Gold in the Emerge-Tech Category!
24/08/2021
To succeed in business, you need to generate sales – I think we can all agree on that. Figuring out exactly how to sell successfully can vary widely from business to business. For the purpose of this blog I’m going to take a look at 2 different approaches that have reasonable results but work wonders when married: Ms. Email Marketing and Mr. Outbound Sales.
Email Campaigns
Some believe that email marketing has a much higher ROI than cold calling. But is that just a sign of the times and the digital era we live in? A good B2B email campaign can have a 30% open rate with 6% click through. However, this can vary depending on company size, number of employees, how many times you send email campaigns, etc. But the simple fact is, unless by some magical force you can jump out of the email, all bells and whistles, and actually bring the reader to your business, chances are you won’t get a very high conversion rate by running an email campaign on its own. The problem is, we just get a lot of emails! You can look at your own inbox to see that for yourself. According to SalesStaff, 89 billion business emails are sent every single day. 89 billion! That’s a lot of electronic correspondence!
Results of email campaigns can differ based on a variety factors. For example, MailChimp sends billions of emails every month on behalf of more than 10 million users. They analysed their data by industry and their open rates ranged from 13.73% for the Daily Deals industry up to 27.46% for the Arts. Interesting!
Outbound Sales
So what about outbound sales? Cold calling appears to be quite the contentious topic for a lot of people. On the one hand you have statistics claiming that it can take an average of 8 cold call attempts to reach a prospect, and that it results in about a 1-3% success rate in landing an appointment. On the other hand, contributors to a Salesforce blog post seem to have taken the left wing radicalist view that cold calling is just as important now as it was before the Internet became ‘a thing.’ So which is it? In reality, a business probably won’t visit your website unless they’re in the market for a product or service that you can provide. So you could potentially be waiting a very long time before your future customer comes knocking. They don’t just grow on trees, you know!
So what should you do?
10 Steps to Success
Here’s our two cents: as a startup, but with individual skillsets in both marketing as well as sales, we’ve taken the blended route: email first, actively work our social media platforms, and then follow up with outbound calls. It’s also worth noting that cold calls can actually become lukewarm if we connect with them on social media before making the call.
We’ve pulled together 10 Tips For Success Using Email Marketing that will help you increase our overall conversion rate by using a mixture of methods. We hope you find it useful too!
- Source a list of leads either internally, or from a reputable company/directory
- Qualify these leads to assess whether they can become a customer
- Upload this list of leads to your CRM system
- Sign off the qualified list of leads with your sales team
- Ask your sales team to follow these potential customers on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
- Sign up for a marketing automation tool e.g. Hubspot, Act-On, MailChimp, Marketo, etc.
- Start your email campaign using one of the above tools (all of these tools are fantastic in sending and measuring email campaigns)
- In the meantime, start your outbound sales campaign, following up from the initial emails sent out. If you don’t have sales staff, consider hiring an external company like Zevas (These guys are doing an amazing job for both European and US Companies!)
- Track the campaign performance by using Google Analytics, and also with the marketing automation tool to measure campaign success. Some of these marketing tools can also be integrated into Google Analytics to allow for more effective measurement
- Have a daily scrum meeting with your Sales team to ensure that every lead is being worked
Sales may be hard work, but this approach could increase your conversion rate above 10% to 20%+
(it did for us!)
