What We Learned Sending 200,000 Cold Emails
Overview
RAT RACE MARKETING works with B2B professional services companies to grow their revenue via outbound marketing strategies including cold email marketing, LinkedIn, Facebook Ads, and Google Ads.
Cold email marketing is used by nearly every sales organization in the B2B space, from Fortune 100’s to high growth startups, and everything in between. In this article we outline the process to conduct a cold email marketing program along with recent results we achieved for a client.
Background
This case study is from one of our clients that provides expert services to attorneys. Their ideal customer profile is an attorney in the personal injury or criminal defense practice areas at small-to-medium sized law offices. The client is a very small business with extremely limited time and resources to dedicate to business development and marketing.
A quick LinkedIn search told us there were over 80,000 potential customers, which demonstrated that a cold email strategy would be a fit. A large population (tens of thousands) of potential customers in a target market indicates that an automated cold email strategy could be a fit.
We do not recommend an automated cold email strategy if the target market is small (only hundreds to low thousands of contacts), email is not a reliable method to reach your prospects, or a lower level of personalization in messaging could be off-putting.
Sending Cold Emails En Masse
Our cold email marketing automation process can be broken down into several components:
1. Ideal customer profile mapping
2. Contact sourcing
3. Email service provider & marketing automation tool selection
4. Email copy
5. Email scheduling
6. Tracking results
We knew our ideal customer profile from interviewing the business owner and analyzing the backgrounds of prior clients.
In order to source contacts en masse, we used several public directories to source prospect names, companies and, in some cases, contact information. We then added contacts and domains into an email address sourcing tool and matched the contact information to the names in the directories.
We also utilized a list of past clients (a gold mine), as well as a list of prospects that had contacted the business but did not transact. This data spanned more than 20 years and we included it in our marketing strategy.
We created a separate email address for the client to send cold emails through. This is a crucial step which minimized the impact to the business’s day-to-day operations in the event that our email service provider paused or blocked our email domain from sending emails.
We then used an all-in-one CRM to upload our contacts, send the emails, and track results. One of the reasons we chose our CRM provider was that we could use its email server to send emails (versus our own Gmail or Outlook services which have stricter email sending limits). The tradeoff is that fewer emails are delivered because client email services may block or filter outgoing emails coming from a shared email server. Note that we would not recommend using this method of email delivery for lead nurturing or other communications.
Working with the business, we wrote email headlines and bodies that demonstrated the value of the service provided and the authority it has developed over the years.
A Word on SPAM
No, these emails do not violate the CAN-SPAM Act. More information is on the FTC website, but here is the gist of how to comply (from the FTC):
1. Don’t use false or misleading header information
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines
3. Identify the message as an ad
4. Tell recipients where you are located
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf
By following these rules cold emails will be FTC-compliant. As an agency with experience complying with CAN-SPAM regulations, feel free to consult with us about cold email plans.
The Best Days & Times to Send Cold Emails
We initially started sending emails between 11am-1pm, Monday-Friday. We tested sending in the afternoon, early evening, and early morning, and found the best open rates to remain around 11am and in the following order:
• Thursdays
• Fridays
• Wednesdays
• Mondays
• Tuesdays
After learning this, we actually stopped sending emails on Tuesdays entirely.
Any marketer will tell you that these dates and times are subject to change based on different businesses, customers, etc., so test early and test often.
Types of Emails Sent
The business had more than 20 years of client and prospect history, and nearly no nurturing programs or active digital campaigns. We tackled this with two methods:
1. We engaged past clients and prospects in a 4-email sequence that reminded them of their history working together.
2. We also mapped out a 4-email sequence for the cold contact list, which started out by sending weekly emails and then stretched them out to every month (more on this later).
Email Sending Frequency (Constraints)
While the business was game to use this strategy (which some marketers deplore), it was not comfortable sending emails to each prospect more than once per month. We would send a few hundred to a couple of thousand emails per day, typically in batches. We began sending emails on a weekly basis but the client asked to push the cadence to monthly.
I would recommend doing what you are comfortable with, but just remember:
1. People are busy and forget about emails about which they are actually interested.
2. People do not always read emails.
3. Email filters are getting smarter.
4. The Rule of Seven - people often need to see your message seven times before taking action to buy a product or service.
The Results
Over the course of 12 months, we sent more than 224,355 emails with an approximate 8% open rate. That percent is not world-class by any measure, and we are actively looking to improve it. We found about 25% of the emails initially bounced, even after scrubbing the list for inactive emails. We simply deleted them which improved our overall deliverability as the program progressed.
We were able to generate more than 120 leads (about 10 per month) with a near 50% close rate (kudos to the business owner)! The average value of each engagement hovered at about $1,500, which generated about a 7.5x ROI for the program.
Learnings
Despite some lumpy results (some days and weeks with no leads, and others with multiple), the program successfully engaged past clients (for new business) and drove new customers and revenue. For a small business looking to grow--with limited time, personnel, or capital--this strategy is an excellent growth option.