Five Ways to Put Your Prospecting Lists to Better Use
We come across and work with email prospect lists all the time from various sources. Sometimes from a sponsored event or a webinar we hosted, other times it might be from a list we exported from our CRM, or from when we use LeadIQ to build a list from our LinkedIn searches (we use it too you know). What comes next however is critical. We don’t want to waste their time but we need to follow up in a timely fashion, and blasting our message to the masses (aka “spamming” them) becomes very tempting.
Pro tip — spamming sucks. Don’t be that guy.
Spamming is a huge waste of time that can ultimately hurt your company’s reputation and blow your chances of making a great impression with a prospect. On average it takes 6–8 impressions with a prospect to convert them into a customer, so why would you start by spamming them? There are a lot of other great ways to build and use these lists. In fact, we have four ways that will take your list and kill it when prospecting:
Building a custom audience for social media ads
Using social ads is a great way to get your message or your product in front of the right people. While every social network is different, they all allow for you to build an audience based on their location, interests and professions. Twitter and Facebook will also allow you to create custom audiences based on email addresses, which allows you to target not only them, but lookalike audiences as well.
Setting up audiences on either network does require you to add payment options and may interfere with ongoing campaigns from your social media or marketing teams, so as an individual in a team it may be a good idea to connect with them before launching. They may also be willing to work with you and your lists to create custom campaigns for you through company channels.
Bulk adding connections to LinkedIn
Did you know that you can import your address book onto LinkedIn and bulk send connection requests? No? Oh…well, you can and its pretty simple:
Log into LinkedIn and go to My network → Connections
Hit the gear icon in the upper right hand corner
Import the Lead List as an Outlook Contacts CSV
If you haven’t already prepared your CSV file, follow the directions on screen, then select and click “import”
After it Finishes, click “add connections”
All of your prospects will receive a request to connect with you from LinkedIn. This can be a great way to get more information about them and track their professional growth from one company to another. This can also give you a warmer intro when you do send an individualized follow up to them.
Follow your prospects on Twitter
Similar to LinkedIn, you can import your contacts to Twitter, however you can’t import thousands of contacts at once otherwise your account will be suspended. This tactic is best for smaller lists or batches of 100 at a time:
On the right of your Twitter homepage is a “Who to follow” section. Click “Find friends” toward the bottom
A list of networks will appear (Gmail, Outlook etc). Choose the network your contacts are stored in to search your contacts
A window will pop up asking you to authorize access (say “yes”)
Pick and choose which contacts you would like to follow. They will be notified that you are now following them
repeat for any of the other networks you would like to use
Creating lists of influencers, journalists or writers
Having influencers and journalists who are actively engaging your brand with their followers is obviously great exposure for you and your product, and it can be a lot easier to win over one influencer versus thousands of prospects (and they are always looking for cool new products to try out and share with their audience). Having an influencer in your corner can help create positive exposure to your other prospects as well. With access to their contact information, it will be much easier for you to send a thoughtful email with your opportunity to them.
LeadIQ customers have an advantage here as they can simply run some LinkedIn searches with their important keywords and start building their lists immediately.
Sending personalized follow up emails
I mean, you need to follow up with them, otherwise all this work you’ve just done would be for nothing. Emailing them after they have seen your ads and you’ve connected with them on LinkedIn/Twitter helps to create more familiarity with you and your brand, making it more likely for them to open and respond to your carefully crafted email to them. Leveraging your new connections can also help with understanding them and how to connect best with them. Perhaps you can use humor in your email.
Leveraging any of these tactics will help you with taking your prospecting to the next level. Using more than one in tandem will increase their awareness and familiarity with you, warming them to you even more. By building a relationship of familiarity with one another, you will be able to connect with them on a more personal level than had you just sent that flat generic email.
Originally published at blog.leadiq.io on March 1, 2016.
