What is your cold outreach strategy?

I’ve spoken about cold outreach emails in in episode 127 “How would you write a outreach email”] but prior to that, you need a strategy to get to that email right?

You can’t convince anyone of everything

First thing to remember is cold outreach is a numbers game.

If you cast a wide net with no bait, the more likely it’ll be that you need to throw away most of the fish.

What I mean by that is, if you have a large list of emails or contacts of a particular industry, most of that list isn’t the right kind of client for you and you are just wasting time.

The segment that may listen to you will be small, but even most of them you won’t be able to convince them that what you do is valuable to them.

The segment that is the smallest are those that fit for your business, because they see the value in what you do. They are the contacts that you want to target for cold outreach and not waste time on everyone else.

Instead of picking an industry/trade/niche and then casting that net and praying for responses and then weeding through another round of bad leads to get to the good ones. Think about how you can throw away the biggest chunk of leads first.

You won’t be able to change the behavior of anyone if they aren’t ready to listen and accept value in what you do.

Meet them where they are

In episode 56 - Do you get any leads from your content?] you will hear about the buyer’s journey and the different stages of a potential client.

If you take this idea and apply it to your cold outreach strategy, if only for a small amount of time, you’ll greatly increase the chance of success.

Cold outreach metrics say that a 1% response rate is good. That response doesn’t even need to be a positive response either.

Let me explain a bit about my business as an example of this in practice.

I do email automation and behavioral marketing for clients. This entails lots of ecommerce and membership clients who need this for their business to grow and retain customers organically over time.

Business owners often try these things for themselves and get frustrated with all the nuances that goes into it. The development on site to link up data points to specific events within the sales process, etc. They simply don’t want to know how to do it and get frustrated with it.

But they see the value in it and know what it can do for them and so the seek out help. Those are my ideal cold outreach candidates. Businesses using platforms and products that I can work with, but they seem to struggle with the setup.

Conversely, any ecommerce business or any membership website could benefit from my services. Any website that sells anything could in fact. But if they are more focused on paid advertising campaigns and other means of generating business that isn’t on-site personalizations or automation, they are more likely to not want to wait for results and fully understand their customers and just want that next sale to come through.

I’m not going to be able to change their behavior them otherwise that by learning a tiny bit more about what makes their customer tick, they’ll be able to shorten the time to first purchase, retain customers longer and increase customer lifetime value, and finally be able to reduce the ad spend because the on-site personalization in tandem with the email automation is evergreen and continues to bring in sales organically.

Sure I may be able to convince a small portion of those, but I want to play that numbers game more to my favor and if I can put a little more focus into who I reach out to with some specifics in that strategy, I will increase my chances to close that deal. But also save time and resources in the next step of that sales process and conversations with this leads that are not my ideal clients.

Learn more about your client objections

This isn’t easy and requires you to carefully listen to sales conversations and pay attention in ways that you may not be doing so during your conversations with clients now.

But if you start paying a bit more attention to the details of your existing clients and the good leads coming into your business, you’ll start to be able to further segment your cold outreach in ways that you hadn’t before.

This segmentation really will fall inline with whatever objections you are getting that aren’t budget related with the leads you have now.

When you start to see and hear those objections, you can address them further up the chain and earlier in the process to increase your cold outreach campaign success rates.

[optin-monster-shortcode id="bzuygihht1q3oswohwvi"]