How to Launch Cold Outreach Campaigns that Get Results

Finding a good-fit prospect in an outbound campaign can feel a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Except you’re in a field surrounded by thousands of haystacks. And you’re blindfolded. And depending on the industry you’re targeting, some of the haystacks may be on fire and therefore the needles have more immediate concerns than your offer.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

Outbound experts Eric Nowoslawski and Mark Colgan gave a masterclass on how you can launch campaigns that get results.

Your Featured Experts

“What Tools Should I Use?”

First, we’ll address one of the questions everyone asks about starting with outbound: what should my tech stack look like?

For your email infrastructure, or where you’re going to send emails from, Eric is adamant about starting with Google and Outlook inboxes. In his opinion, platforms like SuperWave, MailReef, and MailScale have a place, but they’re not starter-kits.

For data, or where your leads and lists come from, you have two options:

• Apollo.io for what Eric calls “the closest copy of LinkedIn we’ve found”
• D7 Lead Finder, for target markets who don’t tend to have LinkedIn profiles

And then there’s a final, optional step. If you want more personalization and enrichment options, you might consider Clay.

As Eric defines it:

“{Clay} is a spreadsheet connected with APIs. You’re familiar that you got to get your spreadsheets and you do your list building and you, you know, you take one sheet and you upload it to a software and then it enriches it and then you take it to another sheet and then you validate it and everything. Clay is just a platform that everything is baked into the sheet so that you don’t have to keep doing all the switching and going in and doing all the different things. You could just do everything in one sheet. It integrates your data providers into one place.”

The best use of Clay was clear in Mark’s super-succinct workflow breakdown:

“I think some people make the mistake of thinking that they have to build the list in Clay, then they have to enrich it. But the way that I approach it is build the list elsewhere, import it into Clay, and then you can do the enrichments on top of the data that you’ve put into Clay.”

Now that you’ve got your tech stack figured out, you have to start thinking about your offer.

Demand Capture vs. Demand Generation Offers

Offers fall into two categories: demand capture or demand generation.

In demand capture, your prospects are already looking for your solution. Which is why this offer type works particularly well for channels like Google ads. An example would be cybersecurity services. You’re highly unlikely to know someone needs these services unless they’re searching for them.

In demand generation, however, as Eric puts it, your offer: “has a element to it that people didn’t know was possible.”

Which makes outbound an inherently demand gen platform. After all, as Mark pointed out: “you can’t sell car insurance to somebody who doesn’t have a car.”

Now, it is possible to turn a demand capture offer into a demand gen offer because all outbound comes with both demand capture and demand gen elements. Tilting your messaging towards outcomes and building your list in a specific way (both topics we’ll cover a bit later in this article) are options.

To see this in action, take the example Eric used of bookkeeping services:

You’re probably thinking: “Well that’s all fine, but what am I supposed to send as an offer?”

This is where the magic behind Eric and Mark’s approaches start coming in.

The Five Three Things You Sell People B2B Customers

Eric had a beautiful breakdown of the mindset you should have when writing your outreach emails:

“There’s only five things in the world you can sell. You either help people make more money, you help them save money, you help them save time, you help them raise their status or you help them live longer.”

Obviously, living longer is more of a gym and supplement offer, so it’s unlikely you’ll use it in B2B. And when it comes to status-raising, Eric is of the opinion: “If I get an email and somebody said you were gonna help me get promoted, I just don’t believe you. So I don’t really care about the status offerings in a cold email. ”

So, when crafting your offer, you need to think of these three things:

• How can you help someone save time?
• How can you help someone save money?
• How can you help someone make more money?

And this is exactly the approach you should use when building your offer.

Building Your Lead Magnet

Since every business is different, it’s impossible to outline a catch-all guide for the exact way your company should build your lead magnet.

The best general approach, however, is to focus on providing value you know others are charging for. Eric cited the examples of:

• Approaching apartment complexes that don’t allow AirBnB listings with lists of illegitimate AirBnBs discovered within that complex
• Providing example customer support conversations a CS team might have and offering to build a support bot for them
• ROI calculators

Here’s Eric’s complete breakdown of these examples:

But if you’re still racking your brain for what you can use as a lead magnet, Eric’s other approach might help:

“Every company just comes down to knowledge arbitrage, right? Like even you go to a restaurant, the only thing the restaurant is really selling you is like one, they know how to get ingredients better than you. And two, they know how to cook it better than you. And so there’s gotta be some insight that you have in the business {that other people don’t.}”

Cold Email Copywriting Frameworks

Both Mark and Eric note they’re not fans of giving cold email templates because too many people copy, paste, then send without changing them.

But, Eric had a couple of suggested frameworks.

First, there’s John Barrows’ “Why You, Why Now?” In this framework, your opening line answers: “why am I emailing you and why am I doing so now?” Eric’s example was: “I’m reaching out because your VP of Sales at an e-commerce brand and are you guys being affected by the SEO changes?” From there, you of course go into your outcomes you can offer and your call to action.

Then there’s Josh Braun’s “Poking the Bear.” Eric defined it like this:

Just like Barrows’ framework, you move into the offer and call to action after that.

Alternately, you can use Eric’s “relevancy, recency, personalization, attention hacking” approach.

The first angle you try to find for your email is a relevant one. You’re aiming for an offer that strikes such a chord that your prospects can’t help but respond. Think of offering to fill a restaurant’s parking lot pothole after seeing reviewer complaints about it on Yelp.

Then, there’s looking into recency. Here, you’re checking to see if any major events have happened in your prospects’ life or to their company. This might be getting a promotion or the company receiving positive news coverage or even posting of a blog article.

Next, there’s personalization. This needs to go a level deeper than surface details. Eric’s examples included using relevant connections to a company’s mission statement or citing a major project the prospect might have been on at a previous company or team.

Finally, there’s the attention hack. For this one, you’re probably going to have to dig for a fact or question that’s a bit out of left field. Eric’s go-to for local offers? Mention a restaurant in the area that’s popular on Yelp and ask if it’s any good. Yes, it’s a “hack,” because it doesn’t have anything to do with your message, but according to Eric, it works.

Next step? Building your list.

The One Question You Need to Build Your List

Eric gets this question all the time. He joked that his customers usually built the list for him.

But

They were able to because he asked them one very specific question:

“What are the things you’re looking for if you were to research a prospect for 10 minutes and reach out to them?”

From there, the signals come pouring in. If they’re using Hubspot, it’s a good sign. A chief marketing officer with a team of ten is a better sign than a chief marketing officer with a team of two.

Eric’s main thoughts on list-building boiled down to:

“You just have to think about what do you manually search out for and then find the data provider that’s going to get you that answer backwards. After you’re like 80, 90% directionally correct, we think more value proposition at that point. Then once we get value propositions correct, then we think, ‘okay, how can we go crazy with the list?'”

Once your list-building is knocked out, it’s time to start sending your emails.

Getting Your Campaigns Right

The number one thing you need to keep in mind out of the gate: your campaigns are not a “one-and-done deal.” As Mark put it:

“A lot of people think about outbound campaigns as a one and done thing. So I’m going to build a list, I’m going to send out my message and then I get replies or I don’t get replies. And I think people need to think about them as campaigns, as they truly are. This is going to be a message to a segment of people with a specific topic or problem or pain point. It might work, it might not. Let’s try the next segment and let’s try the next segment and list.”

It comes down to being willing to test and experiment. Your goal is to figure out the messaging and offer combination that gets the most bites.

Eric outlined their process like this:

The lesson? Don’t be afraid to test and try different offers. You never know what might land.

With these tips and tricks in mind, your outbound campaigns should feel less like searching through haystacks blindfolded and more like searching through them with a magnet.

But, for even more cold outreach knowledge drops, watch Eric’s cold email course on Youtube.

And if you want personalized, 1:1 outbound advice from Mark? Join GrowthMentor Pro.