Email Outreach: Importance, Best practices, and Main Steps To Build Outreach Campaigns
- Lilit Yeranyan
- January 16, 2023
- 7 min read
Business growth largely depends on how strong companies’ relationships with their prospects are. And here comes the significance of email outreach, which is a great way to find leads and potential clients via email. The main goal of the process is reaching out to leads and trying to turn them into customers. To achieve that, you need a well-thought-out strategy, so you can build successful outreach campaigns. And when managing to create successful campaigns, you can get into the path of business growth.
Importance of email outreach to skyrocket your business
There are several obstacles that may be too hard to overcome, but designing effective outreach campaigns not only can solve all difficulties but also help you accomplish various goals.
Let’s dive into the advantages email outreach can provide to businesses regardless of their type and size:
✓ Increases lead generation
First and foremost, it remains the most effective way to connect with more leads and has a wider audience.
✓ Improves brand image
Great outreach campaigns will give authority and will be much easier to convert into customers who may remain loyal to your business and become brand advocates.
✓ It is the core of a link-building strategy
The outreach process remains an effective tactic for building links and also starting guest posting collaborations.
✓ Connecting with influencers and decision-makers
You can reach out to the influencers that are perfect for your business and also get in touch with decision-makers and investors who can help to scale your business. It’s not the final list of advantages that any company can get from having outreach campaigns, but to summarize it, we can say without hesitation that it is a crucial element for business success.
How to write email outreach that drives great results in 7 steps
After discussing the perks of the outreach campaign, you should know that you can enjoy them only by having the right strategies. It’s not an easy task and can be challenging, so we will offer a step-by-step plan, following which you can build successful outreach campaigns.
Set your goals and objectives
To improve your outreach effectiveness, you should start defining your goals, which is vital for every marketing campaign. These objectives should be specific so that you can concentrate your efforts on accomplishing them. Besides, without setting clear goals, you can’t track performance. You should also remember that every goal has different KPIs. This will help measure your results during and after the campaign is over, such as open and reply rates and the number of successfully created relationships. And also you can improve your efforts to get greater results.
There are different types of email marketing objectives that will shape your strategy. One of them is to strengthen relationships with existing customers by suggesting cross and up-selling offers that are tailored to their needs. Depending if you want to promote a certain product, you will need to connect to a great number of people and a lot of companies. But if you offer collaboration to influencers and bloggers, you should design more personalized emails.
2. Create a winning subject line
The subject line is your opportunity to leave a positive impression and convince people to open the email. Not having the right subject line when trying to learn how to write an outreach email you will miss an opportunity to connect with qualified leads. In that matter, in a warm email, a well-crafted subject line can be the key to establishing a genuine connection with potential leads and sparking their curiosity.
First and foremost, you should be as concise as possible and give detailed information about your offer. Being straightforward doesn’t mean your subject line shouldn’t be eye-catching and captivating. Keep the balance between adding a little humor and also being professional. Studies have shown that subject lines that are questions receive about 10% more opens than messages without them.
And also, ensure that your subject lines are relevant to recipients, so they will be interested and will open them.
3. Build a list of prospects
The core of email outreach is building the right connections. The reason is simple: if you don’t reach out to the right people, all your efforts will go in vain. It is crucial to dedicate your time and effort to finding the right prospects who are likely to take action and be interested in your offers. In that matter, you should identify who your ideal prospect is and next build a list of your qualified leads who have the same characteristics as your prospect and can become your new customers. In case you’re searching for influencers and bloggers, it could take a bit more time, and you need to prepare hyper-personalized messages.
You can divide your email list into their age, location, and job titles. And then dive into research and find more details about them. Find what needs and pain points they have, and ensure whether your offer is the best solution for them and what benefits they get from it. And eventually, check whether their email inbox is accessible and what is the right time to send the message.
4. Personalize your emails
There is no debate that personalization plays a significant role in the success of every type of marketer. In the case of outreach campaigns, you will increase the chances that you can achieve greater results and get a high response rate when sending a personalized email instead of a generic one. The reason is that you demonstrate that you care about your prospects and design your message for them.
During the research stage, you probably collected a lot of information about your prospect, then used it to leverage your campaigns. Start including their name on the subject line and also in the body as well. Statistics prove including the recipient’s name in the subject line increases the open rate by 13 to 28%.
Moreover, continue researching their profiles on LinkedIn and other social platforms or their business website, and customize your messages inviting them to join the conversation. Also, find out their accomplishments and include them in your message showing that you will be excited to collaborate with them.
5. Offer value to your prospects
One of the fundamental factors that can make your outreach campaign successful is making it about the potential customer and putting them in the center. In that matter, you shouldn’t be over-promotional and share the value you offer. And in case you already did complete research, you know what their desires, goals, and concerns are. You can offer a solution and build your message around that. Different types of emails, including onboarding emails or messages that are triggered by customers’ actions, can become more effective when expressing value.
When doing cold email outreach. You should give recipients a reason to open your message thanks to the subject line but also encourage them to act and start a partnership with you. If you successfully add value, it will help you build meaningful relationships with your potential customers. More than that value-driven message sets your message apart and gives you a competitive edge.
6. Be clear and write outstanding CTA
People receive numerous emails on a daily basis and check their inboxes in a short time, which makes it harder to hook their attention. If you managed to convince people to open your message, now it’s time to create a great email copy so that customers won’t lose interest. To solve this problem, you should be as concise and clear as possible. Quickly communicate your message, and share the reasons why you reached, definitely share your values and, of course, what you expect from them.
Here comes the importance of CTA, which also should be short and concise as well. It should guide readers in a specific direction, like booking a call with you, responding to the email, or taking another action. Moreover, a call to action for your email should be short and simple and will convince people to act.
Remember that you need to have a single call to action; otherwise, you may confuse and will end up losing a potential customer. On the contrary, being direct and strict to the point can bring a higher conversion rate.
7. Test and measure the results
Only by regularly testing and tracking the performance can you increase the effectiveness of your outreach campaigns. After writing and designing your cold email outreach, you can ask for feedback from your teammates before sending it to prospects. Also, before sending your message to all of your email lists, you can do A/B testing by directing two versions of the message to small groups. Then, you find out the version that brings the best results, like higher clicks and open rate, and send it to all prospects. Remember the process should be done strategically, therefore, start testing step by step, like analyzing different subject lines to see which one performs better.
In the next step, tracking the efficiency of your email outreach, you can have a clear understanding of what performs and what does not so you can develop them and make reasoned decisions. Therefore, after implementing your campaigns, you should analyze all valuable metrics. And for that, you need to collect data to track open and response rates. If you include in your message certain links, you also need to check how many people clicked on those links. Also, you should keep information data about unsubscribe rates as well and measure overall ROI to know whether your efforts brought profit or not. And eventually, after testing and tracking, you should build a strategy to make our campaigns even more effective.
To sum up
It’s safe to say that almost all types of companies need to prepare email outreach strategies to scale their business. And for that reason, in this article, we started to define what it is, in what cases businesses should think about creating outreach campaigns, and what benefits they can get. We also gave you tips and suggested the steps that can guide you to build an effective outreach campaign for your email recipients.