Email prospecting: how to increase
the response rate to an email?

Email prospecting is a common practice used by sales people to get appointments. Inexpensive, emailing is affordable for most businesses. It is also perceived as less intrusive than telemarketing by decision makers. Indeed, they can consult an email at the time of their choice without necessarily interrupting their current activity.

Nevertheless, the success of email as a marketing channel has led to saturation in customers’ 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 that are sent in mass and without real added value. These will be deleted or placed in the junk folder.

To achieve your goals, you need to create emails that stand out. And, for that, it is advisable to bet on the personalization of each email.

Segment your contact lists

The e-mail prospecting file you have built up probably includes different types of target customers.

Indeed, they can be differentiated by the position they hold, the type of company or the sector of activity. In addition to socio-demographic data, behavioral data can also show you divergent interests. But above all, not all of them have the same maturity with respect to your offer. For some, the intention to buy is strong, while for others, it is not yet evident.

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

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

The segmentation allows to:

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

Sending automated emails to segmented lists is useful when prospects are not yet mature enough, in a lead nurturing logic. However, further along the purchase path, in the context of a commercial contact, personalization must be refined.

Conduct preliminary research on your target prospect

Segmentation allows you to group together prospects with common characteristics. It is therefore a good marketing starting point for building a sales pitch that addresses shared issues.

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

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

First, you can display the prospect’s record in your CRM tool to view their profile information and history. Then, you’ll also find relevant information on LinkedIn in several places:

• Its recent activity
• Recent news or events of his company

By doing this research, you’ll have a better chance of finding an engaging hook for your message. Indeed, you can bounce off one of his latest posts or a recent company success or important industry information.

For example, if you are an international management consultant and discover on LinkedIn that your prospect’s company will soon be opening new offices in England, you have an ideal angle of attack.

Adapt your message to the position of the contact in the buying process

Prospecting marketing emails work well when they provide value to the prospect. That’s why personalization is imperative. But personalizing a message does not only mean integrating the « first name » field in an emailing template. This is not nearly 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 depends largely on the sender’s ability to understand and use the context.

For this, it is necessary to :

• Know your target (profile and history)
• Conduct preliminary research to find a relevant hook
• Know your position in the buying process

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