Sales teams today face an unfortunate lack of knowledge about how to effectively reach out to their prospects through cold emailing. They are still sending out large lists of cold emails, hitting the send button, and hoping that they will fill their calendars with meetings as a result.
Unfortunately, things have changed considerably in just three short years; methods that used to work are now going straight to the spam folders of their intended recipients.
In fact, reply rates for templates sent out through most platforms have decreased from an average of 8.5% in 2019 to less than 3.5%. Additionally, there is an oversaturation of automated emails in the marketplace, and the filtering of these kinds of emails has only become more stringent.
What You Need to Know About Cold Emails Now
What does this mean for you and your B2B email lead generation strategy? It means that relying on hope will not help you be successful, and relying on guessing will ultimately cause harm to your domain reputation.
Therefore, if you want to continue to book meetings on a regular basis through emailing people, you must have an exact understanding of the math that you will need to do this; you must have a documented operational process for creating your emails; and you must ensure that you have clean data within the database from which you are emailing.
Cold emailing has transformed, and the way to be successful in cold emailing today is to act like a data scientist instead of a traditional marketer. You can find tons of information online about how to properly segment and personalize your cold messages, but they do not provide the underlying mathematics that will help make your campaign successful.
The companies winning at reaching out to their prospects treat their email campaigns like a highly technical and automated software product. When they send out cold messages, they are fully aware of the limitations of their domains, and they track exactly how many positive responses they receive from each of their campaigns.
If at any time they cross an established threshold of safety, they immediately pause their outreach campaigns. They understand that having a positive response rate of between 0.5% and 2.0% is "normal" and that anything greater than 5.0% is "outstanding."
In order to reach these numbers, it will be necessary for companies to move beyond standard cold emailing templates. A company's B2B email lead generation process must be structured so that all of these processes (targeting, technical setup, and message timing) operate in complete harmony with each other.
Building Your B2B Email Lead Generation Setup
You need to provide yourself with a safe way to send before you ever write your first subject line. If you do not have the proper setup, you will never deliver your emails to the main inbox of your prospect. The foundation of this entire B2B email lead generation process is deliverability.
Protecting Your Domain Name
Your main company domain is one of your most valuable assets. Cold emails should never go out to potential customers from your primary company domain.
Instead, you should create multiple subdomains for each outreach application that you will use (for example, you can create a subdomain specifically for the Apollo outreach platform or the Instantly outreach application).
This way, if your outreach campaign generates a significant amount of spam complaints, your primary brand will remain protected. You will also need to establish and authenticate the technical records that indicate that you are a legitimate sender. These technical records will send Google and Microsoft an indication that your message is not fraudulent.
Configure your DNS records – SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your core domain.
Purchase unique tracking domains to preserve your original sender reputation.
Gradually warm the new subdomains over 3 weeks before reaching full volume.
Keeping Your Email Lists Clean
Data decays at a rapid pace. Job transitions, company closures, and email formatting changes all contribute to data decay. Sending email to outdated email addresses creates hard bounces, which immediately degrade your sender reputation.
You must validate and clean your email lists prior to each send with a validation tool (e.g., Mailtrap or ZeroBounce). A bounce rate greater than 3% is a warning sign, and when your bounce rate exceeds 5%, you must stop sending emails and re-evaluate your original list source.
If you are sending to European markets, you need to understand and comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR requires you to have a clear unsubscribe pathway and to provide a legitimate business reason for each recipient you contact.
Tracking Your Math and Growth
Sending messages without knowing how many resulted in revenue is pointless! Tracking numbers allows you to understand, with certainty, how many messages result in revenue, while your financial model should be based on a more accurate theory than an industry myth.
Setting Your Starting Numbers
Today’s benchmarks for open rates can be quite specific, ranging from 36.7-42.35% - but as privacy filters continue to come into play, this may not be as useful.
A very important metric of success for your pipeline is your positive reply rate. This typically ranges from 0.5-2% for most campaigns. As an example, out of every 100 people you email, getting 1 or 2 positive replies is a healthy normalcy.
The next step after receiving a positive reply is to book a meeting with that individual(s). If you successfully book meetings with 3 to 4% of your total replies, your sequence is working effectively. If your percentage is outside of these ranges, you have either targeted the wrong audience or made them an unattractive offer.
Looking at Campaign Feedback
Every response you receive sends you a signal. You can use tools such as HubSpot and Copper to keep track of how your prospects interact with your follow-ups.
If your prospects are opening your messages but not replying, you probably have a mismatch between the audience and the core offer.
If your prospects reply to your emails but do not book a meeting, it is most likely because your call to action was too aggressive. If you use a more subtle approach in requesting interest, you will have a far better chance of receiving a positive reply than if you asked for thirty minutes of their time in the very first message.
Finding the Right People for B2B Email Lead Generation
It is just as important to know who to contact as it is to know how to contact them! I am really not okay with the idea of sending out the same information to companies in completely different industries.
This will greatly affect your ability to deliver your B2B email lead generation message to those companies.
Using Buyer Signals
The best lists to use when selling a product are based on the actions of the buyer and what they are doing. Buyer intent signals help determine which companies are actively searching for your solutions.
For example, if a company visits your website frequently, or downloads your content frequently, this is an indication that they will more than likely be a successful conversion for your business.
Identifying these buyer's intent signals can be accomplished by using a variety of platforms, such as Sopro and Leadfeeder. Triggering your marketing automation sequences based on the user's activity will lead to increased engagement with your messaging. An active person searching for a solution is much more likely to view your email.
How Time and Location Change Results
Also, time and place will impact your results. Most marketing teams do not take into consideration the seasonality of your message and where you are sending the messages, and how it impacts the overall unsubscribe rate and bounce rate.
Historical deliverability studies have shown that there are distinct patterns with respect to the overall bounce rate and unsubscribe rates by subscriber’s time of day, day of the week, month of the year, etc.
May has a high level of bounces, estimated at 2.26% on average. October has the least amount of bounces, approximately 1.26%. Unsubscribe requests on a monthly basis increased the most in September.
The advertising and marketing industries experience the highest unsubscribe rates.
Geography plays a significant role in determining deliverability. When you send email communications to countries such as India and Spain, your bounce rates are very high (3%+). Countries such as Sweden and Finland typically have very stable bounce rates of about 1%. Adjust your sending limits according to the areas you are targeting.
Fixing Problems When They Happen
Even excellent systems will fail. If your statistics drop, you need to quickly determine what caused the drop, so you do not have to discard the entire campaign.
Fixing Low Open Rates
Usually, when your open rate drops below 30%, there is a technical issue. You may think that the subject line of your email is poor, but the more likely issue is that your emails are going to the spam folder.
Review your DMARC report, your sender reputation, and pause any campaigns on that subdomain to allow it to "cool off". After confirming your technical integrity, you can begin testing shorter, more conversational subject lines.
Getting More People to Book Meetings
If you are receiving a good number of positive replies, but no phone calls are being booked, the "disconnect" is due to the qualifying process of the sale. Your prospects are interested in the offer but are deterred by the difficulty of arranging a call.
Look closely at how you transition to the next step. Are you directing them to complete an extensive form? Asking for an hour of their time? Reduce the friction and send them a short video or one-page summary first and allow them to choose when the conversation continues.
Final Thoughts on B2B Email Lead Generation
It is much harder now than it was just 5 years ago to get into an inbox (although it is not impossible). In the current environment, the companies who are succeeding at getting into their target customers' inboxes are those who take the time to understand, respect, and adhere to the technical limitations of the various platforms upon which they operate.
Businesses need to implement strict list hygiene, authenticate their subdomains, and use the highest-level intent data that they can find, while also ensuring that their message remains relevant to their prospects.
Maintaining a bounce rate of less than 2% and an expectation of 1% positive reply (for example, so that they will respond to the business that sent the email) helps to build a consistent and reliable lead generation system that delivers real growth for the company.
The only reliable guide for determining the information you need to base your decisions on is data. Do not rely on out-of-date templates for sending messages.
Common Questions About Email Campaigns
Why Do Domains Burn When Set Up Right?
Setting up a domain is only part of the equation, so even with a technically set-up domain and verified authentication, you still run the risk of burning your domain if your list quality is not high.
Providers will refer to a high percentage of bounces, low response rates, and direct spam complaints as a signal that you are a "bad sender." If you continue to send out low-quality generic messages to unqualified or unverified prospects, you will be blocked from accessing your domain by Google and Microsoft despite having legitimate technical records.
How Do Bounce Rates Affect Pausing Campaigns?
Every bounce rate represents an emergency stop button for your campaigns. When your bounce rate is below 2%, you can continue to send messages without taking any precautions.
Once your bounce rate reaches 3%, you should review the data provider you are using to determine whether it is reliable. Once your bounce rate reaches 5%, you must stop sending any message until after you have resolved whatever caused the bounce rate to reach this level. Continuing to send to a 5% bounce rate or greater will permanently damage your sending domain's reputation.
How Long Should a Campaign Run to Get Good Data?
A single weekend is not long enough to determine the quality of any single campaign. You need to replicate your messages over a longer period of time to arrive at a statistically qualified and consistent level of response.
Approximately two to three weeks and ideally the minimum volume of messages sent over the course of time will yield statistically significant results. If you change your subject lines and/or send to a different target profile every 48 hours, you will create chaos in your data model.
A sequence must be allowed to reach a minimum number of validated contacts (hundreds) within a given sequence prior to implementing any broad operational changes.