Fine-grained targeting, where signals and automation lead to personal touch.

Response rates on outbound sales campaigns are decreasing, but many B2B business development folk continue to keep pushing ahead with bulk cold email strategies — which let’s face it never really worked that well in the first place. It’s a strategy that has led to a whole generation of people simply ignoring unsolicited emails — even the ones that might have proved helpful. We heard from one partner that when trying to persuade a large corporate client to take a more precision-driven sales approach, the response was “we just need better emails”. Continuing on this journey will only lead to even lower response rates.

At glass.ai, we have previously spoken about the falling significance of traditional company databases and many sales intelligence tools, often the starting point for bulk email campaigns. In fact, it can sometimes be hard to segment small datasets within these sources beyond high-level criteria like location, revenue and industry sector. They are almost encouraging a spray-and-pray approach…and it makes sense, given that many of these tools do charge per person and email/phone contact.

With the AI technology that is available today, it is possible to look much deeper into the activities of businesses by reading what they do on the web. Maybe you’re interested in contacting construction companies but only those who are involved in projects related to senior living developments. Further, you feel you’ve got a better chance of a successful outcome if there has recently been a change of senior management or if the targets have delivered a certain number of projects in the past 6 months. Implementing an automated signals-based selling strategy that is able to keep up to date with events as they unfold on the web means that fine-grained targets can be delivered at the best possible time for action.

The beauty of using technology in this way to identify B2B targets on a rolling basis is that the lists that are built incrementally are likely to be small enough that an actual human (no way!?) would be able to take the identified targets, and manually do any extra research to generate a truly personalised email. Looking at some stats available online, let’s compare:

• If a traditional email campaign sends 1,000 emails then on average this achieves a 7% response rate, 70 responses, and 30% of those convert, resulting in 21 meetings.
• To get 21 meetings from a set of fine grained targets with a human writing the final email: if a targeted campaign sends 100 emails, responses are 6 times more likely with a personalised email so 42 respond and 50% are likely to convert which gives 21 meetings.
• Further, we have seen typical response and conversion rates increase 36%–50% through delivering timely off-the-shelf signals, potentially much higher with custom signals that match prospects directly to the problems that your products or services address.

The targeted approach sounds like a lot more effort, right? For the same result? Maybe that explains why bulk emailing is still so popular. However, there’s a hidden cost or at least potential lost future opportunities. What about the 930 who didn’t respond? They’ve got a more negative view of your company based on the bulk approach — whereas with the fine-grained approach, even those who received a personalised email through targeting but didn’t respond probably have a better impression of your company as well. Why is this important?

With the signals-based selling approach, there might be a better time in the future to contact the targets when the message resonates better with their position and so are more likely to respond. You can’t do this if they’ve put you on ignore or the spam folder as a result of a traditional cold email campaign!

Looking beyond low response rates, there is an increasing need to battle against bulk email defences, efforts to stop or limit the sending of bulk emails at source and — increasingly — local regulations. Continuing with spray and pray is an uphill and lost battle on so many fronts. Fundamentally, email has become a trust issue. Years (no, decades!) filling people’s inboxes with irrelevant messages has meant there’s a very low level of trust in any unsolicited message that hits the inbox. The fact is, it might be too late to save email as a B2B business development tool but using technology to allow fine-grained targeting and signals-based selling to make contact at the right time, enables a return to a personalised email strategy. We can start making human connections again at the start of the sales process which lead to more symbiotic business relationships. We might even save email from obsolescence!

Get in touch if you want to learn more about our B2B discovery and tracking capabilities: info@glass.ai.