Prepping For Your September Outbound Campaign: List Building & Email Setup
After our last post that looked at how you can use the summer sales slump to gear up for a successful September and Q4. In response to that post, our audience asked us to next focus on preparing an outbound campaign for this coming September (when the leaves start to fall, the kids go back to school, and pumpkin is back on the menu).
We’ll start by defining your target audience, building a list, and getting email accounts warmed and ready for sending. This follows best practices that we’ve developed from 700+ outbound campaigns.
Nail Down Your Target Audience
Take a good hard look at who you've had success selling to this year. Who are your dream clients (or customers)? What situations are they in (both at a business and industry level)? Get specific here. Then look at the similarities/trends so you can find more people/companies like them.
Company:
Their industry / company type. Such as SaaS businesses in the FinTech space
Company or department size. 51-200 employees or an IT department with 10-20 people
Years in operation
Revenue (although this can be tricky as much of the data available is not particularly accurate)
People:
What is their role/title? It could be the founders or VP of Operations.
Years of experience / time in role.
Situation:
What outside indicators can you find that show that these companies or the people at them are in need of your help now?
Examples: web traffic, reviews, upcoming regulations, turnover, funding, technologies used on their website, job postings for specific roles, etc.
Build Your List
Once you’re clear on the companies and people you want to go after, it’s time to build your list. The typical starting place is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but there are also a range of industry specific tools and databases you can use (Crunchbase, Ocean, ZoomInfo, Apollo, etc.).
In practice we find databases, specifically for companies, a good starting point, but the reality is to get a solid list it still takes good old-fashioned manual effort to ensure a company is an ideal fit and to collect data on them you can use to customize your messaging. It’s why we combine a host of databases and tools with our human research team to get our clients highly-targeted outreach.
Get Ready for Email
Unlike LinkedIn, where you just need Sales Navigator, email takes a bit of setup. You need to be using secondary domains (think lead-cookie.com instead of leadcookie.com) for sending cold email if you don’t want to risk your actual domain’s sending reputation.
NOTE: Please don’t skip this as there is nothing worse than having regular client communication go to spam because you ruined your sending reputation.
Go buy new domains, authenticate them with the proper DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and put Gmail or Outlook accounts on them. Then spend a few weeks warming them (sending/receiving emails) to build up the sending reputation. Often email sending softwares have a warming feature included that you can use. We like Woodpecker and Smartleads. If you hit a snag authenticating your domain, send us a message. We offer one-off help with ensuring your domain/email accounts are properly setup to maximize deliverability (i.e. not going directly to spam).
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So get out there and get these ducks in a row. After that, you’ll be ready for the next steps (updating your LinkedIn + website, crafting messaging, and preparing follow-ups + optimizations; these will be covered in our next post.
