10 Proven Email Outreach Strategies to Find and Convert More Leads Effectively
Marketing strategies depend on the business's size and the products and services it offers customers to find and connect potential leads. One powerful tool to increase customer outreach is by adding email strategies.
Learning how to implement email outreach strategies helps businesses to effectively generate more traffic on their platforms and create more sales opportunities.
What Is Email Outreach?
Email outreach is the process of reaching out to people through email to grow relationships for the business's long-term success. Its core idea is to build relationships with prospects and turn them into customers by providing value through personalized and well-crafted emails.
There are two different approaches when reaching out to potential clients or customers – cold and warm outreach.
Cold outreach is reaching out to prospects who haven't shown interest in becoming a customer or are not aware of the brand.
Warm outreach is reaching to prospects who expressed interest in the product and trust in the brand.
The Purposes of Email Outreach
Email outreach help business connect to potential people and customers for the following purposes:
Lead generation
Email outreach encourages potential customers to respond positively to the email, generating leads.
Link-building: With email outreach, you can reach out to website owners or admins and ask them to link to your content.
Influencer collaboration: Email outreach can be used to reach out to influencers and propose partnerships or collaboration.
Sales: Email outreach reaches out to potential customers and encourages them to make a purchase, generating sales.
Email Outreach Strategies That Can Help You Generate More Leads
To get the most out of your email outreach to generate more leads, here are 10 strategies that you can implement.
1. Craft a Message for your Target Audience
According to the APSIS customer journey report, 84% of customers start their journey after realizing the need for a product or service. Identifying your target audience helps focus your efforts on customers who are most likely interested in your products and services – it saves you time and resources by avoiding sending emails to people who are unlikely to convert.
2. Leverage Email Automation to Streamline the Process
Email automation is where software sends targeted emails depending on predefined conditions or triggers like time and user behavior - all with minimal human input. It allows relevant and timely communication without manual and time-consuming intervention.
Interacting consistently with the customers makes the business stay ahead of competitors that might have failed to look after customer engagement.
3. Utilize Personalization of Your Emails
Personalization of emails has the potential to capture your recipient's attention. It is reported to deliver 6 times higher transactional rates, as 52% of customers find somewhere else to go if an email is not personal.
Unlike a generic email, using their name instead of the usual "hello" speaks directly to them. It also increases the open rate, as they feel connected to the message when they see their names or other personal details in the subject line or throughout the email.
4. Track and Measure Your Email Outreach Performance
Tracking and measuring your email outreach performance allows you to identify what works and needs improvement, making it easier for you to adjust your strategies accordingly.
There are email outreach metrics to look out for and focus on:
Deliverability
Open rate
Click-through rate
Unique open and clicks
Click-to-open rates
Unsubscribe rate
Conversion rate
With the help of tools like Closely, Quickmail, MailTrack, Boomerang, and RightInbox, you will be able to check the status of your email outreach campaign.
5. Refine Your Subject Lines to Increase Open Rates
64% of recipients decide when to open or delete an email, depending on the subject line. It also helps them prioritize their emails, as it determines if the email requires immediate attention or can be put off later. To have your email noticed and achieve email communication goals, you need to write an effective subject line.
Be clear and descriptive.
Keep it short and sweet.
Use keywords carefully.
Personalize.
6. Segment Your List for More Tailored Emails
Email list segmentation is dividing your email subscribers into groups based on a set of criteria. You can segment your list with past interactions, demographics, or purchase history. Segmenting your list helps you send more targeted and relevant emails to different segments instead of sending a one-size-fits-all message.
7. Know When to Follow Up on Unopened Emails
Follow-up emails are often neglected, yet they are crucial to keeping potential customers engaged and moving them further down the sales funnel. Research says that follow-up emails can increase the reply rate up to 9-13%. But when is the best time to follow up on unopened emails?
Send follow-up emails mid-week, preferably on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. People are mostly organizing their emails at the start of the week, so your follow-up email may get deleted along with the unnecessary emails. Weekends are also not the best time, as people will have plans for the weekend and may not bother to look into their email during these days.
Give your contacts up to 3 days to reply to not seem pushy; wait at least a week. After your waiting time, send a follow-up email that consists of an objective.
8. Maximize Your Reach with A/B Testing
A/B testing involves sending two different versions of an email to two randomly segmented halves of the same list to measure how one change affects performance. The goal is to determine which version of the email produces the most opens, clicks, and conversions. It can be applied to subject lines, content, CTAs, visuals, delivery date, and time.
To maximize your reach with a/b testing, here are some best practices you can implement:
Test only one variable at a time.
Use a control version to test against.
Test simultaneously.
Know your goals.
Develop hypothesis.
9. Understand How to Handle and Respond to Negative Feedback
Appropriate handling and responding to negative feedback is essential in retaining customers. You should acknowledge the feedback and apologize for the dissatisfaction and inconvenience. Show empathy towards the customer and explain the reason behind the issue. Then, offer a compensation or solution.
10. Make the Most Out of Your Email Outreach Efforts
To make the most out of your efforts, you can use email outreach tools like Saleshandy, Woodpecker, and SmartReach. These tools can help automate your email outreach process, track and analyze your performance, personalize emails, segment your list, and more. With these tools, you can save time and effort while achieving better results in your email outreach campaigns.
Conclusion
Email outreach is a powerful tool that helps businesses reach their prospects, generate leads, and convert them into customers. Start implementing the strategies in this article, such as segmenting your email list, sending timely follow-up emails, conducting A/B testing, handling negative feedback appropriately, and using email outreach tools; you can maximize the success of your email outreach campaigns.
Consistency is key, so keep testing and refining your approach to continuously improve your email outreach performance.
Kevin is the CEO and founder of Aemorph. A seasoned entrepreneur and digital marketing expert. Kevin started in digital marketing, specializing in Search Engine Optimisation since 2010, and is helping Finance, Insurance, E-commerce, Medical, B2B, and SaaS companies.
Kevin is also a certified adult educator in Singapore, delivering high-quality, relevant, and easy-to-implement training to ensure learners can get immediate results and build upon their knowledge. He’s currently building Mint Superteams with a mission to train 1 million people and place them into companies.