How can a handful of emails return $200,000 of revenue every month?
It's a secret that's never been a secret. It's the power of outbound marketing wielded correctly.
If you're unsure about the difference between inbound and outbound marketing, check out last week's article. We take you through the different types of outbound marketing and how it has evolved in recent years to involve your audience in the experience, such as through augmented reality.
This article will show you why outbound marketing works and how you can get the most out of your B2B outbound marketing strategy to drive demand and win opportunities.
Most of the content and marketing platforms out there are designed to leverage inbound marketing tactics. Often, they tout the benefits of inbound vs. outbound. Sure, inbound has its place. Case and point - this blog post. Yet, most content marketing efforts deal with the sad reality thatmost won't be viewed and is often ignored.
In the B2B marketing world, we're not dealing with generalities, such as "women 25-35 in North America." We have the luxury of getting to know our target audience on a very personal and professional level. For instance, you can leverage tools like BI Signature from Boardroom Insiders to get insights on business priorities, challenges, personal attributes, and more for key executives.
Rather than falling on deaf ears, these types of insights allow you to deliver highly relevant communication to reach them on their terms in the tone and manner they like to communicate.
Adding outbound marketing to your B2B marketing strategy is an investment in 1:1 communication. What's the ROI on that alone?
Marketing Schools, a website for marketers continuing to improve their marketing education, states, "Outbound marketing proves to be particularly effective in business-to-business marketing, and/or with transactions involving higher-end products."
There are several reasons for this.
One is the principle of value and trust. For instance, if I have something of value you would like, you will need to demonstrate you recognize that value before I offer any value to you. I will then trust you with giving up equal or greater value than what was demonstrated.
This is especially true in dealing with decision-makers, typically in the C-Suite. Often, these hard-to-reach decision-makers prefer to make business decisions with members of their peer network. It could even be an introduction from someone in their network (someone they established value and trust with).
After all, a decision made on behalf of an Enterprise-level organization has a higher risk than an online impulse buy. The trust and value barrier is far greater than most B2C marketers have to deal with. The exception here is luxury B2C brands.
Given this principle, most Enterprise-level organizations with a customer lifetime value (LTV) of $10,000 or more, should be investing heavily in outbound marketing as a growth strategy.
Of course, a successful marketing mix requires inbound marketing, such as a digital presence where interested prospects can learn more about you. However, without outbound marketing, you'll be waiting for the right prospect when you could've gone to them.
According to a DataSpot survey of marketers, the most successful outbound marketing strategy in 2021 so far has been "cold emails."
This is with an important caveat; these emails are not truly cold in the sense that you know nothing about your prospect when you hit the send button.
One marketing expert explained, "All of our 'cold' outreach still has an element of research behind it. We know these companies could benefit from our service. We know the prospect is the right person to speak with. We aren't blindly reaching out; there's a science behind it."
Not only that but there needs to be a personal, fun element to your outreach.
At UviaUs, we use "cold emails,"... but we research the prospect to make sure we're a perfect match, and then couple the emails with augmented reality or a personalized video. Or often, we'll lead with a dimensional direct mailer sent to create a moment of impact and then follow up with an email sequence. Nothing is ever just an email and certainly not a bulk-send template.
One surveyed marketer reported that by focusing on the quality of emails, rather than sending out hundreds of impersonal messages, "For a previous campaign, we were able to get monthly revenue from $160K to $200K."
It's thoughtful outreach with a warm human touch. Start with research, make it personal, and make it remarkable. It'll make all the difference to getting noticed and acted upon.
Now that we've talked about the stats behind outbound marketing, next week, we'll dive into some specific examples of how companies of all sizes have used outbound marketing to benefit their marketing strategy.
There's no one-size-fits-all for outbound marketing, but these success stories will inspire you to think of new ways to engage your perfect prospects.
