The key to effective email marketing is to build a perfectly targeted mailing list tailored to your business needs. The last thing you want to do is to buy a list of email addresses repeatedly used for mass mailing by plenty of your competitors.
Why not to buy a ready-to-go mailing list when it’s so damn easy
The main reason is that purchased email lists were already used bazillion times and it’s more than likely that they won’t be ever changed. Also, you never know what kind of companies or direct recipients are there, so you can’t be sure whether they match your ideal client’s profile. And remember: you need more hot leads, not just a huge number of cold emails sent out.
Average statistics for bought email lists suck. There are a lot of invalid email addresses, which has an impact on your domain reputation and may get your domain blacklisted. (I talked about emails’ deliverability and domain’s reputation in my previous post.)
Just how clean is your data? Identify where your data requires attention, allowing you to choose which areas to improve.
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If you use a purchased email list, you can expect your reply rate to reach 1-2% – and it’s the best-case scenario. With a well-targeted list you can easily achieve the reply rate of 20-30%. So you’d have to send over ten times more emails based on a bought list to get the same number of answers and in the end your domain will get blacklisted and your emails won’t be delivered. Doesn’t make sense, huh?
The magic of a perfectly targeted mailing list
To build an awesome mailing list you need to define your target group: what type of companies are your best clients? who do you usually talk to regarding potential cooperation? Companies that are similar to your favourite and most satisfied clients should be your major focus.
While talking to them you actually know their concerns and can help them by solving real problems – like you’ve done for a couple of companies from their market. Don’t be shy and tell your leads exactly how you helped company X from the same industry to achieve impressive results. Targeting + personalization can really work wonders and boost your reply rate. You just need to find the right people first.
There are plenty of ways to find great leads that will become your clients if you play the cards right, but right now I will tell you about my favourite one, which is… networking!
How to use your network to get more clients?
LinkedIn, as you know, is a truly powerful tool that can bring a new biz to your company. But you don’t need to dig deeply. Actually, the best leads are just in front of you. You can find them in your satisfied clients’ networks.
Take a look at one of your client’s profile and then check their connections. There is an easy way to view only the connections you might be interested in, for example CEOs from London or CTOs of the Berlin based SaaS companies. Let me show you how to cut it right on the GIF below:
As you can see on the video above, you should click the ‘connections’ button on one’s profile and it will get you directly to their list of Linkedin contacts.
Type the phrase that you are looking for, for instance ‘CEO’, then click ‘advanced search’ and – voilà. Looks familiar? Now you can see the results in a well-known view and filter them by location, industry etc.
Using your network to build a targeted list of prospects is easy and fast, and, which is even more important, the selected people will be probably interested in what you wrote to them and won’t consider you as a spammer. You can also choose a few contacts that you have a feeling are the best fits for your company and ask your common connection for a referral and introduction.
The borderline between outbound marketing and SPAM is really thin and you don’t want to cross it. That’s why personal approach is the most important thing, both when building a prospects’ list and writing email templates. If you talk only to people who are your perfect potential customers and you sound like a human, not a bot, then you are one step closer to become a cold mailing ninja.
Article From: getprospects.io
