How to increase email open rates to cold prospects
The numbers on the above picture are from a campaign that AltiSales is currently running. It's allowing us to book on average, one demo per day with one SDR. As the campaign reaches maturity (where we have leads on all stages of the sequence), I expect this campaign to produce 2-3 meetings per day with one SDR.
Depending on what data you look at, using the phone today might be better or worse than 10 years ago to set up meetings with prospective clients (a.k.a. build pipeline). However, email is also worse, and so is every other channel. It's just getting crowded out there. Most people are just accepting the fact that their open rates will be ~35% or less.
Execution eats strategy for breakfast.
Is the phone dead?
If you’ve never cold-called and you don’t understand the art of persuasion over the phone, or the tools in the market available for cold-calling, you will probably not be able to build a solid cold calling script, give good feedback to your reps, or ever make any significant progress on the phone. Without any experience, or proper time for testing, the phone is dead.
Is email dead?
When it comes to email, open and reply rates are tanking. With today’s technology of marketing and sales automation, you and everyone else is getting 2-10x as many emails and it's just getting worse. We only open and respond to a certain amount of emails and that number is not growing at the same pace.
For instance, every morning I get to the office, and delete 50-100 emails I have gotten in the past 12 hours. Then I proceed to open 3-8 emails that really matter to me (the majority, if not all, from people I work with) and I reply to ~50% of those.
So what’s the long term strategy?
Doing something that none of your competitors can easily learn how to do is the only way to have a sustained competitive advantage, and will allow you to create predictable revenue at scale.
In another blog post, I covered the 5 steps to the call, which I teach every company building an outbound engine. These steps are hard to implement unless you have someone very experienced teaching you exactly how to build your first script, review call recordings, iterate on your script, train your reps and build your unique offering over the phone.
Hiring someone good to help you with outbound is expensive. In the meantime, here's one tip you can use to increase your email open rates.
Going above and beyond the competition
Cold-call prospects and use this script when you get to voicemail:
Hi {{first_name}}, this is {{YOU!}} with {{your_company}}. I sent you an email yesterday about {{subject of email or topic covered}} but I have not heard back from you. Can you give it a quick glance and reply back? Again it’s {{YOU!}} with {{your_company}}. Thanks!
Note: Do not leave a call back number. Businesses have caller ID technology and they can just call you back if they want to. They rarely do. Instead, make every word count and ask for a reply to your email. Doing so, you'll get their attention. Re-estate your name and company name at the end of the voicemail so they can search their inbox easily.Â
If you are respectfully persistent with prospects, call them and email them several times and leave voicemails, your likelihood to get your emails read and replied to is so much higher.
I hope this helps. Go ahead, make the calls, leave voicemails and check if you get better email metrics. I certainly do. Oh! and if you've done the math and realized that spending $X0,000 for a consultant like me is worth it, go ahead and message me. If not, just follow my blogs and you'll get plenty of free help.
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