Outbound Marketing simply refers to the act of going out actively and contacting your target customers whether it’s through an email, voice call, sms or face to face.
A large part of our focus here will be on email and the same fundamentals apply to cold calling as well.
Once you have a product or service that your target market considers valuable, the first step is to identify contact information of the target market.
There are various ways of getting this information. Assuming you don’t have any opt-in emails, some databases/contact sources to get started are Apollo, Crunchbase and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. There are niche relevant sources or advanced databases you can use as you start getting good results from outbound marketing, however this would be a great starting point.
Once you have the emails of decision makers you want to contact, it’s very essential to validate the emails to ensure that it’s an active email. This will help keep the bounce rate under control and immensely improve deliverability. Furthermore, this is very essential to maintain the email/domain health over the medium to long run.
A trap most people can get into which I was a victim of too, is to rely on the ‘verified’ email status on some of these databases. For example, Apollo has the email status for every contact and during my initial days of running outbound campaigns, I was relying on this. It worked well, until after a month or two when my emails started going to spam. After a while of noticing the same pattern repeat again and again, I started to verify my emails with an external software. Since then, that problem has been entirely resolved.
Once you have the verified email list of decision makers from your target market, you need to start crafting the messaging. First, it’s important to determine the outcome you want out of this campaign. Do you want to get people onto a website, get them on a one on one call with you or simply reply via email and direct them to a self-serve landing page? Depending on all these factors, the CTA (Call to action) you use and the funnel will vary.
However, for most B2B companies, getting the prospect onto a call will be the first step. The best way to go about creating copy is to write a one on one email to one of your target companies, and then figure out how to templatize that to everyone in that target segment. The expected outcome from copy is to communicate about your product/service in the best possible way to your prospects. You do this by talking about specific pain points relevant to your target audience and the value propositions that they consider most valuable which you can also deliver upon.
We will create a separate guide on writing copy since that is an art and a science in itself. However, these fundamentals should be enough to get you started.
Once you have the target email list and the messaging ready, it’s time to send the emails. If you are sending very low volume of emails (less than 10 to 20 per day), then using your main website email may be fine. However, most businesses would require a lot more volume. (Check out some of our previous articles breaking down some example numbers) Due to this, it’s best to set up emails using secondary domains which will eliminate the risk of you damaging the main domain’s reputation. You wouldn’t really want to see the emails you send to your active customers and prospects in spam right? If so, this is an essential step. The email stack can be planned and set up depending on the volume of monthly prospects you want to reach.
Start shooting the emails, and feel free to comment below or DM if you have any questions.
