SOP: The Outbound Email Guide

This blog post covers the Standard Operating Procedure of Outbound Email. It is a repeatable process that you can apply to every email campaign. Simply follow it and learn how to contact the right people on scale.

Campaign Kick-Off

The Kickoff is a meeting that should create a discussion around the outcome and the strategy of a campaign.

It is important to do this properly because this will influence the success of your campaign.

TASKS

• Define your Goal

  • What is your Goal? (whatever you do, always start with a goal) e.g.:

    • Generating Sales Accepted Opportunities (SAO) for Sales Team

    • Setting up meetings together with AE/SD

    • Signing up people for trials

    • Generating Leads

    • Generating Awareness
      

• Measure your Goal:

  • Meetings: Signup to Kickscale and measure your Meetings. They can be measured in the Meetings section and tag them to the responsible campaign

  • Opportunities: can be measured in the Insights Section

• Create a Brief Create a short brief of your strategy and track it on the first page of your newly created campaign in Kickscale. Why is this important? Because every stakeholder will know the plan. Here is what a campaign brief should include:

  • Campaign Goal (track this in the Insights section)

  • Campaign timeframe

  • Responsible people (who is the campaign leader, who is just helping?) - track these in the Team section

  • Strategy: What approach are you using? How are you going to achieve your goal? This can be: Linkedin Outreach, Email Outreach, Cold Calling, etc.

2) Prospecting

Lead Generation can be done in different ways depending what your goal is.

Here are some of the approaches you can use for Lead Generation

• Linkedin Sales Navigator

• Linkedin Groups

• Twitter Groups

• Facebook Groups

• Crunchbase

• Similarweb

• Websites

• Tradeshow Websites

• the list goes on and on

TASKS

• Define Target Audience

  • Who are the people you are targeting? Here are the questions you should be answering

  • What industry are they in?

  • What solution do they use?

  • What job title does the ideal target have?
    

• Find Leads Build your own lists within different tools. You need to know your audience. Where do they hang out? What are they interested in? Here are some Tools you can be using to get leads:

  • LinkedIn Sales Navigator

  • Linkedin Groups

  • Twitter Groups

  • Builtwith: find out what solutions your customers use

  • Similartech: find out what solutions your customers use

  • ZoomInfo: Tool to find leads from all kind of companies

  • Forums such as Reddit

  • Websites from Tradeshows: Find speakers, exhibitors and sometimes even attendees
    

• Clean the List Remove people:

  • that don't fit your target audience

  • Competitors

  • Make sure that the first name and other variables are written properly (e.g. good: Markus, bad: mArkus) Same counts for the company name. Avoid companies written like that: Kickscale Inc, Kickscale GmbH, it should be just Kickscale instead

3) Templates

So now it's the time to think of the goal you are trying to achieve. Is it a reply? a Meeting? a Trial? Whatever it is, it is crucial that you first think of your goal, because every message that you send, should lead towards this goal.

Once you confirm your goal, you can start to draft your message. It is important to focus on --- Less is More --- Sales Teams tend to send too long and the same email to everyone. I can tell you right now that this is not working ideally. Customization and providing value are key.

Click HERE to get the full guide on how to structure your emails

TASKS

• Write Templates

  • We propose to create 4 Email Templates.

  • It's best if you send the prospects 4 emails over the course of a month. (every week 1 email)

  • Personal Touching point: Show them that you are not a robot. - I know who you are (e.g. info from Linkedin) I saw on your linkedin profile that…. (1 sentence). Be sure that you focus on the right lead osur

  • Be Positive (I see you are doing a great job at…. NEVER be negative… don't use negative phrases (1 sentence)

  • Deliver Value: I am of value to you: (2-6 sentences) deliver some kind of value. did he check for example the player page. Share some relevant blog posts that he has not viewed yet. Check Hubspot, Salesforce, … what have they done? What does their product look like? What’s in the news? Check web google etc.

  • Call to action: ask a precise question: e.g. Do you have time for a meeting on Tuesday 11 a.m.? (note: end with a question mark) I will never ever go away until you reply to me. (be subtle): always follow up until this guy replies or explicitly says i don't want to get your messages.
    

• Proofread

  • Let someone else proofread your emails.

  • Someone who is native in the language

4) Email Automation

Setup a tool that fits your company size:

• PersistIQ is an email automation tool for smaller companies. Its really cheap with 79 dollar per seat and it is vey reliable

• Outreach.io is also an email automation tool, a bit trickier to use but has a lot more functionality. It is more expensive and usually used by bigger teams

• Note: Expandi.io is a Linkedin Automation tool that can also be used for your campaigns

TASKS

• Create a Drip Campaign

  • Setup a drip campaign (email sequence) in the tool of your choice. (Outreach.io, PersistIQ)

  • Take the templates you have written and copy into the tool
    

• Import Leads to the System Import all the leads that you got from the Upworker to the system that you are using (Outreach.io, PersistIQ)
  

• Final Check and Campaign Start Send yourself a test email to see if it is working as expected. Also check all the variables that you are using within your emails. To avoid mistakes such as: Hi FirstName, ....

5) Track and Measure

Be sure to track all your efforts in Kickscale:

• Add your Meetings

• Add Meeting notes and next steps

• Tag the Meetings to Campaigns

• Create the Opportunities in Salesforce

The Outcome of a campaign can then be seen in the Campaign section under Insights or in the Analytics section

TASKS

• Track your Meetings

Be sure to add all your meetings to the campaign that created them and to do the following:

• Prepare for meetings

• Ask the right questions during the meeting and take notes

• Define next steps

• Send a follow-up Email

• Track your Opportunities: Be sure to create opportunities in Salesforce

• Write a campaign summary on the first page of the campaign section.

  • Should we redo it? Why or why not?

  • What worked and what didn't

  • Be as specific as possible