Outline:

Generating email leads and launching outbound campaigns is only 50% of your success. You can improve results dramatically by optimizing your lead generation and email campaigns. That’s why it’s important to not just run your campaigns but constantly work on their improvement.

There are numerous ways to make your lead gen and outbound marketing work better. We will disclose many hacks, secrets, and tactics in upcoming articles.

In this article, we want to analyze the situation where you have your leads generated and verified and now you are ready to start your first, or one of the first, outbound campaigns.

We understand that every business and product is unique, but the steps provided below will definitely improve your outbound campaigns and drive better results in terms of positive replies, conversions and deals won.

We also suggest applying these techniques with at least a few hundred leads to start with. If you have prepared less, we assume you’ve generated laser-targeted leads of the highest quality and you are 100% sure what to do with them. If not you are welcome to apply what you will learn later!

Let’s get down to business and see the 4 steps you can take to easily improve your outbound marketing campaigns right away. Read on to discover more!

1. Humanize your approach

Have you ever thought what kind of emails you like to read and what emails make you mark them as spam with no hesitation? I reckon you like more personal emails that are short and easy-to-understand and hate long corporate mailings.

Well you are not the only one! Most of the people you will be contacting with your outbound campaigns are not just tech-savvy but also sales-resistant. I believe you are one of these people as well and you will delete any email that is too salesy.

So take the first step and humanize your emails:

Make them personal by addressing your recipient by name in the subject line and in the email’s body.

Use as much additional info as possible – mention company name, geography, titles, and everything that will make this email look unique and hand-written.

Don’t write long emails, start with a short one. Your goal is to grab the person’s attention and then develop a dialog.

Be friendly and polite, while using a non-corporate tone of voice. Of course, your email shouldn’t sound like street talk either.

Don’t sell or promote anything in your first email, that’s the rule of thumb.

2. Focus on your lead, not yourself

This step will help you not to sell something right away, thus boosting your chance to continue the communication with a potential customer after your initial email.

Besides making your email friendly and not salesy, make sure to keep it non-promotional (at least the first email). This means you should speak less about your company or your product, and speak more about your potential client.

Grab their attention with the following techniques:

Ask questions about their company

Ask to introduce yourself to the most relevant person within the company

Ask for their feedback or opinion on something

Share something useful with them

Talk about their productivity bottlenecks and challenges

Of course you can mention your product or quickly introduce it, but make sure it’s literally one sentence and it doesn’t sound like a promotion. If you establish a dialog you will have many opportunities to promote and sell, believe me.

3. Understand your lead’s journey

It’s very important to understand at what step of the journey your lead is on. You can imagine the whole buying journey as 3 phases:

Awareness phase – this is the step where your potential customer first finds out about your product or the problem your product or service is solving.

Consideration phase – this is the step of considering your product/service as a solution to their problem. On this step, a potential customer evaluates how serious the problem is and how useful your solution is.

Decision-making phase – this is the step where a potential customer compares you with your competitors, evaluates cost-effectiveness, and makes a final decision.

As you’ve probably gathered, you should adjust your messages, emails, and dialog according to these phases. For example, you shouldn’t discuss prices and competitors if the potential lead is on the first step but focus on their problem and possible solution instead.

The more you adjust your messaging according to the lead’s buying journey, the more relevant and reasonable you sound.

4. Use segments and content-mapping

This step will help you improve your previous steps and make your outbound campaigns look close to perfect. It may sound boring, but segmentation makes a difference!

We’ve always taught you to segment your generated leads so you can make your mailings more personalized. Segmentation will help you not only make your mailings more personal, it will make them more relevant in terms of content.

You can segment your leads by Geographical Location, Gender, Company Size and more.

Besides lead segmentation, we advise you to map your content (the emails you are sending) according to your segments and prepare laser-targeted campaigns for every segment. It makes sense to have a different approach to small and big clients; for example, also you can use a different tone of voice while contacting people in different countries and of different cultures.

Don’t be scared by this step, as it may look massive – you can always start with the main segments and a smaller content map. A good choice is to segment by client size or geographical location first.

Conclusion

The more you work on your outbound campaigns the better results you will get. To help you optimize your very first campaign and avoid some obvious mistakes, we advise you to take the following steps:

Personalize your mailings and make them sound friendly, polite and non-salesy.

Focus on your lead and their expertise, problems, and issues. Do not promote or at least over-promote your product or service in the first email.

Understand the buying journey and where your lead is on this journey.

Segment your leads and map your content according to your segments.

Hope your next campaign brings you way better results! Have an awesome day!