Action Hero is lucky enough to discuss and strategize about cold email prospecting daily with our clients and prospective clients. During these conversations, there are very common questions that are asked so we have taken the time to answer some of them here. Hopefully this helps!
What Targeting Options Are Available?
Email Prospecting is a B2B channel so targeting aligns with “firmagraphics” or business related characteristics. Targeting can vary based on the platform you acquire your leads from as well as the plan that you pay for.
However, here is a list of pretty standard targeting options that we choose from when compiling lists for our clients:
1. Job titles / departments / management level
2. Company name
3. Location
4. # of employees
5. Industry
6. Buying intent
7. Email status
8. Owner
9. Technologies
10. Revenue
11. Funding
12. Job Posting
13. Other signals such as changed jobs or recently opened emails
How Much Does It Cost?
There are 5 main costs associated with email prospecting that need to be accounted for:
1. Domain costs – We set up domains for our clients so sending and domain scores for the organization’s main domain is not impacted. Domain costs will vary from $5 to $18 annually.
2. Email costs – Depending on the platform used, costs will be anywhere from free to $9 per account per month. Savings can occur at scale, annual subscriptions or from different providers.
3. List costs – Depending on the amount of leads you pull and the specific platform you are using, costs will become cheaper the more leads you purchase. Regardless, each lead is less than $.01 but costs can add up very quickly.
4. List scrubber – While not required, it is recommended to use a scrubbing tool. Scrubbing tools work very similar to list costs where you buy credits and review each contact. These credits are also less than $.01 each.
5. Sending platform costs – Similarly, this will vary based on the tool and features you use. We recommend conducting extensive research to find the tool(s) that work best for you.
What Do You Consider a Lead?
Leads can vary from client to client. So Action Hero has outlined what they consider to be common lead categories. This helps us to align with our clients to really understand the success of our campaigns as well as help the clients to prepare for nurturing leads and responses in the proper way.
Hot Lead – Qualified
1.Scheduled through meeting link
2. Contact or conversion action through website
3. Positive response
4. Let’s talk / meeting request
5. Can you send more info?
6. Please reach out to this person
7. Not at the moment but let’s connect in the future
Cool Lead – Received a response but will require more work
1. I’m not the right person, no thanks
2. We just signed with another vendor
3. We have this in house
4. Send more info
5. Maybe in future
6. No thanks
7. This person no longer works here but please contact this person (manual reply)
Not a Lead
1. Out of office
2. Not interested / no thanks / unsubscribe
3. This person no longer works here (automatic reply)
Where Do You Get Your Data?
There are several different ways we acquire our data to use for email prospecting campaigns:
1. We have access to commonly used database such as Apollo and ZoomInfo
2. We have scraping capabilities which allow us to quickly acquire lists from other databases, platforms and websites such as LinkedIn
3. Clients occasionally have large lists that they have acquired through different efforts that we can combine with our own lists
Why a Three Month Contract?
Most agencies lock clients into contracts for 6 to 12 months, and rightfully so. There is a lot of time and effort that goes into understanding a client’s needs and goals, their ICP and building an appropriate strategy.
However, Action Hero does only 3 months, then auto renews month to month, in an effort to lower the barrier of entry. We truly believe in the power and effectiveness of our email prospecting solution so we want clients to sign on, see how great the leads are we are driving for them and continue with a longstanding relationship.
What Do You Recommend for Lead Followup?
Lead follow up is so crucial for any lead generation strategy. It is very rare that somebody is simply going to purchase a high ticket item from any marketing campaign and they will require some nurturing.
Action Hero sits on top of your current sales team, ensuring your normal process isn’t disrupted and your sales team can work these leads as they normally would.
We recommend all green and orange actions from the lead qualification tier above get added into your CRM. At that point, either an SDR or your sales director can jump in depending on the potential size of the client. The best thing to do is to immediately follow up with some proof of concept, such as a case study and share your calendar so you can get them on the phone. From there, your sales team can handle the rest.
Pro tip: don’t forget your CRM automations. There are many ways to offer value and stay top of mind for prospects without having to manually send information or spend time personalizing proposals. Common automations are a “Welcome Series”, “Lead but no call scheduled”, “Lead and call scheduled” and “Call scheduled but did not show”.
What Is a Good Response Rate?
If you have spent any time at all in digital marketing, you have received the “what is ‘performance’?” question. Furthermore, you know there are a million ways to slice and dice this question based on industry, targeting, brand name, the CTA, and more.
At Action Hero, we conservatively like to say we get a positive response after every 500 contacts, or .2%. However, we have seen instances where this rate is significantly higher.
For example, we have had several campaigns, both for clients and our own internal marketing that have well exceeded 1%.
However, this is truly a game of scale. We are reaching out to people that are not aware of you and that get a ton of emails like this every day. We need to cast a wide net, consistently get in front of users and send a lot of emails to drive positive response volume that really moves the needle.
