A Definitive Guide to Create a Successful Email Outreach Campaign

Whatever your reason for wanting to set up your email outreach campaign, you are in good company; be it that you have tried everything with no solid results or whether you have quit halfway through, now you could rest assured, knowing that it does need to be this way anymore.

You will get to learn more about the best email campaigns where you will adopt a simple structure and have space to try, do further analysis and optimization so that you build that much-wanted email campaign that gets you the results that you want.

First, you got to choose the outcome that you want, the right crowd that you need to reach. Secondly, you would want to create a smart email with a strong call to action, building that remarkable campaign, and eventually employ the right tactics in the proper conditions for your email campaign.

After that you analyze and observe what’s working well and what’s not doing that great, then you reiterate with the proposed set of improvements till your perfect the game of email outreach campaigns.

If you want the full details, then here is the step-by-step manual that you could follow to ensure your email campaign is successful:

Step 1: Set Your Goals

You will need to know what you are aiming at before starting your email campaign because although it seems like a logical step, it could be easily overlooked and lead to losing track of why you started in the first place.

Campaign goals can be done for a variety of reasons: Ranging from prospecting, to brand awareness or announcement of new products or features, or even help close deals and accomplishing sales conversions

Also, it’s important to have your team on board with the end goal identify the metrics of a successful email campaign and whether they are being achieved or not, and focusing on metrics that really indicate success such as conversions and return of investment.

Step 2: Get the Right Prospects

Targeting the right audience is crucial to your email campaign efforts success. Luckily, there are a number of ways where you can find people who could be interested in what you are selling such as networking, outbound prospecting, inbound marketing, besides referrals as well.

It could take some time and effort to decide which way could be the most beneficial to your brand, way of doing sales or your product/service. However, you could adopt a mix of different approaches where it could put emphasis on the ROI for time and resources put into such a process. A useful tip is a fact that automation could be of immense help to get the lead data that you so much need, take for example LinkedIn Sales navigator, which enables you to find prospects based on industry, geography, number of employees and many factors more.

Step 3: Verify Prospects’ Emails and build Compliance

Once you have built your prospect list, now you need to make sure that you have the correct contact information, which can be done using tools such as Voila Norbert, where you can get the corresponding emails from your leads data.

As soon as you have a verified email list, you need now to get CAN-SPAM compliance, which help you make sure the delivery is complete and protect the integrity of your domain at the very same time.

1. Use Another Domain for Email

Because you wouldn’t want to risk sending so many emails from your primary domain which could potentially hurt your company’s reputation, so your safest bet is to use another domain for your email campaign when targeting new prospects.

2. Make an SPF Record

The SPF is short for Sender Policy Framework, which is a security mechanism that protects you from anyone using your email to send on your behalf. All you need is to set it up on your DNS server, the thing that defines and also verifies certain IP addresses that could alone send emails from your domain.

3. Make a DKIM Record

DomainKeys identified Mail or DKIM is another layer of security that verifies your true identity when sending emails, and similarly, it ensures a higher deliverability rate like SPF does.

4. Stick to CAN-SPAM Guidelines

The CAN-SPAM Act sets a group of guidelines for sending commercial ads, of which some main points are:

• Not sending false or misleading information
• Limit using of exclamation marks in the emails
• Not using too many “promotional words” such as “free”, “sales”, etc.
• Be clear about your intentions
• Limiting the use of images

Step 4: Create Your Emails

Crafting your emails is usually where people get caught up. Many have a tendency to over-analyze and try to perfect the email on the first outreach campaign. While you should spend a decent amount of time here, it isn’t good practice to dwell on things. Find or create a good template, run with it, analyze what works, and move on. With that in mind, there are still some best practices to adhere to when crafting your emails:

Some people tend to feel stuck when creating the email, and that’s due to over-analyzing and trying to achieve the perfect email form in their first campaign. Although it’s an important part, you should not be overthinking things; just find a nice email template, use it, and analyze then continue. Here is what could help you formulate a decent email template:

Subject Line and Snippet

It’s important here to grasp attention, especially due to the fact that 47% of emails are either ignored or opened only because of the subject line. Here is what a winning subject line could look like:

• Being short and concise, which means around 3 to 4 words and a maximum of 6 words. This gives them a chance to get noticed among a piled-up email inbox
• Personalize as much as you can by using a prospect’s name, his company name, or a shared experience. This could have a good impact on increasing open rates.
• Maintain a casual tone to make sure your subject line does not look like spammy offers that go to junk. Talk to your prospect as if you were talking to a friend.

Email Body

Here is where you should be talking about your prospect, so you really should not be talking initially about your product or service. Start by exposing a pain point or introducing your value proposition or even catching attention by sharing some interesting facts, and it’s better to use something relevant that includes a proof using numbers or undeniable facts that help instantly brings you the attention and trust of your reader.

Call-To-Action (CTA)

Since you have successfully maintained the reader’s attention till now, it’s about time to use a call to action or CTA, which is a request that is usually answered positively or negatively, yet it remains a very important part to include by the end of your email. It has been observed that emails with a CTA increase clicks by more than 300% and sales by 1600%!

Signature

Signature could be the least paid attention to part of the email, and also a part that your customers scroll to check when they open the email, so you could make it work for you instead and provide overlooked benefits; you could, for example, include social media profiles, links to recent article or an award you received. This has a huge benefit when it comes to building credibility and more rapport with your prospects.

Step 5: Build Your Campaign

As excited you could be to start sending your first finished email, it’s wiser o structure the rest of your email outreach campaign, which includes setting your email schedule and what your upcoming emails should be covering.

While you could do that manually, there are tools that could automate the process for your such as Mailshake, a very useful tool that could automate sending your emails for you. As for waiting time, it’s better not to wait for a long time before you send a follow-up email as not to waste the momentum you gained and so you sustain maximum impact. Here is an example of how it could work:

• Day 1:
  Send your first email

• Day 4:
  Do some engagement on social media

• Day 5:
  Time to send the first follow-up email
• Day 8:
  Consider giving them a call
• Day 12:
  Time to send the second follow-up email
• Day 16:
  Engage with their interactions on social media
• Day 22:
  Time to send the third follow-up email

And then you could repeat at least once per month. This isn’t the exact plan to follow, just use some common sense to spread things a little and find out what other channels you could use to engage them, and you will find that your efforts will be less perceived as sales or spam.

Step 6: Starting Your Campaign

Now it’s time to launch your plan. Before sending though, consider reviewing your email content one last time either by reading out loud or enlisting the help of a colleague so that you make sure they are error-free. As for launching times, you could pick Tuesday and choose times between 8 AM and 10 AM or between 3 PM and 4 PM. While those times could enhance your open rates, don’t hesitate to make changes as needed for any other reasons you may have.

Step 7: Observing and Optimizing Results

Now it’s time to measure your email campaign efforts to ensure the future ones are even more effective. It’s important to inspect & analyze the campaign, templates, and launch activities so you know the formula you used is performing well or not.

Here as some metrics to observe:

Delivery rates: Which tells you how good your list is. A high rate indicates a high reach for your prospects while a low one might show that you need to further verify the prospects list.

Open rates and CTR: This shows you multiples things; that your subject line was catchy, and the timing was good, and that the content was well perceived by your prospects.

Conversion rates: Which is the most important metric ever, because as long as your email campaign is making good conversions, then it means you are performing quite well, and it’s better to keep doing what makes the campaign successful.

That way you could keep track of your efforts, observe your metrics, and decide whether or not to make any required changes before launching your next upcoming campaign.

Winning in your Email Outreach: Final word

In the end, the success of your email campaign normally is dependent on the time, effort and resources you give to it. That way you ensure continual success of your email campaigns to come and make sure you achieve high metrics that continue to deliver value to your business while leveraging maximum usage of your email channel.