Why cold outbound email no longer works.

How to reach your customers where they’re at.

Email has long been relied upon by sales and marketing teams as a way to communicate with prospects and customers. It’s great when the sender and receiver are willing and engaged.

Problems arise when this communication mode becomes the primary way to engage a future customer, especially at the top of the funnel. We all receive unwanted emails. It’s interruptive, overdone and in most cases the content is generic and presumptive. The flip side is that sales and marketing believe this to be easy, fast and cheap.

Don’t get blocked or blacklisted
However it breaches the CAN-SPAM laws which got more stringent in Jan 2024. You can be fined up to $43k per email and you often get blacklisted, especially by companies with more sophisticated filters, typically in mid-to-large companies. Compliance with CAN-SPAM is now a must-do in order to build a reputable and trustworthy brand.

Starting February 1st, 2024, Google started to block all emails from organizations that exceed a 0.3% abuse complaint.

Pressure and time constraints are real
As a startup team pressured to build pipeline, the temptation is to grow the prospect database fast and then send outbound emails in the hope recipients will click, read and at the right moment ask for more. This also assumes that your prospects spend time on email which is sadly no longer true. Communication is happening in other channels like Slack or perhaps Substack, Reddit or even social channels like TikTok and LinkedIn.

A paltry .5% response
For cold outbound, you’re lucky to get a .5%-2% response and so the tendency for many is to up the volume. If you don’t have a well defined budget to start executing longer-play programs like SEO, paid, events, and organic, you may have to rely on email as the tool in your bag to begin outreach.

So, if you must lean on email, here’s must-do’s to avoid getting blocked or fined:

1. Don’t send multiple emails to multiple contacts under the same domain, at the same time. IOW slow your volume.
2. Send frequency. Sending more than twice a week is too much for an unengaged recipient.
3. Your email body should contain no more than 3 links. Remember your email and company website in your signature count.
4. Using certain words like free, exclamation points and all caps are flags for spam filters.
5. Avoid attachments and heavy graphics in the body.
6. Always include an opt-out or unsubscribe and please make it easy with just 2 clicks.
7. Include your physical address. HubSpot won’t let you send without this.
8. Use an accurate originating domain name and also allow a reply to from that same sending domain.

It’s not too hard to find best practices and if you’re using a system like HubSpot, you can auto-suppress inactive contacts and set rules on send frequency. Here’s a good LinkedIn article on such practices.

Define a reliable and scalable outbound plan
While building the plan for reaching future customers and figuring out where to invest, make sure you thoughtfully build your target database. Starting out, here’s modern ways to figure out how to both reach and engage customers. Be thoughtful and always experiment with different channels to learn and measure what works. Ask yourself:

1. What are the top 2 pain points you solve?

Sounds basic, right? It still surprises me how companies only talk about what their product does and not about the pain it solves. Do you deeply understand those pains?

2. What search keywords does your prospect use when looking ?

The start of your SEO content journey. Understand this in the context of all market offerings and other approaches they could use.

3. Where do your buyers hang-out, digitally?

What channels are they active in? Is it LinkedIn or perhaps, SubStack or StackOverflow? Think groups and active forums with communities of like-minded people. GitHub has an active DevOps community, for example.

4. What type of content do your users like to consume?

Is there a preference for deep dive technical docs, how-to videos, live webinars or office hours. Of course different content is relevant at different stages of the knowledge journey, so take that into consideration.

5. Who are the thought leaders or subject matter experts (SMEs) in your category?

Do you have any relationships with these SMEs? Can you team-up to conduct a live session or perhaps sponsor to co-produce useful content?

6. Is your audience willing to share content and advocate for you?

Do they like to engage in producing content and helping peers? Do you have team-members that could collaborate with them in a Q&A session or a podcast? Can you incent or further educate them on your offerings?

7. Finally, what is your top CTA or the best way to engage early?

If your persona likes a hands-off, self-drive approach, know that early on so you can build a friction-less journey to get activated and see value.

By answering these 7 questions you should be able to understand:

A. What does your audience care about? How do you make a difference

B. What content do they read and consume?

C. Where do they typically find the best content?

D. Who do they follow and respect?

E. How active and willing are they in sharing?

F. What commitment can you expect from them early in the journey?

G. What pages on your site you should optimize and promote.

Start with the basics and stick to them
With concrete answers you can create a content plan, including keywords plus cadence and authorship. You should also understand the cost of engaging certain channels and you can start to build out who your advocate and partner ecosystem should be for the near-medium term.

If you’re early in the growth phase, you don’t need to hire a community or advocacy team yet but you can start to sow those seeds. Keep it simple at the outset. Write the plan down, socialize and execute. Stay the course and measure as you go.

As always, share your thoughts.