Personalizing Outbound Email At Scale

awesomo

Initiating email sequence…

How many outbound emails have you gotten recently? Probably a lot.  It might range from a few per week to a handful a day but at the very least, you’re getting them…and it might be annoying.

In short, you get these emails because they work.  Email-based prospecting it’s one of the quickest ways to market a product and drum up interest.  Just about every B2B / SaaS company on the planet does it, some MUCH better than others.  And the companies that aren’t probably should be.

As a result, email is pretty saturated medium — which poses a few important questions for us:

  • How do you send emails to busy execs that stand out above the rest?
  • How do we get extremely busy people to actually respond?
  • How does RevBoss differ from the run-of-the-mill robo-email process?

The answer to most of these? Personalized content.  And we’re not talking about “Hey {{first_name}}, how’s it going at {{company}}?” — those things should be a given.  We mean personalized content that addresses the prospect in a more meaningful way — either by connecting you to them personally, by mapping your offering to their specific pain point you’ve identified on their site, by highlighting a recent business or personal achievement, etc.

In other words — think about a great sales email that you received in which the rep obviously spent some time crafting a message just for you.  That’s what we mean.

Personalizing an email to a prospect is (in theory) a pretty straightforward process — spend some time researching the person, find your angle, and craft a great message that will warm up enough curiosity to get your foot in the door.

There are a couple problems with this approach:

  1. Few sales development reps actually do this.
  2. Even fewer sales development reps are any good at it.
  3. The process doesn’t scale beyond a handful of prospects per rep, per day.

So we’ve started testing (and building) a solution to this problem.  We’ve made great progress on a human author based system that integrates with our sales development platform.

And we’re moving towards a machine author based system with human helpers.  In other words, robots write read and respond to your email on your behalf and people help out when the robots get confused.

(It is no coincidence that Robbie Allen — renowned robot whisperer and CEO @ automated content pioneer Automated Insights — is an investor in RevBoss.)

The early returns are good — the email messages that include personalized content consistently get a meaningful reply lift compared to control groups without personalized content.  But we still have a lot to figure out.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on personalizing outbound email.  Is your sales team doing it?  How are you doing it?

And let us know if you’d like to take our personalization stuff for a test drive!  More on this soon…