We had product market fit and some revenues, and had to speed up lead generation and sales. But, we didn’t have sales / lead generation team, or any marketing budget to run ads. We had to figure out a smart outreach campaign that was warm and personalized (at least semi-personalized), that can be automated and done at a very low cost.
In our team’s combined network, we instantly found a few thousand potential prospects
These are people we know either directly or through mutual contacts. We built this list using our own database — we have a network of over 175 Million business professionals and their connections across various social and professional networks, it has info like Sam is connected on Facebook with Ted from Dell, and Ted is connected on LinkedIn with Lisa from Intel.
Besides the above list, we also had another target list of potential prospects.
We segmented our lists
We segmented our lists based on location, industry, titles, solution, etc. And then sub-divided them based on any direct or mutual contacts we have, and crafted templates for each segment.
Segmented email campaigns have a 100.95% higher click-through rate (CTR) than non-segmented campaigns.
We set up a drip email outreach campaign
Drip campaigns are where you send an initial mail, and then based on response keep sending relevant follow-up mails at regular intervals. We tried Yesware and MixMax for this — both are easy to use for email automation like this, and provide analytics like open rates and click rates, and cost $25 per user per month.
We wrote our drip emails and A/B tested them. But if you need help with writing drip email scripts, you can use tools like Drip Scripts — choose from one of the email sequences they have and then customize them.
We also made sure the emails were validated, to avoid bounces.
We conducted a number of A/B tests
- Subject line — HubSpot has a great list of email subject lines that can get you best open rates. Unbounce personalized their subject line with the reader’s name and got an amazing 43% open rate and 15% click-through rate.
- Content — Mailchimp has compiled a list of triggers that may get your email marked as spam. EmailAnalyzer is a nifty tool to test the spamminess of your emails and increase the chances of your emails getting delivered to recipients.
- Sender name — HubSpot conducted an experiment where they found that mails sent by a real person are more likely to be clicked than emails sent from a company name.
- Call to action — clear, catchy yet humble call-to-action
- Time sent — (a) Day of week, (b) Time of day, (c) Time zone
The Conversions
While personalized introductions by mutual contacts are clearly the best, the challenge is that you can only get so many introductions. So, we mentioned about mutual contacts to warm our emails — and this gave us much better open rates and leads as compared to the mails without any mention of mutual contacts.
786 SMB leads!
We generated 786 qualified SMB leads using the above approach. The drip campaign is still running so we hope to get more leads in the coming weeks — also, we plan to scale this up now that it’s working for us.
As the word spread, couple of entrepreneur friends approached us for help with building similar lead lists. Initially, we helped them on one-by-one basis, and then we built LeadCandy to help companies build their own smart lead lists for their outreach campaigns.
Our cost per lead with above approach has been $2, which is significantly lower as compared to the industry average of $51–100. One reason for our low cost is that we used our own database for the lead list, but it would still be considerably less if we paid for a product like LeadCandy or something similar. Also, automating the process helped reduce our cost.
Mail us at team@leadcandy.io for questions, comments or if you need any help with your lead generation.
If you enjoyed this article, please click 👏 to share it with others.
