Cold Outreach: Doing Business With Strangers
In a world where people spend so much of their time interacting virtually, outreach has expanded to the point that cold outreach has an important place in business and marketing.
Pitching an idea and working with complete strangers is becoming more integral to every business’s long-term plan for growth and expansion.
Is Cold Outreach Still Relevant?
In the current climate, 92% of customer interactions occur on the phone, and a large chunk of those are involved with cold outreach. Successful businesses are able to not only care for their customer base but also expand that base and move into new territory.
Cold outreach campaigns and outreach strategies are as old as door-to-door salespeople, but it is a tactic that has evolved heavily from what it once was in this day and age. Technologically, a single business can reach millions upon millions of potential customers from within a single office space.
An important adaptation, as a result, is that knowing how to structure a form of cold outreach makes all the difference if you want to get responses from potential customers.
Here are some ways you can improve your ability to conduct cold outreach.
Diversify Your Methods
Nowadays, going door to door isn’t many peoples’ first choice when it comes to cold outreach, but there are still a variety of ways to do it. In addition to cold calling, in which you call a potential customer who has not been interacted with, there are also cold emails and even text options.
Knowing how and when to use these different options is very important when trying to make your cold outreach initiatives successful.
Flexibility is important because the things people respond to are changing; social media outreach is becoming more popular, but cold emails are nearly 30% less likely to get a response today than ten years ago.
It is worth considering branching into social media and utilizing various platforms to spread the word about you to countless new audiences. Social media integration may not be as direct as an email, but it can expand the pool of people you can reach.
Also, pay attention to when you are doing your outreach; while business hours are earlier in the day, people are more likely to open new emails in the evening, making it an attractive prospect to do outreach at different hours of the day.
Monitor Your Cold Outreach Metrics
Pay attention to these metrics to ensure your cold outreach emails and social media messages are working:
Open rate
Response rate
Cold email campaigns are still the best forms of cold outreach. A good cold email has:
A catchy subject line to ensure it’s opened after hitting the inbox
Doesn’t land in spam
Is a template email to ensure its effectiveness
Addresses the recipient’s pain points and offers a value proposition
Has a professional email signature
Has a bit of a personal touch in the email copy
Has an enticing CTA (call to action)
You Might Be Warmer Than You Think
It has been found that most business-to-business buyers are 60% of the way through learning about a product they want to buy before they ever speak to a representative. This means that through marketing and expansion, you will often be working with people who already have an understanding of your operation.
As a result, your goal is to prove that what you have to offer is practical and timely for them. People often make the mistake of spending too much time explaining what exactly it is that they are offering, when in fact, many people already have their foot in the door when a cold call occurs.
Do your best to be clear with the outreach recipient, and make sure you are giving them facts in addition to the emotional hooks you need to get the ball rolling. When building a relationship through methods like these, try to remember that they could be as interested in you as you are with them.
Act accordingly, and understand that what you have to offer is valuable and worth having for the person that you are speaking with at that moment.
Know Your Audience
It may seem beside the point to ask you to get to know your audience when the whole point of cold calling is that you don’t know who you are talking to. However, you must focus on catering your cold outreach to those you think you might be reaching based on market research.
If you are utilizing a social media platform used by an older audience, try and market as you would to an older customer compared to how you could act when working with a younger audience.
Cold outreach is most successful when it can alleviate an existing problem the audience member has, which is something you can better hone in on if you have an idea of what your audience will be.
Using an app like Dialed, you can track your contacts and what kinds of customers and team members you engage with. Dialed lets you categorize and manage all the contacts you have in your network, sending out mass messages to groups depending on their needs and preferences.
Tools like this give you the chance to pay attention to your audience and create different marketing strategies depending on the type of person who is meant to receive them.
Know Your Audience
Doing business with strangers has been important to businesses across the country for centuries, but cold outreach has transformed into something that requires skill and technical savvy to navigate. When doing cold outreach (and outreach of any kind), make sure you diversify your approaches and understand your worth and the worth of your business.
Pay attention to market research and be flexible in your strategies to cater to different needs and preferences. Apps like Dialed give you the ability to keep track of your entire network and figure out which pitches need to be made in which corners to get the job done. Cold outreach can be an invaluable part of your business if you give it the tools it needs to thrive.
Download Dialed now to improve your cold outreach.
Sources:
6 Cold Outreach Sales Statistics — Infographic | by Michael Phillips | Medium
13 Strategies For Making A Truly Effective Cold Pitch | Forbes
