The commercial prospecting is deeply rooted in the acquisition strategy strategy of a company. It allows you to define objectives, achieve results and understand your customer target. Generating leads relies on a set of different strategies of acquisition. In particular, the cold emailing is an unavoidable strategy and one of the most effective to launch you in 2023 as it should be!
The essential in 3 points
- There are several acquisition strategies that aim to increase your company's visibility, generate traffic to your site, and acquire new partners or customers.
- Cold emailing is an acquisition strategy that requires an orchestrated approach to ensure the redirection of your prospects to your site.
- Thanks to structuring tools such as CRM, cold emailing is a technique that allows you to collect a lot of data on your prospects to better seduce your future customers.
Presentation of the different acquisition strategies
Gaining visibility and generating traffic to your website are key to enriching your prospect list to acquire new partners or customers. The first step is to develop a plan for your acquisition strategy. This plan will allow you to test different acquisition levers to quickly determine which ones work best. Here is a non-exhaustive list of different levers to acquire traffic to your website.
- Outbound: This is the 'outbound' marketing. It involves the display of advertising banners targeted to prospects or Internet users, with the possibility of reaching many people.
- Social networks: Using social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter can be an effective acquisition strategy. You can redirect contacts to your site from targeted content publications.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Your position and natural or organic search engine optimization is very important. There are many different strategies to try to enrich your SEO and make it a key part of your acquisition strategy.
- SEA (Search Engine Advertising) : Also known as 'paid referencing' in French, SEA is defined as a key way to position yourself quickly on certain links or keywords.
- Emailing: A very generalized technique, it is the sending of emails with promotional content to a list of prospects or existing customers.
- Partnerships: This method consists of partnering with other companies to extend the impact and performance of marketing actions on other similar products or services.
Focus on the "cold email" - outbound
Let's take a look at emailing, and in particular cold emailing, an integral part of commercial prospecting in companies today.
In concrete terms, cold emailing consists of making contact with someone for the first time by sending them an email with a targeted call to action. In order to generate new leads, this technique targets prospects with whom you have never spoken, and is largely reserved for B2B prospecting.
Generally, one of the first objectives of this cold email is to be able to engage in an initial discussion with the prospect, having "warned" him via this email, rather than directly making what is called a cold call.
Our pro tip on cold emailing
Cold emailing is not exclusively reserved for sales, but is also used for networking, recruiting and building relationships with others around a common interest.
Best practices in cold emailing
Like any other marketing acquisition technique, there are good practices to take into account and to work on according to your needs, objectives and financial and human resources.
Identify targets.
This consists in defining its ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). A cold email sent to everyone is a bad email; on the contrary, a cold email sent to a targeted and studied audience with a specific objective is a good email.
Your KPI is the most valuable customers, that is, both the customers to whom you bring the most value and the customers who bring you the most value.
It is important to define your KPI in order to have a good identity of your ideal customers and to focus your efforts on these profiles.
To properly define your KPI, you need to identify the people to whom you provide the most value, no matter how. The characteristics of your KPI also include the size of the company, the profiles of its employees, how they will use your solution, the price they pay, and the maturity of that company, among others.
Retrieve information.
The next step is to retrieve theinformation attached to your KPI. This is the contact and relationship information that will be key in your marketing approach.
You can include their interests, geographic locations and personal preferences.
Segment the data.
Once you have collected all this qualitative, quantitative and behavioral data, you need to sort this information in order to identify the most profitable and interesting criteria for your strategy.
You can use a CRM or other marketing automation tools to better visualize the whole.
Build an email template that converts.
In your cold emailing approach, the structure of the email will be extremely important. On average, 47% of the readers of an email only open it after thesubject line, and 70% may send it directly to spam according to the same indicator.
It is therefore important to take care of the subject line in order to reach your prospect first, the first step of the conversion.
To make your prospect want to open your email, you need to arouse both curiosity and personal interest in your prospect. If you have established your KPI, you should know how to use the right words to talk to your prospect.
Choose the right call to action.
One of the real indicators of your email campaign is the number of people who will actually read your email until the call to action.
This button or part of your email is important because it qualifies your prospect into a prospect interested in the speech you gave him, and who will end up on your site, or answer a form.
Your call to action will depend on the objective of the email campaign. It could be scheduling an appointment, or it could be a simple question!
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How to write a cold email that converts?
Choose a targeted and personalized object.
There are many sample email templates to best convert your prospects. This includes subject line templates as well.
For example: The 3 best ways to choose your vacation destination.
It is also possible to address questions, your offer, discounts, or try a comical approach in your subject line. In any case, the more targeted and personalized your subject line is in relation to your KPI, the more likely it is that your email will be opened and your prospect will convert.
Increase the click-through rate.
For the rest of your email, if you include links to your site or product, increasing the click-through rate is going to be one of your goals.
Beyond the content of your email, you can also set up a lot of processes to automate the management of this acquisition strategy. In particular, you can set up registration forms attached to the click in your email, automatic sendings, automatic responders that vary according to the returns you have.
Avoid spam filters.
There are other little tricks to better convert your prospects. First of all, you have to put all the chances on your side, by avoiding spam filters. This includes of course the RGPD, and being sure that you have permission to send to the right recipients.
It is also important to send your emails from a verified domain and a secure IP address. You should also avoid using too much standard language with words that are easily detected as spam (e.g. 'Money', 'Buy').
Targeting the right day and time to send.
Finally, in the process ofautomating the sending, it is important to target the day and time of sending, which are important in the opening rate.
An example of an effective cold email
For a little more clarity on email templates that convert, let's take an example.
Give the context of your email.
"Max, I saw that you..."(here, you are directly targeting the recipient through the use of their first name).
→ Publish videos on YouTube
→ Hire a growth marketer
→ Launch ads on LinkedIn
Above are actions from Max's daily life that you have spotted. These are ways to get Max's attention on these interests. The more personalized this part is, the more the email will be read.
Link the context to a problem.
"Generally, this means that... " (here you highlight an issue that Max certainly encounters in his day, or at least habits he has) .
→ You spend a lot of time creating videos.
→ You're going to have more data to analyze.
→ You get a fairly high cost per lead.
This will push you to focus on the right problem.
Show that you have the solution to the problem
"We are building a [...] to help with that".
This will get the reader interested in you because you are offering something that can potentially help them solve a problem they often encounter.
How to finance this acquisition strategy?
As you can see, cold emailing is a long-term technique. Its implementation can nevertheless be accelerated thanks to the expertise of several companies specialized in outbound or via the recruitment of new talents in-house.
These solutions are easy to implement, but require a significant source of funding. Fortunately, Karmen is here to help support your cash flow as you implement your acquisition strategy.
How do I get a quick loan as a business from Karmen?
Indeed, Karmen allows digital companies to finance their growth in a non-dilutive way and very quickly.
At Karmen, the investor has no direct ownership in the business and does not require fixed payments. Payments will be based on the company's revenue . Karmen uses a tool to anticipate the future revenues of a business.
In concrete terms, if your income decreases during a month, the royalties to Karmen will be reduced proportionally . Conversely, if the company's revenues increase drastically during a month, the royalties will increase simultaneously.
Karmen offers an alternative to fundraising that allows more companies to finance themselves.
Indeed, Karmen does not have any particular requirement on a business sector or an ultra-tech product as a venture capital fund may have.
Getting a quick loan is the essence of Karmen's offer, as a business can receive cash in less than 48 hours.
As you can see, cold emailing is a technique that can be mastered over time, but when well targeted and well orchestrated, it is one of the most effective techniques to acquire new leads. Once you have woven together all the key data related to your prospect, a good light but direct layout will do the trick.
