Crafting (and Testing) Outbound Email Templates for B2B Lead Generation

This article is an expansion of a post originally published on Forbes.

To reap the rewards of outbound, your emails, messages, and scripts need to work in your favor.

In this article, we’ll show you how some tactics and tricks to create messaging that will resonate with prospects and start conversations.

How to Craft Outbound Messaging for B2B Lead Generation

By 2022, more than 347 billion emails will be sent and received per day. So if you want your messaging to stand out in your potential customer’s inbox, it needs to be expertly crafted.

Crafting outbound messaging can be labor-intensive, but the process itself doesn’t have to take years. Here are some general do’s and don’ts for creating effective B2B messaging:

Do:

• Write tailored messaging for each buyer persona and ideal customer profile (ICP). 
• Consider your tone of voice; is it appropriate for the person you’re reaching out to? You may want to interview your users to see how they frame their problem and your solution — use their words instead of your internal company jargon. 
• Use an attention-grabbing subject line, you need your prospect to be intrigued before they even open your message.
• Convey your value and provide proof that you can help alleviate the prospect’s pain points. Point to examples and let other stories tacitly speak to the work you can do for them.  
• Consistency is key, so utilize a CRM like Salesforce to keep on top of your buyer’s journey.

Don’t:

• Use an inauthentic or insincere tone in your voice. Prospects can spot fakeness instantly. Don’t try to impress people with pedantic words, such as “pedantic”. You don’t want to emphasize your expertise in such a way that it comes off as bragging. Prospects will want to prove you wrong if you do this.
• Write long, boring subject lines, your prospect will be less likely to read and engage with your message.
• Write offputting lengthy messages; verbosity is for academics, not revenue generators. Don’t waffle about how amazing your offering is. Instead, focus on what your offering can do specifically for the prospect, using succinct stories as examples.

Email tip: If you know someone is very busy, occupied, focused on other things, the best way to get a chance at a piece of their time is with a very short email, not a very long one. I understand the tendency to go into detail, but it works against you. Think about the receiver.

— Jason Fried (@jasonfried) June 17, 2020 

• Attention-grabbing tactics can hook a potential lead, but going overboard will make people think that you’re not taking your role seriously. Find the balance. Know your buyer; don’t use exclamation points and smiley faces if you are targeting F500 CFO’s. 

One of the cold sales templates we have seen success with is as follows:

• • Research: Open with a personalized sentence to prove you’ve done your research on the company. Connect the dots too, if you’ve made other attempts to reach them.
    

Dear SDRs/AEs: Want to close more deals? You can improve the effectiveness of your cold outreach by 10x with 5-10 mins of research and personalization of a message. 99.999% of salespeople don’t do this. It will be easy for you to stand out. 🙂

— Rob Bailey (@RMB) May 6, 2020

• Reference: Provide an example of your experience working with similar customers. We can’t underscore this point enough.
• Reward: Your email should contain a precise ask. No more than one. 
• Concise: 150 words or less. 
• Request: End with a call-to-action. What do you want the prospect to do once they’ve read your email?

Why is Outbound Emailing so Effective?

We know that outbound messaging can, and should, engage with a decision-maker in a way that no other traditional marketing method is capable of. 

Sending outbound emails is like cold calling hundreds of people at once but in a less intrusive way. When it’s done right email marketing delivers an excellent ROI that can be as high as 38-1, so it’s worth investing in this highly effective channel. 

That’s not to say that outbound equals instant income, though. It takes time and expertise to build a successful campaign, and poor execution can seriously alienate leads. This is a common issue for companies that are just starting out with outbound email campaigns for lead generation.

What Tools do you Need to Send Outbound Emails for Lead Generation?

Marketing automation tools take a lot of the heavy lifting out of outbound messaging and there are some great platforms that manage the process for you.

Reply.io is a great starting tool for beginners lets you automate and scale campaigns while maintaining that all-important personal tone to your messaging. It also allows you to monitor performance and track results so you can test solutions and see what’s working (and what isn’t).

Mailshake is another great option for beginning teams that are just starting out. This platform makes it quick and easy to set up your campaigns and allows you to send emails at scale. You can also track key performance indicators including open rate and response rate.

Offer

Offers require their own playbook, and can range from evaluations to reports to communities.

We’ll cover this in more detail in a separate post, but if you go the community route, we recommend LaunchPass for community growth and management as a lead magnet.

How to Test Outbound Messaging for B2B Lead Generation

If you’re new to outbound B2B messaging, the likelihood is that you’re not going to get it exactly right the first time. That’s why it’s important to regularly test your communications to see if they’re performing as they should.

Email open rates are one of the most accurate ways of testing whether your outbound messaging strategy is working.

To test engagement, if you measure your click rate, that is a good number to look at. MailChimp suggests that the average click rate across all industries is 2.43%, so if your number is much lower than this you should reassess your marketing strategy.

Most outbound messaging tools will have the ability to conduct testing and run reports that you and your sales team can analyze. Alternatively, an external sales vendor can manage testing for you.

Other Ways to Improve Your Outbound Messaging

If you aren’t seeing the response rate with your sales email templates, we recommend a few tried and tested tricks that have delivered success for our clients:

• Try including the recipient’s name in your subject lines. A report by Adestra suggests that this can boost your open rate by 22.2%.
• Try sending emails in middle to late mornings. 11:00 am EST is the optimal time of day to maximize click-through rates according to Hubspot, so experiment with sending messaging mid-morning.
• Avoiding spam filters is also an often-overlooked factor. To get around them, it’s worth spending time learning how they work.

If, after these measures, you’re still concerned that your outbound messaging is letting you down, it’s quick and easy to outsource the task to vendors like Convert.AI. 

Final Thoughts

A successful outbound sales email marketing campaign combines a killer subject line, perfectly written copy, and valuable content that generates interest. Done correctly, outbound messaging can be the key to keeping your sales pipeline full of valuable leads. 

Want personalized insight for crafting and testing emails for your company? Book a sequence strategy session with us here.