How We Drove $200,000 In Pipeline In 60 Days With Cold Email Automation
Background
A brand new creative and media agency, using comedy to create engaging campaigns that drive sales and mindshare for brands. The founder is a leading creative mind with little in the way of business development and sales experience. Pipeline was his number one concern and he didn’t have budget for an ad campaign. Our recommendation? Cold Email Automation.
Tools We Used
G Suite (Email)
Methodology
As a start up agency with a limited client roster, we had a lot of freedom to target different industries and decision makers throughout North America. We also had a lot of latitude to experiment with messaging and subject lines for the emails themselves. With a variety of factors to work with, we ran several experiments to see what messaging landed best for different industries and titles of prospects.
Setting Up The Pipes to $200k in Pipeline
Targeting
We used LinkedIn to research a variety of leads, saving searches with the results we wanted to use for cold email campaigns. We then shared the search urls with Scraping Solutions, which matched the results against their database and provided email addresses for the desired contacts. We started small with 5,000 contacts for about $200.
We used Snov.io to search for additional contacts using their Technology Checker module. We wanted to know all the e-commerce stores using Shopify above 10 employees, so we plugged that in and then ran Contact searches. We got another 9,000 contacts to include for about $75. These were a little less refined than the LinkedIn search, but the price was right.
Sending Emails
To send cold email, it’s best practice to have a separate email address and even domain to send from. First we set up a new email account with G-Suite and started warming it up with sending emails internally.
In parallel, we set up a Mixmax account which allows us to set up automated email drip campaigns. We uploaded contacts in batches of 100-300 into Mixmax and added them to different sequences. We also tested multiple versions of the same campaign to see if one got more open, responses, etc. by making different copy adjustments.
It’s important to limit the number of emails you are sending per day in each sequence so you don’t get rate limited by Gmail. We were looking to be at around 500 emails a day on one email account, but some days we bumped into Gmail’s limits.
Note: Gmail mentions in their documentation that they allow 2000 emails to be sent per day, but they place limits based on a variety of factors.
As you can see from the image below, we got a whopping 45% open rate across all emails for all sequences, which is frankly, AMAZING.
Leads and Pipeline
Over the course of about 60 days, we sent almost 10,000 emails to 2400 recipients. This translated into 13 opportunities valued at over $200,000 in pipeline for creative and media services.
Conclusion
If you’re a startup, have a new business idea to test, or are looking to scale your business with another channel, we highly recommend cold email automation. It is cost effective, fast to set up, and insanely powerful.