How to use email outreach to grow your business

What’s an email outreach campaign?

An email outreach campaign is one where you send bulk emails that read like one-to-one messages to a huge email list.

Unlike marketing emails, emails used in an outreach campaign feel like personalized communications. Below, you’ve got an email sent as part of an email outreach campaign (geared at mobilizing the current user base for the client to generate referrals):

As you can see, there’s no easy way to tell if this is a bulk email or one that Rayne Water emailed “personally” to each one of its customers.

Marketing emails, on the other hand, give away that they’re mass emails. Here are some of the marketing emails we’ve done for our clients (as part of our email marketing service):

Following this overview of email outreach and how it differs from email marketing, let’s take a look at the five steps you need to follow to launch a successful email outreach campaign.

Here goes.

1. Building the (email) list

Making a list of the addresses you’ll be emailing is the first step to creating an effective email outreach campaign. The results you’ll see from your campaign hinge mainly on the quality of this list.

If you are doing an email outreach campaign to generate new business, you might want to find the emails of the decision-makers at the different companies you’re looking to do business with.

As you can tell, this is going to be a cold email outreach campaign.

This list-building can be manual, semi-automated, or even fully automated.

One way to go about collecting emails, for example, might be to research companies (that match your target customers) on LinkedIn and discover who their decision-makers are and then using an email finder tool like FindThatLead or Hunter to look up their emails from their LinkedIn profiles. Some of these tools even let you do a bulk search of companies that match your criteria and fetch emails for all in one go.

You can also buy email lists from reputed business directories and other email database services like Bookyourdata. In contrast to manual headhunting, which guarantees quality contacts (but isn’t scalable beyond a point), this method might end up with a saturated list.

A business can also “obtain” lists in other ways (read random “buying”), but this isn’t recommended due to the lower quality of leads.

2. Planning your email outreach campaign

After you’ve compiled a list of targets, it’s time to plan your campaign. Typically, you’ll need to plan a campaign of around 3 to 8 emails to warm up your email recipients to take action.

For instance, if you want your recipients to book a demo with you or place a service request, you’ll want to build up to that gradually through your initial email and its follow-up emails.

Traditionally, email consultants into outreach campaigns have suggested that the seventh touchpoint (or seventh email!) is where business deals are actually closed. However, this varies significantly by industry. You may be able to accomplish your goals with just three emails – so there’s no one correct number of emails in such a series.

That said, you’d need to experiment a bit with the email series to get this right.

3. Producing the campaign copy

Once you’ve plotted your email campaign, it’s time to develop your copy.

Here you write:

• The copy for your emails
• Subject lines
• Preview texts
• And the actual email copy for each email in your campaign

You might want to come up with different pairs for each of these if you wish to A/B test and find the best-performing versions.

4. Deploying the campaign

Once your copy is ready, it’s time to add your emails to your email software.

The whole point of an email outreach service is to send personalized emails that feel like one-to-one communications and not like mass mailings. In order to make your emails sound one-to-one and to make the recipient feel like they’re written specifically to them, it’s essential to send them from a service like Gmail and not from an email marketing service like MailChimp or Campaign Monitor.

Also, while you can use Gmail to schedule emails, we recommend using a third-party solution like Mailshake or HubSpot Sales to manage your email delivery and other campaign logistics, as these solutions allow you to connect your email account, create a sequence of scheduled emails, and track the actions of your recipients like opens and clicks.

At 2POINT, when a client signs up for our done-for-you email outreach service, we make them buy a domain similar to their business domain and get a Gmail ID for it. For example, if the client’s domain is website.com and they have a team member named Mike, we’ll ask them to get a domain name like “websites.com” and a Gmail ID like [email protected]. The campaign is then set up using their newly registered domain and email address. The purpose of this is to protect our client’s original domain from being flagged by email services like Google.

This new email is also prepared so it can send thousands of emails per day without upsetting Google. Google and other email providers take bulk emailing seriously and often consider it to be spam, so this step is an essential.

We also run a host of email list deliverability checks at this point to ensure that emails actually land in the inbox.

The best thing about email outreach campaigns is that they are entirely automated. When your email cadence is ready, you can schedule it so that it lands in your recipients’ inboxes at the right time. For example, if you plan to launch a B2B campaign, you can easily schedule the first email for Tuesday, its follow-up email for Friday, and the third and the last email to go on the following Tuesday. You get the drift.

5. Testing…  and it’s a go!

Before scheduling the campaign for your entire list, it’s time to send yourself a test campaign.

To start with, you’d want all the email(s) to land in your inbox.

You’d also want to ensure the emails look great and come across as personal emails (and not as marketing mails).

Additionally, it’s important to send a response and see how it’s handled.

IMPORTANT: Monitoring unsubscribe requests

It doesn’t matter if you’re emailing a cold list or one you’ve built on your business website, you’ll get a few requests to unsubscribe. It’s vital that you monitor your inbox closely for such requests and remove anyone who opts out of receiving your emails from the list as soon as possible.

Feels like a lot of work? It is.

As you can imagine, it can take a lot of effort to get an email outreach campaign going, right from building your email list to deploying the campaigns. If you’d rather have someone handle it all for you, check out our email outreach service.  With our email outreach service, we help clients just like you generate new and repeat business by sending one-to-one emails at scale. Check out how our fully done-for-you email outreach service works.