If you can run an ad, you can run an outbound email campaign.
Outbound and direct B2B marketing has experienced a resurgence.
New outbound email technology, in particular, has made lead generation, cold email targeting, and message testing practical for marketers. What makes email different than other outbound channels is its cost-effectiveness, versatility, and scalability.
In this whiteboard video, Lena Shaw, Director of Marketing and Growth at LeadGenius, demonstrates how outbound email campaigns can be used by marketing teams to accelerate lead velocity at all stages of the funnel.
Before marketing automation and email nurturing, there was direct mail. A traditional direct mail strategy looked something like this:
- Buy a static list of contacts
- Create a fancy marketing message
- Blast it out to a loosely targeted category list – once
- Wait and see if sales goes up
That’s a simplification, but not by much.
Each step in the old direct mail process contains an assumption. For modern, data-driven B2B marketers, each of these assumptions is unacceptable on its own. These assumptions combined send that same marketer running for the hills.
Assumptions and hurdles in the traditional outbound process include,
- The list contains a sufficient percentage of qualified accounts and buyers within the category
- Contact information is accurate
- A message sent to a shared inbox is routed to the right individual
- There is a limited, single-step feedback loop between seller and buyer
- Inability to sufficiently track the preceding steps to inform message iterations or prove ROI
Compounding assumptions are just a few of the (legitimate) reasons outbound historically gets a bad rap.
People have called outbound old, ineffective, slow, low-quality, etc., but those are really critiques of a channel and available technology, not of the efficacy of the strategy itself.
At the end of the day, outbound and direct email are simply about communicating in a 1:1 format with a prospect.
Salespeople have always done this on individual prospect level. Marketers are now following suit, because technology – especially automated email sequences – enables this form of communication at scale, in a variety of contexts.
Technology eliminates the aforementioned assumptions and makes outbound email a key component in the modern marketing stack.
You may be thinking, “great, but how do I get started with direct email?”
In the whiteboard video above, Lena Shaw discusses how to integrate this tactic with your current lead generation strategy to increase velocity at each stage of the funnel.
At LeadGenius we use direct email at several points in the buying journey:
- Top – Engage qualified leads at the top of the funnel
- Middle – Retarget and nurture prospects with targeted content
- Bottom – Convert leads to opportunities
Content plays a key role throughout.
Targeted content enables you to cut through the noise, demonstrate value, and get noticed. The blog posts, videos, and webinars that you’re already creating for your inbound strategy can be repurposed to power your outbound efforts. The same piece of content can be used in multiple contexts.
When we launch a campaign at LeadGenius, we generally use a high-value piece of content to help propel that campaign. For example, an archived webinar campaign will these elements:
- A landing page
- Nurturing email workflows
- CTAs
- Display ads (for retargeting)
- Social copy
- Outbound email
The inbound part of this process takes time to work. Even when you do everything right, it still takes time.
It is the outbound component of this campaign – putting content directly in the inboxes of qualified prospects, and starting a conversation – that adds consistency to your pipeline. Consistency is valuable for estimating content ROI and making lead projections.
In addition to creating the right message for a buyer persona, you also want to make sure your email addresses the customer at the corresponding stage of their buying journey.
By using direct email in your marketing mix, you’re your way to drastically upping your B2B marketing game by actually doing the same thing as before; just bigger, faster, better.
If you can run an ad, you can run an outbound email campaign.
Outbound direct emailing is a “strategy” that has developed because any software company that enables mass emailing won’t allow import of contacts that haven’t specifically opted in to receive your emails.
Distributing a purchased or “built” aka scraped list to their SDRs to send “nothing fancy” personal emails is still a violation of Federal CAN-SPAM regulations. CAN-SPAM allows one unsolicited business email. If the recipient doesn’t respond, then that’s it. You may not send another email. One-off “personal” emails from an SDR is still an unsolicited business email. Any subsequent unsolicited “follow-up” email (Oh, did you get my email the other day?) is spam. Inviting the recipient to unsubscribe and providing a link does not circumvent these Federal regulations. The recipients have every right to hit the spam button.
This creates a cascading problem for the company since online reputation responsibility has shifted, to a great degree, onto the sender. Every spam complaint negatively affects the reputation. It impacts deliverability of all emails. It can get you in trouble with your ISP. It could even mean your website could be shut down by your hosting company. And, ESPs (Email Solution Providers) and any other software provider of marketing automation or CRM apps through which you’d send email won’t want you as a customer.
It may seem like a good idea, but this outbound strategy can put you out of business. It’s much better to have those SDRs do cold calling with a great “nothing fancy” personalized script and be prepared with another like script for leaving a voicemail. Combine that with campaigns to drive traffic to your site where you can capture genuine opt-in email addresses. Then, you’re completely legit and actually initiating a relationship on the right foot from the beginning.
Awesome content! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Thanks for sharing. Really giving me an idea of what the work entails.
Sp deeply discussed, in the above whiteboard animation I wanna ask you; is that really outbound direct email works better than Inbound or its depends on the skills of the person.
Thank you for sharing, its really so helpful 🙂
Thanks Anna.
Yes, outbound effectiveness does depend on skills (and more importantly *process* – email content and templates, team training, targeting, etc). Of course, inbound effectiveness also depends on skills of content creators, media planning, etc.
Most B2B marketing and sales teams are performing at their best when they strike a balance between a 75~25 mix. This is not a hard and fast rule. But it is wise to invest in both areas.