When the CEO Reads Your Email 120 Times
Cold Email Yields Hot Prospects
Recently an energy harvesting startup targeted 200 hand-picked sales prospects for an aggressive email and telephone campaign. To make contact, the team constructed a sequence of cold emails to each prospect. Each email message announced a technical milestone and provided product specifications and test results that related directly to industry pain points identified during Market Validation.
The startup used a CRM that enabled them to track when recipients open emails and what they click. After sending out the first email, they watched on the campaign dashboard as prospects read the message, often opening it more than once to study the information and follow the links. On the campaign dashboard below, the green circles show how many times the recipient opened the email message.
Because the outbound email message included plenty of technical details, it was not uncommon to see prospects open an email several times as they studied the data. But the startup was shocked when this appeared in the campaign dashboard:
120 views! What was the CEO of a quarter-billion dollar NASDAQ company doing reading that message 120 times in two days? The answer was simple: He had forwarded it to members of his team and a lot of internal discussion had followed. Every forward and reply was tracked, 120 of them. Just as the startup was about to phone the CEO directly, this email arrived:
Needless to say, the sales conversation progressed quickly after that.
Success formula for outbound email campaigns
Figure out what economic and competitive factors motivate your target market.
Create outbound messages containing data and test results, and offering evaluation units or Minimum Viable Products for testing. Keep it timely, relevant and interesting.
Track results and follow up with prospects who engage with the email messages, as indicated by open and click tracking.
Go wide in the organization to learn as much as possible about specific requirements before meeting in person. Use meetings to confirm requirements and collaborate on action plans.
Response Rates
What kind of response should you expect?
A few recipients will request to be removed from your list. Honor these requests quickly. If you use an email system like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, they will handle this automatically.
Between 10%-40% of your recipients should open your messages. Because these numbers depend on tracking pixels and browser behavior, they are not perfectly accurate. But they do give you an indication that your message is being read.
A timely, relevant and interesting message should generate 2-5% or more responses or inquiries. The first message in this campaign got 6%, including 3 meeting requests, 1 from the NASDAQ firm mentioned above.