🏴☠️ ⚡️ Launching Cold Outbound to Establish Performance Base Rates (OKR Teardown)
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
The Objective and Key Results
Select Commentary on Key Results (Prerequisites, best practice, failures, etc.)
🛠️ OKR TEARDOWN
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THE OBJECTIVE & KEY RESULTS
I’ve included the full OKR below as a point of departure to set the foundation for a teardown of our approach thus far…
OBJECTIVE: Test cold outbound to establish base rates, systematize if trial conversions >3.5%
KEY RESULTS:
Learning: Manually craft outbound to current users
Learning: Analyze last 10x paid users (firmographics, segment, and product usage)
Finalize personalization inputs / substance and optimal channels
Determine first priority target segment and create a multi-touch campaign template
Finalize lead sourcing and enrichment method / tooling
Execute limited campaign (~300 leads over 4 weeks) to start warming up domains
Execute full campaign (1k+) and estbalish base rate trial sign-up conversions (beat 3.5%!)
Establish v1 Playbook: Cold Outbound
SELECT COMMENTARY ON KEY RESULTS
Learning: Manually craft outbound to current users
As you’ve heard us preach in the past, ‘start with things that don’t scale.’ Especially the outbound, and the state of the art, the tendency is to jump into tons of automation, tooling and integration. To start with a manual process, we asked ourselves a few simple questions:
How would we engage with existing users, assuming they were ice cold leads?
How would we personalize a message?
What channels are most likely to reach them?
What’s a very valuable resource(s) we could provide for free to be useful and build trust?
This is an insanely productive exercise I can’t recommend enough. I always learn a ton. Generally speaking, this starts with a trip to the user’s business website, social profiles and whatever other digital surface area you uncover from a search. In our case, it was made clear that directories and review sites were our best bet for uncovering information related to a user’s business (primary services, points of differentiation, customer feedback, etc.), which validates they fit our ideal customer profile (ICP) and provides tons of inputs for personalizing a message. From here, we noted the channels they were most active on and any dialog around the challenges they were facing, or recent breakthroughs, etc.
Learning: Analyze last 10x paid users (firmographics, segment, and product usage)
Similiar to the above, this will feel like a pretty manual exercise, though you have much more data working for you to answer questions like the following:
How did this user find us? (google analytics, trial sign up form)
Which customer segment do they fall into? (trial sign up form)
What primary actions did they take in the product? Which outcomes were most important to them? (mixpanel)
Here, we are looking for patterns in customer segment and usage, in hopes there are clear patterns that will inform both the first priority segment we target with outbound and our messaging around pain points (or priority jobs-to-be-done).
Finalize personalization inputs / substance and optimal channels
Following the exercises above, we can move toward stamping a hypothesis on the most compelling information to use in an outbound campaign and the optimal channels to utilize. This is where we land:
Personalization inputs: average stars and number of reviews on most prominent vendor directory / review site
Optimal Channels:
Email — this is how our users capture leads so they are very attentive to inbox; furthermore, our users fall squarely in SMB category and recieve far less email marketing from SaaS vendors
Facebook — our users produce creative work, which they share extensively to market their services.
Determine first priority target segment and create a multi-touch campaign template
In our case, it was clear existing users had amazing online reputations (4+ Average Stars with 100+ reviews). In addition, the vast majority struggled to scale their operation and generate more revenue / income, while preserving the same caliber of work. Thus, our first priority segment was prospects (or leads) with 4+ stars and 100+ reviews and both our messaging and the free resource(s) we shared (aka lead magnets) centered around:
A growth calculator: using business metrics to esablish a clear roadmap toward a defined revenue growth goal
A workflow builder: to improve the consistency and repeatability of their service, enabling greater volume without risking quality
With this shaped, we crafted 4x programmable emails sent over a 7-10 day period.
Execute limited campaign to start warming up domains
Warming up an email domain is essential before sending cold outbound emails, as it helps establish a good sender reputation and improve email deliverability (aka prevents being labeled as spam). The key steps are:
Set up the email domain properly (the email address sending emails), configuring the MX record, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. This ensures your emails are recognized as legitimate.
Start small and gradually increase the volume of emails sent from the domain. Begin by manually sending emails to friends, colleagues, and other "warm" contacts who will engage with the messages. This builds a positive sending history.
Slowly ramp up the volume of cold outreach emails over 2-4 weeks, using features like daily sending limits and throttling to control the pace. This gradual increase signals to email providers that the domain is not being used for spam.
Monitor the domain's reputation and deliverability metrics, and make adjustments as needed. Maintaining a consistent, moderate sending cadence is key to successfully warming up a new domain.
Rushing the domain warm-up process or sending high volumes of cold emails too quickly can result in the domain being blacklisted and emails ending up in spam folders. Taking the time to properly warm up the domain is essential for the success of any cold outreach campaign.
Lastly, you’ll obviously want to leverage an outbound email campaign tool here, we chose snov.io. In addition, there is a pretty significant amount of operational tooling involved across the following:
Acquiring and enriching leads: via data vendor (ie clearbit) or webscraping
Adding to CRM (or system of record)
Adding leads to email outbound tool (or system of action)
Monitoring campaign performance
The above could be a post of it’s own. The takeaway for now is to be thoughtful of the pieces involved along the way and the general architecture of a tech stack (in context of your existing stack) that allows you to systemetize cold outbound from start to finish if the performance is compelling.
For us, compelling means a trial sign up conversion rate greater than 3.5%, once our campaigns achieve a meaningful scale (our current conversion rate from organic and social…).
I’ll leave it at that. For. The. Love. Of. The. Game. 🏴☠️ ⚡️