Your Prospects Don't Reply Because You Have Nothing Good To Say
The problem with most outbound motions is that teams are identifying a basic Ideal Customer Profile and using the same message with all of them. There's a much better way...
The world's best SaaS companies trust Growth Engine X
We pride ourselves in being the largest Clay user on the platform by usage to serve our clients.
Exactly What We Do
Build
We create custom cold email campaigns tailored to your specific business and industry to drive consistent, predictable results.
Test
We set up campaigns where we consult and craft creative copy using email sending platforms to ensure your messages connect with prospects and stay out of spam.
Automate
We scale your campaigns to reach your entire addressable market. Currently sending 1.5 million targeted emails per month for our clients with consistently high deliverability.
Outbound Methodology Explained
Step 1: Bypass Spam Filters
Cold Email in the Past
In 2014, a company could have seen results in a cold email campaign by buying a list of prospects, adding them to a Mailchimp HTML campaign, and send out an email blast with a {{First Name}} custom variable and stay busy with the leads that rolled in.
In 2016, large marketing SMTPs like Mailchimp started cracking down and throttling your reach if you did this. No matter. You could still load up prospects into an Excel sheet and mail merge them into your Outlook account and send emails automatically.
In 2020, the need for a Sales Engagement tool took over the market. Although it was founded in 2014, Outreach.io made huge strives when Covid-19 hit and the world needed so send far more emails.
This has created increasingly diminishing returns because of the hammering of the domain reputation that using multiple inboxes on one domain causes.
Cold Email Today
Today, in order to optimize for delivery into your prospects inbox, it's a scientific endeavor. MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records need to be aligned and validated on the DNS.
Each inbox that you create needs to be on a domain that is completely separate from the main domain to keep all live communication and opted-in marketing email out of the spam box.
The inboxes need to join a warmup pool of others that are evading the spam filters in order to fake engagement. Artificial Intelligence is needed to send messages back and forth that make Google believe it's real traffic.
One day, 100% unique emails will probably need to be sent in order to evade the spam filters. Luckily we aren't there yet.
Growth Engine X manages and advises on these processes for all of our clients and partners in order to ensure optimized inbox placement.
Step 2: Identify your Ideal Customer Profile
Building Lists in the Past
In the past, buyers only had access to the information that was presented to them.
If they were looking for an accounting software, there weren't great ways for them to find and compare tools.
So what a full cycle sales rep could do is load up a list of Accounting Managers, send off emails through Outreach or Apollo and deliver their company approved template to every buyer.
Without much knowledge or options, a manager would take the meeting to learn about the new software.
This would keep a sales team's outbound engine running smoothly and their time could be spent on other tasks.
Very little relevance or personalization was needed to start a conversation with prospects.
With the onset of data companies like Apollo, ZoomInfo, Seamless, LeadIQ etc. Now every company in the world could unlock LinkedIn data and fire off emails to everyone in their market.
A new approach is necessary.
Building Lists Today
Today it's not as simple as uploading a list of prospects from a database into an email automation tool.
You need to think critically about the perfect type of prospect for your business.
Your business likely isn't the right fit for every possible prospect in your market. The more precise you can be with targeting your ideal customers, the higher conversion rate you'll see in your outbound campaigns.
By using custom data collection strategies focused on surfacing personalization data rather than just contact information, Growth Engine X can truly narrow in on the best possible prospects for your business.
Taking this approach prevents you from burning through every prospect in your target market with low response rates - it's a powerful way to ensure you're connecting with the right people in the right way.
Step 3: What do you even say?
Note: This is a prospect we sent an email to on behalf of one of our customers. They loved our copywriting so much, they made a 5 minute video and a LinkedIn post about it. Check it out.
Your Dad's Cold Email Template
As you get to this step, you probably know generally what I'm going to say and can even harken back to how cold email outreach used to sound at one of your prior organizations.
The subject lines were exploding with language like, "Don't hire another VP until you read this!" and the body of the email was filled with 2-3 paragraphs of copywriting explaining all of the widgets and features that come with your product or service.
Again, because information was not readily available, this was often the only information a prospect could find about a solution to one of their problems.
Today, this doesn't work because information is everywhere. Everyone is sequencing the same Hey {{First Name}} with a templated message that follows.
No one is replying because you have nothing good to say to them.
Data Empowered Copywriting
Now we have data to leverage in order to write far better emails. Emails under 75 words get the most responses. Interest based calls to action out perform "book a call on my calendar" type calls to action by a factor of 5. Speaking to prospect's with a 5th grade reading level increases response by 32%.
Using subject lines that look like a customer or colleague sent them an email (without lying of course) increases responses by 47%.
Adding personalizations based on their LinkedIn profile and their website as simple as calling out when they started at their role again increases responses by a factor of 5. Not to mention all of the data that we gathered in step 2 that we can leverage in our outreach as well.
Check out our copywriting training on YouTube for more but I hope I made the point that we don't need to blindly be writing emails anymore. There are frameworks and guidelines that we write all of our first drafts under for our clients in order to increase the odds of success.
Case Studies
Instantly.ai
- Developed creative data targeting approaches
- Delivered 12-15 interested prospects per day
Secureframe
- Increased open rates from 7-15% to 69.7%
- Improved email deliverability significantly
Website Closers
- Built repeatable data collection strategy
- Created predictable pipeline for sales team
Bequest Income Fund
- Overcame spam issues for financial messaging
- Provides ongoing leads for 6 salespeople
About Growth Engine X
Growth Engine X was founded by Eric Nowoslawski after working with 32 different startups at a tech incubator. He developed this methodology after finding that traditional sales approaches worked but couldn't scale effectively.
Our data-driven, personalized approach ensures that your emails bypass spam filters, your messages are relevant to each prospect, and your campaigns produce consistent, predictable results.
