Building up quality contact lists, enriching them in order to contact prospects at the right time and with the right message...
These are essential steps to build your commercial actions on a solid foundation and obtain results quickly.
How to build a quality prospect base
The Sales team database is its backbone. It has to be as straight!
Data is as obsolete as ever
A few years ago, the obsolescence rate of client databases was about 5-10% per year. In 2020, it was instead 25 to 33% of your customer or prospect database that is no longer up to date after one year. 😱
The main reason? The increasing turnover in companies.
That is why today, it is more important to capitalize on people than on the company itself.
If a contact changes companies, all the nurturing work you've built up with him must not go up in smoke.
On the contrary, it's a new way for you to introduce yourself to this new company that probably needs your product or service. This is the ideal time to strengthen customer relations.
Continuously updating your customer or prospect data is therefore essential.
LinkedIn: The essential prospect database
Today, LinkedIn is undoubtedly the best prospect base in France and the world.
Simply, it's because we are all (or almost all) on LinkedIn, and we update our profile every time we change jobs or companies. Don't you?
So, how do you use LinkedIn effectively for prospecting?
The idea is quite simple:
- Define your persona, target, and segment;
- Find profiles via Sales Navigator;
- Retrieve the (public) information of your targeted leads, at least the first name, last name, website, and company: PhantomBuster, Captain Data, Lobstr, Dux-Soup
- Enriching email data: Dropcontact is today the only solution for data enrichment and correction that is 100% GDPR compliant 👼
- Prospecting in an ultra-personalized way thanks to cold email campaigns: with lemlist for example
Best practices for better email deliverability rates
Setting up the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC protocols
The 3 protocols (SPF, DKIM, and DMARK) are used to certify that the email address and domain name you use for prospecting is authentic and authorized to send emails. You can configure them in the settings of your emailing solution.
You can learn more 👉 "[Tuto] How to have an opening rate higher than 70% thanks to the configuration of your domain".
Setting up the custom domain
This is the first thing to do before launching a cold email campaign: make sure you have correctly configured your custom domain in the back office of your emailing service.
Do not put aside catch-all emails
There are two types of domains:
- classic domains: only receive emails with correctly written addresses
- catch-all domains: receive all emails as long as the domain is well written (the part following the "@")
Catch-alls may increase your bounce rate very slightly, but it doesn't matter (and it doesn't affect your reputation) in reasonable sending volumes (a few hundred sendings per day).
If you decide not to shoot catch-alls, you are depriving yourself of a large pool of potential customers (especially since most large accounts have catch-all domains).
So, you should send your campaigns to catch-all domains and not exclude them from the campaigns!
All you need to know about catch-all is here
Successful cold email campaigns
The key to successful prospecting campaigns, especially in cold email: BE DIFFERENT! 🙃
"You want to do some hard-hitting cold email text? Then don't do what you're told to do and create your own signature!"
We all know the "good practices" of emailing: what type of object should we put, what content for a good click rate, or the optimal day and time to send your campaigns...
We all know them... So the people you're probably talking to know them as well...
Likely, an email (however good it may be) following these practices will be identified as a "campaign" and not a dedicated, unique, and personalized email. It's a shame to have optimized all your processes to reach such a conclusion!
Differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd. Dare, and don't be like everyone else!
Prepare your items, your customized content... You are the best placed to know the expectations and the needs of your target, aren't you?
Your sales teams send dozens, even hundreds of emails every day to your customers, prospects, or partners: they know them and have insight into their strategy.
Why not getting your salespeople together to brainstorm with them and take notes of which email objects are performing, the most effective acquisition channel, or the messages that are hitting the hardest?
🗝 With all these keys, you'll be able to open the doors of commercial efficiency!
The added value of the marketing and sales teams is undoubtedly not in copying and pasting emails from prospects, updating databases, or manual integration in the CRM.
Dropcontact is there for that 🚀
