This cold outreach strategy has been helping us add $10K to the MRR every month.
Hey you all,
I want to share a growth marketing strategy that's working well for a B2B SaaS client of mine. Since it's pretty straightforward, maybe some of you could use it for your own SaaS.
So we're running an outbound email campaign targeted towards ecommerce stores.
As the line between spam and meaningful cold outreach is a thin one, I have carefully crafted and segmented our emails to be personal, valuable, and scalable.
Instead of trying to sell something, our first message is meant to spark a conversation. It goes like "Don't you think doing X the Y way will save you more time and hassles?"
If they respond, it starts a conversation. We then eventually tell them about our product and it's often them who express interest upfront.
We are approaching it by:
- Identifying ideal stores using BuiltWith
- Mining their email contacts using Apollo & Lusha
- Managing and automating the campaign using Lemlist
Of the 3200 stores I have reached out to in a month, 774 prospects have replied, and 217 of them have bought a monthly subscription for $50—adding $10,850 to the MRR.
Better yet, so many prospects appreciate us for reaching out. And so many of those who reply but don't buy end up following the product's social accounts.
Edit: Check the comments for more details on this campaign.
It's great that it works for you! But, how do you motivate people to answer your question? Do you ask them as "an expert" for advice, as a friend for an opinion, or what?
Sharing the whole letter (if you can) would be amazing, too, as I'm sure almost all the founders struggle a lot with cold emails :)
That's really interesting! Do you have a full example email you've sent? I'd love to learn about that!
@arminas @yiblet @harvellocapello @stackingflow @wmeredith
I'll explain.
So this product helps store owners to sync certain details between Shopify orders and their Stripe payments. It automates the process for thousands of orders and thus helps to mitigate fraud.
I used BuiltWith to identify stores running Shopify Plus & Stripe Payments. We had three assumptions for prospects at that moment:
If we could figure out which one is true for a particular prospect, we could counter it with our most compelling argument.
Also, I knew we had the best chance for the first and second types of prospects because a minor price difference would not have been enough for them to bear the switching cost.
So the first email was framed to answer which category did they fit, ignoring the third type of prospects altogether.
It went like, "Don't you think if you automate this process, you would save yourselves a lot of time and money?"
The premise of this email consisted of their pain points and some credibility indicators for our product.
I also revamped the client's landing pages and onboarding sequences to make the most of every lead.
I can't share the actual work or the SaaS in concern because of an NDA in place, probably because cold outreach is a grey area for many.
Though I'll help you with some time-tested tactics I have used to get my clients to sell with cold outreach:
That's pretty much it.
Great post, thanks for replying @palashwadhwani.
PS - I'm intrigued by the idea of not asking for a call. How would you close off?-
"Let me know if that sounds interesting?"
"Would you be open to a chat?"
Etc?
Yes, you shouldn't ask them for their time from the get-go. Instead, you should pitch something that helps them save time and meet their goals.
The purpose of your first cold message is to grab their attention and get them to reply. That's the minimum ask you could be making - the one with the least resistance for them and the most conversions for you.
In a way, it's you asking them for permission to talk further.
Ex:
"Do you think it will help you {GAIN BENEFIT/REDUCE PAIN} with [A SPECIFIC THING THEY DO]?"
"WE helped [RELEVANT SOCIAL PROOF] increase their [DESIRABLE OUTCOME] using our [UNIQUE SELLING POINT]. Would you like to know more about it?"
Nice, clarifies lots of my concerns. How do you manage to follow up with so many prospects? Do you use automated emails for that or you manually talk to them?
I ask this to everyone I interact with, what are you favourite books and 3 people you would recommend to follow on the internet?
I manually talk to them. Automated sequences run until they do not respond. That too consists of just 2 follow-ups.
Also, you'll eventually spot themes in their responses so you can template-ize your replies to speed it up.
That's a nice question.
People: Shane Parrish from Farnam Street, Peep Laja from CXL/Wynter, & Louis Grenier from Everybody Hates Marketers
Books: Sapiens from Yuval Noah Harrari, Fooled by Randomness from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, & Ogilvy on Advertising
I don't read many books by the way. I am more of blog reader.
What about you? What are you favorite books and 3 people you would recommend to follow on the internet?
Good one,
Books - Man’s search for meaning, Sapiens, The War of Art
People - Mark Manson, Naval, Paul G
Thanks for taking the time on writing this, provides a lot more context and what to think about 🤔
Hard to visualise what the email looks like when half of it is "X" or "Y" lol.
Even if you don't share the client you worked with, could you write an example with a random SaaS product?
I’d like more information on this.
Did you check all the comments? If yes, what else would you want to know?
Can you tell us more about the email you are talking about?
What's the product?