When we hired our first outbound rep (a business development rep, or BDR) we had what seemed like infinite tests to run. Should we target individual companies, specific industries, or just “spray and pray” with generic emails?
And within each one of these campaigns, we aimed to perform multivariate testing on our subject lines, email templates, and number of touch-points. Reading everything I could get my hands on about prospecting, there seemed to be some golden rules:
- Keep it short & sweet
- Be polite
- Include only one call to action
- Don’t be salesy
I wanted to a) validate these general tenets on my own and b) get data-driven down to the most effective wording.
The first step was to launch two parallel campaigns. We launched a generic, non-personalized mass campaign to about 500 contacts we culled quickly from our database. Our response rate was extremely low – about 5% – but because we targeted so many people, that still generated a meaningful number of leads with rather minimal effort.
The second campaign we tried was very targeted – we came up with a list of companies that we thought would make excellent clients, found our ideal champions at each company (about 5-10 people per company), and carefully reached out to them, industry by industry. We crafted a story about insights relevant to their market, found case studies, and built a list of references. Our response rate was very high – but the numbers were roughly the same as our spray and pray attempt, and the effort involved was greater.
So, we were convinced the first method was the right method. However, the biggest insight for us came a few weeks later: the lead quality turned out to be much higher in the second experiment. These leads had a much greater chance of converting to real opportunities, as the companies and the people had been so carefully curated.
We tried a third experiment – what if we spent the time and effort carefully curating a list, but spent less time on the crafted email? This seemed to be the perfect combination; our results validated this hypothesis. We had only a slightly lower response rate – about 30% – but saved ourselves hours by building repeatable outbound campaigns.
Next came the fun part – experimenting on these generic emails. Was short better than long? Was polite better than witty? Did people tend to respond to email #1, #2, #8…?
After a couple of months of running tests, we generated some surprising results.
1) Response rate from email #2 is roughly 3 times greater than the initial email. Email #2 was typically along the lines of “Just following up on that last email?” but it really seemed to make a huge difference in response rates. Evidently we humans need that extra nudge.
2) Emailing every day versus every other day is twice as effective. We assumed we’d be really annoying people by bombarding them, but it seems this is not the case. Repetition breeds familiarity…
3) Humor works! We ran several experiments where we sent a 5th touchpoint Hail Mary email that incorporated humor – i.e., “Oh my god! Have you been abducted by aliens? I can’t imagine why else you have not responded.” Shockingly, this actually works. Our response rate is nearly 20% on these – and keep in mind this is the FIFTH touch point. Meaning, they have ignored your previous four emails.
4) Mentioning competitors is not effective. We thought the Challenger Sales Method would lend itself nicely to outbound, but it seemed to have very little effect on response rates. In a real-life pitch, this method is extremely powerful – “Your competitors all use us” – but oddly, not so much in email. Perhaps it’s too salesy?
Our campaigns now consists of the following approach, as proven by our data:
- Target 10-15 people at carefully chosen companies
- Set up a 5 touch-point campaign
- Send the first email on Tuesday and the last email the following Monday
- Don’t spend too much time researching the company; keep the messaging broad
- The Day 2 email should be a simple follow-up call to action
- The Day 5 email should be funny
With this formula we’ve created a large team of BDRs who consistently generate high quality opportunities for our sales reps.