How to Run Outreach Without Looking Spammy
"I want to make sure I don't look like all of those spammy people who reach out to me with horrible messages."
Many people who come talk to us about Lead Cookie are concerned about looking "spammy.”
This concern is rightfully justified because a lot of outreach in the current market is horrible, spammy, and irrelevant.
So how do you make sure you don't come across as a spammer?
How do you get your message to break through the noise?
That is what we will cover in this article.
Why is there so much "spam" out there?
Over the past 5 years, we have seen a rise in automation tools focused around prospecting. Because cold sales outreach is an activity enjoyed by a rare few, software vendors decided to build tools to automate outreach.
This lead to a rise of email software tools like Mailshake along with many black hat LinkedIn automation tools.
At first, these tools were great because they were only known of by the outbound experts who were deep into these industries. But as their popularity increased, so did the amount of spam and messages on the market.
To be fair, this is not the fault of the tools... but instead, the fault of the users.
At Lead Cookie, we still use Mailshake today for ourselves, and for many of our clients. We love the tool and get amazing results with it...
BUT... it's also possible that a rookie gets their hands on the tool and blasts out a horrible message to thousands of people...
With great power comes great responsibility... and lots of spam...
How do you stand out from spam?
There are 4 key components that help your message stand out from spam.
Targeting
Value Proposition
Relevance
Social Proof
Messaging
1) Targeting
Every single day, I get spammy cold emails of people asking to guest blog on Jake-Jorgovan.com... If they took even 60 seconds to view my website, they would see that it's a personal blog that does not accept guest posts...
Yet countless spammers load up my high domain ranking website into their outbound queue and spam me relentlessly.
This is an example of poor targeting.
Another example is from a friend who hired a low-cost outbound firm to get him conversations with CPAs. Yet he was quickly getting booked on calls with in-house accountants at large companies. Once again, low-quality targeting led to spammy poor-quality outreach.
Everything else is pointless if you reach the wrong people
At the end fo the day, if you don't contact the right people, then nothing else matters. Yet for many outbound companies, they just use the pray and spray approach to outbound.
Getting clear on your targeting and making sure you go after the right people is one of the most crucial steps to outbound.
Hand-qualify your leads
At Lead Cookie, we are proud that we have built the ability to hand qualify every lead we send to. While this takes time, it is often worth doing because it ensures that every single lead you contact is going to be a great fit for the message you are sending.
Build many small segments
Another thing you can do with targeting to improve quality is to build many small segments. For example, let’s say we have a marketing firm that works with home services company.
What many low quality firms will do is run one generic campaign at all home services companies. This leads to generic messaging that comes across quite spammy.
An alternative is to build many small segments. For example, tackle each vertical individually such as plumbers, HVAC, roofers, etc. Then you can niche down even further and do campaigns around roofers in Kansas City. Roofers in St. Louis. etc.
By building multiple small niche campaigns, you can make your messaging very targeted and relevant, which will improve results and make your campaigns look hand-crafted, even when done in volume.
2) Value Proposition
Once you make sure you are targeting the right people, the next thing that will set you apart from the competition is your value proposition.
Your value proposition is incredibly important because it showcases how you are different and why people should pay attention to you in just 1-2 sentences.
Your value proposition is not your business, but instead what your business can do for your target market.
The common framework we use for value propositions at Lead Cookie is:
I help X do or accomplish Y through Z.
X = Who you help
Y = Benefit you bring or pain you solve
Z = How you help them
Your value proposition will make or break your campaign. A good and narrow value proposition will help you stand out from the noise, and a generalist and weak value proposition will have you ignored in a heartbeat.
Good value proposition: We help growing SaaS companies build React applications fast through staff augmentation.
Bad Value Proposition: We help startups and enterprises build full stack software products.
The good value proposition is narrow and specific.
The bad value proposition is generalist.
3) Relevance
The next thing that will set your campaign apart from spam is relevance. Ultimately, spam is a message this so irrelevant to you that you don't care to see it.
But, when someone reaches out to you with something of interest, and something that is relevant, it may catch your eye.
For example, I don't need SEO or web design services despite having countless people reach out to me via email every day...
But, I recently had someone reach out who offered to help get me published in Inc & Forbes... that was interesting. That was something that I actually am interested in. It was relevant to me...
Another example of relevance can be location. For one client, we ran a campaign in his local city and used the relevance of being from the same city to generate phenomenal results. But as we went to other geographies, we found that results tapered off because we did not have that same relevance.
To overcome this, I have often opened up a message sequence with something like "Chicago is one of my favorite cities." Even though I am not in Chicago, I use the prospect’s location to tie in relevance and make the message seem more bespoke and custom.
4) Social Proof
Good social proof is an amplifier for any outbound campaign. In fact, you can have a somewhat horrible outreach, but still produce great results if your social proof is good enough.
For example, I get pitched guests for my podcast every day. Many of these pitches are horrible. Some are even good pitches... but just not of interest for my show.
Yet one caught my eye recently. It was by all means a horrible, templated, and spammy outbound campaign... BUT the social proof was amazing. The person had an incredible track record of success and was very credible.
As a result, I booked them on my show despite how bad the outreach was.
Great social proof is an amplifier that will improve the results of any of your outreach and help set you apart from the spam.
5) Messaging
Finally, the messaging is the last piece that will set your campaign apart. The messaging incorporates everything we have been talking about so far, but is worth its own topic.
With messaging, the key to not sounding spammy is to keep your message short, personable, and clear.
Don't paste a wall of text that is overwhelming to read. Instead, try to keep your message short and to the point so it looks like it was written by hand.
One rule of thumb we often follow at Lead Cookie for writing copy is
"If the copy is so long that you have to decide if you want to read it, it's too long. Just make it so short that you read it without having to commit to reading it."
An example of a short and sweet message from my own outreach campaign is
"Hi ____, great to connect. We turn consultants into thought leaders through content marketing. Would you be interested in learning more?"
It is short, to the point and gets the value proposition across. It's so short you just read it, and as a result, many prospects respond.
Be human
The final piece of advice we have is to be human. When writing your messaging, don't be overly formal in your outreach. Instead, try to write like a human. Just be natural. Keep sentences short and sweet. Grammar does not have to be perfect.
In fact, some of our best campaigns have included an emoticon in one of the messages... a little bit of human touch goes a long way.
Keep it short and sweet, write like you would naturally talk, and keep it simple.
Quality over quantity
As a final conclusion to this article, we want to hammer home that the world of outreach is moving to a quality over quantity game. While outbound will always require some level of volume in order to produce results, the volume does not need to be as high as you think.
One of our recent campaigns had a total contact volume of only 373 leads. Yet we saw a 28% response rate and 13% interest rate because we aimed for quality in our approach. That level of response rate is unheard of for most outbound campaigns!
The days of "spray and pray" are coming to an end. While high volume campaigns still have their time and place, we anticipate that the market is going to require more and more quality focused outbound.
Interested in ramping up sales for your company? Reach out to Lead Cookie, we are your new digital sales team.
