you see the potential and growth, but before that – optimize everything!

Final final touch

Hope you liked this guide! It is a non-fictional one, based on a few existing companies that followed similar methods and scenarios to build their outbound marketing departments and manage their outbound campaigns.

Here is some final advice – no outbound marketing campaign is built right away, it’s a step-by-step process. Test and optimize a lot. Make sure you all work with a single mechanism. And of course, scale wisely – it’s enough with one marketer, two SDRs and one sales rep at the very beginning.

Here’s Hoping you launch grand outbound campaigns soon.

Have a great day!