Email outreach
Cold email outreach is still alive and well, offering many benefits to businesses, especially start-ups with tight budgets or businesses looking for sales acceleration. Email outreach is a tool that reaches out to potential leads once an email address has been secured.
An email address can be gathered from lead magnets on webpages, newsletter sign-ups, and events, for example. Once an email address is taken, it’s added to an email lead list of people that were intrigued by a product or service and now need to be nurtured into conversion.
Email outreach mistakes that lower your ROI
Generic content
A cold email with generic content is an instant delete on the user side. There’s nothing specialized about it, nothing enticing, and there’s nothing that shows them they should care about the content.
Bad subject lines
A subject line is the first thing a viewer will read. What makes a subject line bad? They won’t click the email if the subject line is too long, contains language that sounds like spam, is boring, or is irrelevant to them.
No creativity
People get loads of emails. When it’s something we’re expecting or something from a valued contact, we pay attention to the email. But we’re much pickier about product or service emails. Creativity is a must to hook a lead. Without creativity, whether that be colors, interaction, or animation, there’s no inclination to read the email.
No sincerity
It’s easy to tell when someone is being sincere. An email that’s sent just for the sake of being sent isn’t important to a lead. It’s important for leads to feel like that email was sent with purpose, with a sincere message, and with a sincere face behind the email that truly cares about their experience.
Too many
Receiving too many emails in too short a period will have leads unsubscribe quickly. Using A/B testing, it can be easy finding a good email outreach schedule. Testing shows us how often leads will accept emails and how often is too much.
No personalization
Leads want to see that effort, care, and research has been put into the content sent their way. An email that could’ve been sent to anyone makes us feel like we’re just a number and we’re not valued. Personalizing an email ensures leads that their interaction with a business is valued and mutually beneficial.
Tips to increase your email outreach ROI
Send to the right market
There’s no benefit to email outreach if the wrong market is being targeted. Define the qualities leads must have to be a valuable asset to your business. Whittle down the lead list to those most likely to convert and focus time and energy on them.
Personalize the content
As mentioned, personalization is important to leads. It shows potential customers their customer experience is important and that the business has done its due diligence researching and working on the right messaging to share.
Follow-up with value
To continually nurture leads, follow up with further email outreach that provides additional, free value. Providing value to leads sets the precedence that a business works for them, not the other way around.
Email outreach ROI calculator
There are ROI calculators out there for businesses, but when it comes to email outreach and small businesses, these are the main aspects to consider as an ROI calculator.
- There’s minimal, if any, cost to email outreach.
- It helps form a connection with leads.
- There’s a visual result to clicks, opens, subscribes, and unsubscribes.
- It’s quick and easy to make tweaks to future emails.
- Businesses own their email list.
With so little budget being allocated toward email outreach, ROI tends to be higher for this marketing strategy. It’s a great way for start-ups and small businesses to develop a quality emailing list and spend their money on other aspects to grow. Schedule a consultation for more sales acceleration support.
Dana
Dana Vines works in Sales and Business Development as a full time digital nomad. She helps B2B and B2C companies develop partnerships across the globe. When she's not working on building relationships, you might find her scuba diving, at a live music event, or planning her next destination.