It’s not hard to imagine your marketing team sending out 50, if not 200, cold outreach correspondences every day. After all, 75% of professionals are willing to schedule a meeting just by receiving a cold email or call.

 

 

That said, cold outreach is easy to fumble. 

 

 

Factors like a generic message or even bad timing can lead a prospect to ignore your communication attempts. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes—the average person encounters 121 business emails daily. How many of those emails would you give the time of day to? 

 

 

Why? What about them catches your eye?

 

 

Well, you don’t need to think that long about it. Here, we’ll give you the tools to tailor the best cold outreach strategies to land more clients.

 

 

#1 Picking the Right Channel

 

Choosing a suitable communication method is your first concern. Prospects have a preferred contact method, so tried and true techniques won’t be effective for everyone. 

 

 

Take cold calling, for instance. It comes with it’s share of benefits, with an equal amount of negatives:

 

Pros	Cons
Exposing your brand to the broadest possible audience	Cold calling has an average conversion rate of 2%
Most effective means of closing sales and getting feedback	63% of salespeople consider it their least favorite task
51% of CEOs prefer to be contacted by phone	90% of cold calls are ineffective

 

 

So how do you determine which channels suit your cold outreach strategy? Well, you can identify your best choice in three easy steps:

 

Step 1: Create Buyer Personas

 

Creating buyer personas is the first step in getting your message across effectively. Understanding your audience’s demographics, motivations, preferences, and lingo will help you get on the same level as your prospects.

 

 

Then, you can use social listening tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics to acquire necessary info for your personas, including:

 

• Age
• Location
• Spending habits
• Interests
• Pain points

 

The more you know about your audience, the better you can connect with them.

 

 

Step 2: Determine Your Budget

 

A large budget doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll develop an ideal strategy. We can look at New Coke as the perfect example. Coca-Cola spent $4 million and lost $30 million in the process, all because they didn’t understand the needs and wants of their customers. 

 

 

In contrast, Wendy’s spent next to nothing to create their Twitter profile. However, despite the low investment cost, the fast-food giant landed $64.4 million in profits off the back of their Twitter marketing.

 

 

The lesson?

 

 

Rather than focusing on expensive marketing channels like a Superbowl ad, center your cold outreach strategy on channels where your audience is most active. Case in point, email presents eye-watering ROI opportunities, with its $38 return for every dollar spent.

 

 

Step 3: Keep an Eye on the Competition

 

Peep on your rivals and see which channels they use for their outreach strategy. You’ll want to study what type of content they produce for each channel and how well their outreach strategy is performing.

 

 

To help you conduct your competitive analysis, you can use tools like SE Ranking’s Competitor Analysis Tool to get critical SEO data like high-performing keywords, website traffic, and backlink performance.

 

 

Keeping an eye on your rivals will help you decide which channels will help your cold outreach strategy the most.

 

 

#2 Leverage the Power of Social Media

 

Despite email providing the most ROI out of any channel, social media leverages a unique benefit: it allows you to connect with your prospects on a personal level.

 

 

For instance, browsing a prospect’s feed might help you zero in on their challenges. 

 

 

Look at someone’s Linkedin, and you get an idea of your prospect’s pain points, recent achievements, and the types of content that interests them – all of which gives you an “in” with your cold leads. However, there are three things you need to keep in mind when conducting social media cold outreach:

 

• Consistency: Keep both your posting schedule and quality on a tight leash. Then, ensure your tone and brand identity are unified across every post.

• Interaction: Respond to every question or remark, and monitor feedback.

• Usefulness: Present value on your social media. Aim to educate, entertain, or inform your audience rather than focusing on promotion. Instead, employ the 10-4-1 rule: 

• 10 posts written by others, 

• 4 for your own content, and 

• 1 to share your landing page.

 

Thanks to its unique position as one of the best platforms for encouraging engagement, social media (especially Linkedin) is a cold outreach channel you shouldn’t ignore.

 

 

#3 Employ Automation Tools

 

The secret to every cold outreach strategy is consistency. Ideally, you want to have frequent exchanges with your prospects and follow up on your initial outreach attempts. In fact, it takes an average of 8 touchpoints before getting a response from a prospect.

 

 

Despite that, nearly 50% of salespeople give up after the first outreach attempt. And, given the repetitive nature of following up on every message, it’s understandable why a majority of salespeople give up quickly.

 

 

That’s where automation comes in. For example, some automation software enables you to schedule and automatically deliver responses. In contrast, others allow you to capture email addresses from social media accounts. Ideally, you’ll want to employ tools like:

 

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Allows setting up alerts for prospect messages and integrates CRM tools into your LinkedIn account.
• Zopto: Enables better prospect searches on LinkedIn, which you can use for automated campaigns that send Inmails, sequenced messages, and connection invites. It also contains tools for easy A/B campaign testing.
• SalesBlink: Access customized email messages through the software. It also helps monitor multi-channel cold outreach by providing updated data on important KPIs like response rate.

 

Automation software is a tool you must recognize for your cold outreach strategy.

 

 

#4 Take Advantage of Referrals

 

A person’s willingness to buy a product increases by 400% if a friend recommends it. That’s why leveraging a referral presents a considerable advantage for your outreach attempts.

 

 

So requesting your clients to refer you to their friends and business associates should be one of the pillars of your outreach strategy. Then, you can employ these tactics to further your referral strategy:

 

• Provide incentives for customers that provide referrals—you can provide exclusive discounts or additional perks
• Create a referral template for your email outreach
• Name-drop your mutual contact in email outreach subject lines

 

Referrals are an easy way to boost the engagement of your cold outreach strategy.

 

 

#5 Stay Persistent

 

Only once in a blue moon will you find that prospect that immediately responds to you after your first correspondence. Instead, you’re more likely to get an after several attempts. For instance, when it comes to email, you’re expected to get a response from your prospect after at least six emails.

 

 

However, there’s a fine line between persistent and annoying. Staying clear of that line will increase your engagement while avoiding the spam filter. So, you’ll need two tactics to keep a persistent tone without sounding annoying:

 

• Give them a reason to stay in touch: Don’t message your prospect without cause. Instead, use an excuse like sharing a blog or social media post or exchanging views on a particular pain point.
• Schedule the next touchpoint: Negotiate a deadline for the following message between you and your prospect. Set a deadline and only follow up after the deadline is met.

 

Avoiding annoyance while keeping up correspondence will improve your odds of converting prospects.

 

 

Increase Your Cold Outreach Engagement With the Right Mindset

 

Cold outreach is essential for finding more leads, but dropping the ball is easy. For example, a mistake like sounding too generic can get you flagged on your customer’s spam list, and recovering from that is nearly impossible.

 

 

Luckily with a couple of changes, your cold outreach strategy can go from zero to hero. For instance, automation tools can help you nail down a prospect’s email address and even help craft personalized emails. Luckily, at ScaleUp Sales, we’ve got a team of experts that can help personalize a cold outreach strategy that works for your business.

 

 

Contact us today and get a headstart on boosting your engagements through cold outreach.