TL;DR
– Test two ideal customer profiles for a week with precise criteria-based segmentation
– Short timelines of one week allow for rapid experiments comparing ROI between 3-5 simultaneous campaigns
– Write 80% about prospects and 20% about the product because no one is interested in features
– Integrate LaGrowthMachine with CRM via Zapier to track conversion rates and analyze cohorts
– Measure quality beyond MQLs by tracking which audiences generate the highest closing rates
When you are a startup company (like us at Whaly), everything is complex: you have few/low resources, you are under high time pressure, and of course, you don’t know which are the best campaign strategies you should implement.
One thing doesn’t change: outbound is an essential part of your business. When inbound marketing is relatively low (which is often the case in the early stages), it can be the easiest and most effective way to get more leads.
First, you will have to figure out all the classic steps before doing it efficiently like targeting the right people, scraping and validating emails (which can be done with Linkedin Email Scraper and automatically with LaGrowthMachine 😻) before getting to the execution part.
To know what performs best, in terms of MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads), measuring the success of your campaigns can become tricky.
Over time, we’ve all experienced different setups, trying to understand which campaigns were generating the best leads over time.
This is a quick retrospective on our first campaigns, what we experienced, what failed, and most importantly, how measuring allowed us to improve the conversion rate by +30% in 10 days!
And how do we do it? Well, a good way to do it is to make the whole cold emailing process as light as possible on 3 points: audience, timeline, messaging. (Discover here the best cold email tools). And then measure everything.
Find your audience
Maximizing your outbound is about one key thing: capturing the right audience.
Believe me, everything else is secondary.
If the audience you are targeting truly needs your product/service, the channel, the message, and the tone won’t have that much impact.
When you target the wrong audience (like I did when I started using LaGrowthMachine 🤦♂️), you damage your brand and waste a lot of resources!
And when someone replies to you with a simple “I don’t want to receive any more emails from you, please remove me from your list”, it hurts.
When we (at Whaly) started our first outreach campaigns, we weren’t sure about the exact targeting (ideal customer profile and buyer persona). So we wanted to try many things to help us fine-tune that.
This was a big mistake and a waste of time (and money 💰).
A good quick and simple strategy is to test 2 campaigns over a week, with the goal of targeting 2 ICPs (ideal customer profile, i.e.: ideal customer profile = types of companies) and one persona.
A good ICP is precise and should include criteria such as the number of employees, market/industry, geography, internal organization… that makes your product or services truly relevant. For us, we realized that the tech employee % was important, as Whaly helps non-technical teams build their analytics by themselves: we save a lot of time for developers and data teams by making business teams autonomous. Therefore, we create more value for companies that have few engineering resources or want to focus all of them on product development.
Short timelines = faster experiments
An ideal timeline for an experiment is a week with two campaigns so you can compare the ROI. People tend to respond quickly by email or LinkedIn, so launch your tests as soon as possible, with 3-5 campaigns.
This way, you’ll be able to measure the ROI of your campaigns after 10 days: keep the campaign that performs best in terms of replies or sales. Discard the second one and replace it with a new campaign.
A short timeline reduces the risk of wasting a lot of time before knowing that the campaign is not working.
Expert Tip 🧠
Make the message personal
Cold email messages are for getting replies and setting up meetings, not for selling your product.
Nobody cares about your product ← read that again
Because there are tons of products or services that are extremely similar to yours, especially for prospects who are not as expert as you are.
A good message is 20% about you (your product or service) and 80% about your target.
Try to make it personal.
People can smell from hundreds of miles away when you’ve written an email like a robot.
A good way to know if you’ve done it personally is to read your email out loud and ask yourself “does this sound like a human?”. Do the work, try to close the gap between you and your prospects.
Measure and track everything
Measuring can be tricky. The first experiment is easy. When you start repeating and launching many campaigns it can be a real mess.
After 3 months of campaigns, I felt like I didn’t know what was working and what wasn’t. A good measurement mechanism is to leverage your marketing automation integration with your CRM.
With LaGrowthMachine, you can connect Pipedrive, Hubspot natively, and almost any other CRM using the Zapier (vs Make) integration.
Once your account is connected to your CRM, you can track conversion rates and iterate on experiments much faster.
The ideal for lead generation is to analyze cohorts and conversion rates with your CRM. (Don’t forget to read our article on Lead Gen Forms on Linkedin)
They allow you to analyze the conversion rate level by week and make it super easy to take action on your campaigns over time.
Another key measure is to compare the quality of the leads you generate.
For example, going beyond simple MQL analysis by checking which campaigns (and audiences) are generating the best number of closed deals.
In our case, one target audience was generating fewer MQLs, but the closing rates were very high. It would have been almost impossible to understand this without collecting the data in our CRM.
Of course, we measure everything with Whaly, both the impact of LaGrowthMachine campaigns’ MQLs and the conversion rates of each deal.
In a nutshell, Whaly is the platform to centralize your scattered data and build metrics on top of them. It’s the one-stop shop for:
- Getting a full view of your lead gen campaigns on the number of qualified leads (check our Lead Scoring methods) generated by reconciling your lead gen tool and your CRM (e.g. LaGrowthMachine, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.)
- Building a cohort analysis and digging into each campaign to leverage what’s working best and replicate it over time
- Sharing your analysis with your entire team for your different retros and OKRs (Objective & Key Results)
In Whaly, you can map your campaign records with your CRM.
So whether you want to reconcile data based on campaign names, dates, or emails, custom integrations always work.
Once you have that, you can start digging into channels and messaging.
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Conclusion
In summary: we improved our outreach campaign performance by following these 4 simple steps:
- Experiment with a small number of campaigns at first: two is a good way to compare performance
- A short timeline makes iteration faster (~ one week of campaign and a couple of days of measurement)
- Make the message personal, don’t sound like a robot
- Measure and track performance across all your tools