Email prospecting: how to get more feedback?

Email prospecting is a practice commonly used by salespeople to obtain appointments. Inexpensive, emailing is affordable for most businesses . It is also perceived as less intrusive than teleprospecting by decision-makers. In fact, they can consult an email at the time of their choice without necessarily interrupting their current activity.

However, the success of email as a marketing channel has led to saturation in customer inboxes. In B2B, a decision-maker receives up to 100 prospecting messages daily.

Therefore, if you want your messages to be opened, read and generate engagement, you must optimize every element of your email campaign. Recipients quickly detect messages sent in mass and without real added value. These will be deleted or placed in spam.

To achieve your goals, you need to create emails that stand out from the crowd. And, for this, it is important to focus on the personalization of each email.

Segment your contact lists

The email prospecting file that you have created probably includes different types of target customers. 

Indeed, they can differentiate themselves by the position they occupy, the type of company or even the sector of activity. In addition to socio-demographic data, behavioral data can also show you divergent interests. But above all, not everyone has the same maturity in relation to your offer. For some, the purchasing intention is strong while, for others, it is not yet evident.

In your prospecting campaigns, you are not going to send the same message to a mature prospect as to a prospect who barely knows you. Likewise, you will create separate messages for recipients with different profiles.

To do this, you must define segmentation criteria that are relevant to your offer and your objectives. Then, you will create messages tailored to each segment. By segment, we designate a homogeneous group of individuals with similar characteristics.

Segmentation allows you to:

• Select the most mature prospects for commercial contact
• Personalize your messages according to the chosen segmentation criteria

Sending automated emails to segmented lists is useful when prospects are still relatively immature, in a lead nurturing logic. On the other hand, further along the purchasing journey, in the context of making commercial contact, personalization still needs to be refined.

Do preliminary research on your target prospect

Segmentation allows you to group prospects with common characteristics. It is therefore a good marketing starting point for building an argument responding to shared issues.  

However, it is not enough to guarantee high performance for your commercial emails. Indeed, competition in inboxes is so severe that only the most engaging messages will deliver results.

To succeed, you must create emails that are perfectly aligned with the issues of your recipients. This is why it is essential to do preliminary research before sending a prospecting email.

First, you can display their prospect file in your CRM tool to consult their profile information and history. Then you will also find relevant information on LinkedIn in different places:

• His recent activity
• Recent news or events from your company

By doing this research, you will be more likely to find an engaging hook for your message. In fact, you will be able to pick up on one of its latest posts or on a recent success of the company or important sectoral information.

For example, if you do international management consulting and discover on LinkedIn that your prospect's company will soon open new offices in England, you have an ideal angle of attack.

Adapt your message to the contact's position in the purchasing journey

Prospecting marketing emails work well when they provide value to the prospect. This is why personalization is imperative. But personalizing a message does not just mean integrating the “first name” field into an emailing template. This is far from enough.

More than personalization, we should even talk about contextualization. An email is effective when you send the right message to the right person at the right time. The level of performance of an email campaign largely depends on the sender's ability to understand and use the context.

For this, it is necessary to:

• Know your target (profile and history)
• Do preliminary research to find a relevant hook
• Know your position in the purchasing journey

Indeed, you must adapt your messages by providing value at each stage of the sales cycle. Emailing is built in sequences. Most contacts will not react from the first message but only after several contacts. With each new message, you have to think about providing value and not causing rejection. The first contact email is not used to sell. It serves to provide the means to engage the prospect to continue the conversation.