Too Busy To Prospect? Meet Your Very Own Robot Worker.

Introduction

Let’s face it, when it comes to cold outreach, email prospecting is one of the most effective channels known to man.

If you take the time, each day to carefully research a list of prospects then write a personal email to each and every one of them then you are more than likely going to build plenty of relationships and eventually identify a bounty of interesting opportunities.

If you’re a business owner, in sales or business development then this is something you have most likely been doing since day one.  You do it because it works, if your email is relevant then the prospect replies and you can ring the relationship bell.

So, if it works then why don’t we spend all of our time doing it?  Well, this is the age old issue in any sales role and it is referred to as “feast or famine”.  When you or your sales leaders have no leads, the focus moves to lead generation.  When prospects start replying then your focus moves from Lead Generation on to the next step in your customer journey such as nurturing those relationships and when those relationships turn in to opportunities your focus changes again, typically to closing.

If you’re a business owner then it’s twice as hard because once the sale is done you may need to turn your attention to product/service delivery.  Especially, if you are the business.

With each step in the customer journey, you have more activities to spend your time on and less time to spend on each activity and typically by the time you have taken a customer all the way through your sales cycle you end up with no leads to go back to because you haven’t been focused on lead gen.  As a result, you are typically in a state of either famine (needing leads) or feasting (consuming leads).

The solution to this age old problem is ‘resource’ – once round the block a few times you might start employing additional human resources to focus on things like lead generation or perhaps even outsource this to a third party.

If however the cost of those additional resources aren’t covered by the increase in profit they generate then you don’t have a business model and will ulimately fail and be back at square one sooner or later.

And even if this increase in profit they generate is higher than the resource cost then there are additional challenges to think about.

What if the tasks were rather simple and very repetitive?  Finding a human resource to constantly execute a simple and repetitive set of actions can be very difficult, it is not for everyone and is almost certainly a role that someone may only want to fill part time or at least until they find something else, more exciting to focus on.

Indeed, we prefer to spread the more repetitive jobs out within the company to avoid one single person doing them.  Indeed, according to McKinsey, in about 60 percent of occupations, at least one-third of the activities that make up a specific job could be automated.  And if you are worried about your team kicking back any ideas for automation then relax, workers surveyed look forward to spending less  time on repetitive manual tasks like data entry, and to spending more time on rewarding aspects of their work.  The full report can be seen here.

Even if those human resources are located elsewhere in the World where there is an appetite for simple and repetitive tasks and access to a huge workforce, there is legislation to think about – how easy is it to have a workforce processing personally identifiable information off shore in light of the General Data Protection Regulation?

Challenging right?

Now consider if the simple and repetitive drawbacks were actually the key to some serious scale?

What if they were so simple that Robots could do them?Over the last few years, teams all around the World have been working on this challenge and with so much progress in the field of Robotic Process Automation things are starting to get exciting.

Typically, the prospecting process relies on 3 things that require time, these are:

1. Researching prospects online and where personal data has not been obtained from the data subject directly then processing a notification in compliance with local legislation (G.D.P.R.).
2. Sending emails and scheduling follow ups.
3. Writing personalised introductory email messages that are unique to each and every prospect (and relevant).

At Emailmovers, we help with 2 of the above requirements, namely:

1. Researching prospects – at Emailmovers, we have already researched over 1 million business contacts and sent them a processing notification in compliance with Article 14 of G.D.P.R.
2. Sending emails and scheduling follow ups – our outreach platforms “Deliverite (1 to n)” and/or “Emailmover (1-2-1)” are able to deliver emails and manage follows ups and replies automatically.

But what about writing personalised introductory email messages that are unique to each and every prospect?

Well, if you look at the body of most successful typical cold emails you may find they follow one of these two methods:

1. P.A.S. – Pain. Agitate. Solve.
2. A.I.D.A – Attention. Interest. Desire. Action.

In theory therefore, you can create templates, for instance if you choose to use P.A.S. then you could write the following email to everyone with some very basic personalisation:

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Hi Paul,

Are you struggling to find the time to write cold emails?

Mastering the ability to write effective cold emails takes time.  The time to master the ability and the time each day to actually do it.  How many cold emails will you write today?

For the last 18 years I have been mastering the ability to write effective cold emails and have now decided to offer it as a service to a few select clients.

If you would like to learn more about how I can help you then drop me your number and a good time to call.

Regards

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The above email is a template, it could be sent to practically anyone.  Indeed this is a very common strategy.  If you are using a 1-2-1 strategy then with the right subject line, you should get a 30% open rate, 10% response rate and 1% Positive Response Rate (sales qualified leads).

But, what if we introduced a little data + Natural Language Processing into the above template?  Rather than explain, let me give you an example:

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Good morning Paul,

Interesting to see that you left Microsoft to help people adapt to new technologies. I’m sure you’re a real innovator and I’m following your work on Twitter to stay updated.

With this in mind however, I assume you are pretty busy and have very little time to spare, but still wake up each day with the pressure on to grow your business.  Am I right?

Mastering the ability to write effective cold emails takes time.  The time to master the ability and the time each day to actually do it.  How many cold emails will you write today?

For the last 18 years I have been mastering the ability to write effective cold emails and have now decided to offer it as a service to a few select clients.

If you would like to learn more about how I can help you then drop me your number and a good time to call.

Regards

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You can see that there are 2 distinct versions of the above email template, both use P.A.S. but one uses a service to write a personal introductory line in my email and one doesn’t.

This is an exciting area of email marketing.  I have researched a few different solutions and tested Lyne.ai to see how it works.  All in all it is actually quite straight forward, register for an account, upload your list (.CSV), let the solution process the data then download.  Eyeball it to make sure it’s ok – there were some odd ones in my test that I removed/rewrote.  Once satisfied, upload to the platform creating a merge field for the intro line then drop it in to the email.

Well, there are a few solutions to look at for help with this.

• Lyne.ai – automatically writes the first paragraph of your email
• Copy.ai – automatically writes your whole email
• Rytr.me – automatically write better taglines, SEO titles, interview questions
• Anyword.com – Email Subject Lines, headlines, product descriptions and intro paragraphs.

Did I set the World alight?

Well, no.  Actually the response I received when I tested a personalised intro line with Lyne.ai was 7% which is slightly lower than what I normally get however there are a few things to remember when analysing the results.

1. Is this an exciting area that will ultimately help us make serious gains over the next few months/years – Yes, absolutely
2. Is it difficult to do? No, it’s quite straight forward

With the above in mind however I will be doing a lot more testing to see what works and what doesn’t.  I have confidence in the technology.  If you are using cold email to reach out to prospects then at the very least keep your eye on this otherwise you may never get to the end of ‘busy’.

If you would like more help with your cold email outreach then why not reach out to us for a chat via the following link or call us on 0845 226 7181