Nobody enjoys receiving sales calls or messages, right?
Think again.
The ‘5 Sales Prospecting Myths Debunked’ study, which surveyed 488 B2B buyers, dispels several common misconceptions. Myth #1 is that “buyers don’t want to hear from sellers.” This is followed by the myth that “cold calling is dead.
While cold calling is still very much alive, a remarkable 80% of buyers prefer to be contacted via email rather than by phone.
This means buyers don’t dislike sales emails per se; they are just repulsed by poorly crafted ones. Chaotic emailing that offers no real value, slacks personalization, and comes off as pushy is a big no-no.
If your lead generation efforts yield low responses and email search doesn’t bring many prospects, it’s time to consider using an email outreach tool to enhance your strategy. In this article, we&’ll explore what an email outreach tool is and how it can improve your sales campaigns.
Understanding the sales outreach strategy
You need a solid sales outreach strategy to drive more revenue.
A sales outreach strategy is a roadmap for your sales team that outlines how you will identify, connect with, and engage potential customers and ultimately convert them into paying ones.
As part of the strategy, you’d have to define the following:
- Customer profile or persona (the specific type of company or individual that would benefit most from your product or service)
- Outreach channels (Email, LinkedIn, calls, etc.)
- Concepts of your outreach messages
- Follow-up
Best sales outreach strategy
Truth be told, there is no one-size-fits-all template. Your approach needs to be customized to your company’s needs, goals, and resources.
But there’s a common theme among the winning strategies. The best ones are personalized to each recipient to start a conversation, not make a sale.
In his cold outreach blog post, Neil Patel, the founder of NP Digital, lists “not being sincere” as the biggest cold emailing mistake, with the second being “emails aren’t personalized.”
Therefore, you should always send personalized cold emails to your prospects. Random “Hello, to whomever it may apply” messages no longer work.
Next, your email copy should lead to a conversation, not necessarily to a sale. So “I’m offering $1,000 marketing services. Click here to buy” won’t work. Instead, you should lead them to a meeting, webinar, or a Loom video.
Lastly, you need to follow up. Cold email guru Alex Berman lists three email follow-up strategies that get responses: the personal connection follow-up, the excitement follow-up, and the news item follow-up. So, implement one of them in your outreach strategy to get results.
Five reasons why you need an email outreach tool
These tools can save you hours of your time and valuable resources, which you could devote to more important tasks.
Here are five reasons why an email outreach tool is a must:
Advanced opportunities
Organizing a winning cold email sales campaign may take a lot of time. You need to select the right templates and structure, filter the email list, and warm up your email account before sending emails. These steps are necessary to avoid your emails ending up in the spam folder.
Email outreach tools help you with these tasks and cut the set-up time in half.
Most tools have several ready-to-use templates that you can borrow. They are tested for high deliverability and will help your emails land in the inbox. Some email outreach tools also help you generate leads and gather a database of relevant contacts.
Personalization at scale
We’ve already highlighted the importance of a customized approach. However, creating a unique email copy for each prospect can be time-consuming.
That’s why you need to use an email outreach tool.
Such solutions allow you to create email campaigns that fit your needs and tailor each message to appeal to different audiences, ensuring effective communication.
Effortless scheduling and sending
Scheduling emails to go out at optimal times, like right before lunch or on weekdays, can significantly boost open rates. The best time to send marketing emails in the US is between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. and between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m.
But it’s not always possible to manually send cold emails during this time, especially if you’re not in the same time zone.
Outreach tools allow you to schedule sends in advance and manage your entire campaign timeline from a central dashboard. You can schedule the month’s email in advance, depending on the tool.
Better reporting
Cold email is more or less experimentation. You need to know what works and what doesn’t. Therefore, you need to rack various metrics to analyze and modify your lead generation efforts.
Email outreach tools go beyond just sending emails; they provide comprehensive reporting features that shed light on your campaign performance, allowing you to optimize your strategy for better results.
At the bare minimum, you’ll have campaign metrics like open rates, click-through rates, reply rates, and bounce rates. This data clearly shows how your emails are performing and where improvements can be made.
Streamlined cooperation
When you send cold emails at scale, several team members are often working on the same task, which can make managing inboxes and tracking incoming and outgoing messages difficult without proper measures.
Outreach tools provide a unified command center for everything: emails, campaigns, results, prospects, and templates. Unlike Gmail, these tools offer organized and easily accessible features, making it effortless for the entire team to streamline their efforts and stay coordinated.
Conclusion
Remember, the average cold email response rate is a mere 8.5%. Therefore, you need to ensure you’re implementing the right strategies and using an appropriate email outreach tool to attract the required attention and achieve the desired results.
