Relevance (Personalized) Cold Outreach At Scale: How It Works For A Typical Sales Outreach Campaign
Personalized emails are a great way to convert prospects into leads, and so for a while now, cold outreach has been a walk in the park for many lead-generation agencies. As a sales rep, you might be on your way to booking a meeting with your prospect if you play your cards right.
It is a good idea to take cues from sales professionals who have nailed it, whether you intend to use cold outreach for your firm or believe your campaigns need to perform better.
For an outreach campaign to be successful, your outreach strategy needs to be far above the regular template of scanty/surface research about prospects, generic cold emails or cold calls because you can't keep doing the same old thing and expect a new result.
So, you want to ensure you spend time researching your prospects to know their pain points before sending an email. And in this regard, your cold email should be correctly personalized.
So, in this article, I'll take you through the relevance of personalization at scale, how these personalizations work, and how to choose the ideal prospect for your offer. As a bonus tip, I include 4 steps to create personalized cold email sequences at scale. But first, let's examine the most common mistakes that salespeople and some lead generation agencies still make.
5 Most Common Outreach Mistakes
Many lead generation agencies and sales reps teams still make some cold outreach mistakes. There are many mistakes, but here are 5 most common ones;
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Lack of personalization
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No proofreading
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Sending too many emails per day
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Lack of creativity with your outreach campaign
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Being too sales with emails
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**Lack of creativity with your outreach campaign\
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Many sales reps and even lead generation agencies are guilty of this mistake. Rather than stick with some generic outreach campaign template, you can spend time researching and gaining knowledge on how things are rightly done. If you do your due diligence, you will realize that just a simple addition of a personalized image or video can do the trick by helping you to build more engagement and further foster the relationship with your clients.
- **Lack of personalization\
**
This is another common mistake in outreach campaigns. Sometimes, your no-shows result from a lack of personalization or poorly personalized emails. Making surface research won't cut it here, nor will irrelevant information; you will need to dig deeper for information that pertains to the prospect's most exciting activity or one that portrays their pain point. That way, you can compose a message or an email that would elicit a response from them. If you do it rightly, that might be the start of a potential conversation that might result in converting them into buyers.
- **No proofreading\
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Sometimes, when you need to reach your weekly or monthly target, you may be in a hurry to send a mail without proofreading to check for any errors. Such errors include misspelling the prospect's name, address, company name, job title, or position. Also, errors can come in the form of wrong information or outdated information. For instance, if you are cold emailing a prospect who no longer works at their former place of work, it may be a turn-off to the client as they may think you did a husky (surface) research and just didn't put in any effort.
- **Sending too many emails per day\
**
It's normal for a sales team or salesperson to have a sales quota, which may prompt you to draw up a target. However, because of this, you shouldn't begin sending several emails to different prospects in the hope of meeting your quota. This may lead to effort in futility as most prospects will see such emails as spam. Sometimes, "less is more", and if you do it the right way and put in the right effort, you will be amazed at how much you can achieve with just a few emails.
- **Being too salesy with emails\
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We know the saying about sales reps wanting to sell. However, this might be to your disadvantage if you take this literally. It would help if you were strategic about the sales process (that's why it is a process, after all). Don't be too salesy. Try to enjoy the sales process and gradually take things up from there. Don't be too quick to shove your offer in your prospect's face. Instead, try to focus on how you can help alleviate their pain points, build a relationship with them, and, afterward, leverage that relationship before you bring in your offers.
Knowing these common mistakes in generating leads, you want to make sure you do everything you can to avoid them like the plague. Albeit, if you take a critical look at the 5 mistakes, you will realize a dominant mistake amongst them - the mistake of no/poor personalization. You may think it's not a big deal, so why should you bother? Well, think of personalization as the door to a building. If the door is faulty and you cannot open it, there is no way you can gain access to such a building.
With this illustration, it's time to take you through the relevance of personalization.
Personalization In B2B Sales Cold Outreach: Best Practices For Your Sales Outreach Campaign
As a B2B lead generation agency, chances are you deal with large data sets. Managing such large prospects' information is going to be difficult and time-consuming. So, you want to find a means to it without leaving out any important details or compromising the quality of the personalized messages you send. So, here is where personalization at scales comes in - yet another relevance, you say? Well, yes.
So, you want to be sure you are getting across to all your prospects in a unique voice without repeating the same lines for any two prospects.
Perhaps, you have heard countless times how personalization is the secret to booking meetings and boosting response rates. However, personalization is more than this, as there are many things you can achieve using it in your outreach campaign. So, before I consider the tips on how you can personalize at scale, I'd like to first give you three quick steps to choosing the relevant prospect for your offer.
3 Steps on how to choose relevant prospects relevant to your offer
- **Use a relevant lead-generation technique\
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Begin by searching for good leads. Your target audience is not everywhere, so don't go to a random social media platform looking for them. Else, you may just be wasting your time. Instead, find the most dominant social platform where you can search for most of your target audience relevant to your product or services and pitch your tent there.
However, it is important to note that your choice of outreach methods will depend on the audience you're aiming for with your customers, just like it does with messaging strategy. So consider which method - email, phone, or social media, would be most effective for reaching them.
- **Find your leads\
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Once you can get a consistent platform relevant to your ideal prospect, you will get a basket full of leads from which you will sift to get your target prospects who would be interested in your offer. Then, you can now proceed to the next stage.
- **Get information about leads\
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The next thing you want to do is to find every means possible to get some key information about your prospect, which will be relevant to their pain point. This information will serve as a guide in helping you craft the perfect personalization message.
6 tips on how to personalize at scale
- **Be relevant\
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It's important to begin your emails with a strong opening paragraph. If you grab your prospect's attention right away, they will read your email; if not, they will ignore it, archive it, or mark it as spam.
The idea is to catch their attention with a specific detail you are aware of by every means possible. These data points are present everywhere, so use them to your advantage.
- **Smooth transition\
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You can easily make a transition and tie the problem you are attempting to solve to the catchy words you used in the first phrase. While crafting your message, remember to make it all about them. Doing this will prove that you performed thorough research.
Once you've been able to capture your prospect's interest, ensure your message is captivating enough by bringing up a subject that matters to them.
Remember that not all members of your audience care equally about issues, so you can always tweak your messages appropriately to suit your target audience.
- **Methods and solution\
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Continue with a brief and unambiguous value statement. If your potential customer is interested in a particular topic, save the specifics for the conversation.
- **Social proof\
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Although this step is optional, it can positively impact your conversion rate. One of the simplest ways to achieve that is to provide important instances of current customers.
- **Compare CTAs\
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You can close your emails with a direct call to action. To do this, you can always juxtapose your CTAs by directly asking simple questions, for instance, seeking their opinion on what they think of your email. Don't jump directly to asking them if you can put a call across or schedule a meeting.
How does it work?
To understand how personalization at scale works, I'll take you through the methods they operate. Read on.
**Four methods on how to personalize at scale
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You can standardize your personalization using the four methods below;
- **Email Segmentation\
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Prepare a logical breakdown of your prospect pipeline before you start your outreach. You can further categorize prospects depending on their present industry, prior experiences, and degree subject. You can go ahead and segment by activity if you have a tracking tool. This will enable you to target prospects who have previously opened emails but have yet to respond.
- **Customize features\
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You can advance your email segmentation using customized fields. To do this, you can automatically populate your prospect's industry.
- **Leverage social media\
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Social media has become indispensable for prospect outreach personalization. With social media, you can easily look through a prospect's social media accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook, or even personal blogs, to find interesting or relevant information to reference. For example, suppose you are using LinkedIn. In that case, you can search for your prospect's school they graduated from, a recent event they attended, or even a mutual connection to establish a link.
- **Be cautious of language\
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Your language could undermine your hard work even if you identify the ideal prospect and craft a distinctive, attention-grabbing message. Avoid being gender biased. Instead, use a gender-neutral tone.
**Bonus tip:
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- **Use Merge Tags\
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To offset low reply rates, sales reps need to use a system that enables them to write highly personalized emails at scale. Search for common prospect data points and convert them into merge tags to help you achieve this. Merge tags have the advantage that you can refer to them repeatedly throughout your sequence. Unfortunately, this gives the impression that you created every follow-up message. It is best to use the merge tags in the first sentence to make a good first impression.
**Final Notes **
There are no silver bullets in B2B lead generation, and neither is there a single way to organize your outreach campaign or the medium to use. However, a factor cuts across any method you wish to employ for your campaigns. This factor is your personalization. Leverage this in your sales prospecting and you will be amazed at how much you will convert your prospect into leads.
Having taken you through the relevance of personalization in your cold outreach and how it works, the onus is on you to adopt these practices in your sales outreach methods and see the results you will get.
