Your Prospects Don’t Reply Because You Have Nothing Good To Say

The problem with most outbound motions is that teams are identifying a basic Ideal Customer Profile and using the same message with all of them. There's a much better way...

Instantly.ai came to us looking for creative ways to approach their outbound motion to engage new users.

Being a cold email agency themselves, they already had all of the email delivery infrastructure in place, they wanted creative ways to use data to target more potential users.

We leveraged our internal databases to launch 8 campaigns at once with completely different targeting.

We average about 12-15 interested prospects per day while running the campaigns.

Secureframe had a huge email delivery issue before coming to Growth Engine X.

On average, they were seeing 7-15% open rates on their campaigns and knew they needed to escape the spam filters and promotions tab to talk directly with their prospects.

Using our cold email infrastructure, we average a 69.7% open rate across all of their campaigns without any change in messaging.

Website Closers came to us by listening to our work on a podcast. They knew it would be possible to reach out to business owners looking to sell their business, but they didn't quite know how to do it.

Not only did we advise their internal team, we ran the campaign for them and build a repeatable data collection strategy and script that provides a predictable pipeline for their team.

Bequest Income Fund was one of Growth Engine X's first customers. Their story is a perfect example of the importance of experimentation and creative campaigns when running an outbound program.

The first 3 campaigns that we launched for Bequest Income Fund had large spam issues. Their offering is a financial investment which spam filters are extremely difficult to pass because of the language in the email.

We worked with the Bequest Team to creatively frame their offer so that we could escape the spam filters and still bring in qualified prospects.

Today, our leads supply their team of 6 salespeople and we are continuously building their opted in email list as well with some advice outside of cold email services we provide.

The Gutter Kings came to us because they knew that they could get a leg up on the competition by leveraging technology that Growth Engine X had spoken about at a conference.

Cold Email is not a widely used customer acquisition method in their industry not because it doesn't work but because most don't know where to start.

We gave Gutter Kings the system, the copywriting, and the data and the campaign worked for itself. This is a great example of what happens when an offer is put in front of an audience in need.

Blueprint GTM is a partner and customer of Growth Engine X. They collect and sell the open job data that Growth Engine X even uses for their campaigns.

We leveraged our email infrastructure, contact data, and their open jobs data to find ideal customers and each email was over 50% custom to each prospect.

This is a playbook that works for anyone wanting to reach out to High Net Worth Individuals.

Through our work with our multiple Financial Advisory clients, we have learned a data collection method and copywriting angle that begins the conversation for Real Estate funds, Financial Advisors, and Wealth Managers.

We have done work with SEO, PPC, Performance Marketing, Media Buying, and other types of agencies in the past.

Our Marketing Agency Playbook that we have uncovered combines contact level personalization, data about their web traffic, and our copywriting script to repeatedly bring in interested responses to our outreach.

Combining our open and closed job data with our email delivery infrastructure provides a great use case for Staffing and Recruiting firms to leverage our technology.

We reach out to companies when they post new jobs, when the jobs have been on the market for 30 days, and when the job has been on the market for 60 days to engage the company in using outside Recruiting Services.

Eric Nowoslawski founded Growth Engine X because he knew that there was a better way to run a B2B company's outbound engine.

Eric followed in all of the traditional Sales and Marketing coaching programs such as Dale Carnegie, Sandler Training, Jeb Blount's courses and books, Oren Klaff's Masterminds, Predictable Revenue, Winning by Design, etc. Taking the best pieces of these trainings and building a sales process is what Eric did for a tech incubator across 32 different startups.

The startups began implementing the programs and seeing success but they all had one problem, scale. All of these techniques work but the volume needed to fulfill the goals of a funded company were not happening manually. Eric first developed the outbound tech stack most companies build for themselves.

He bought Apollo, connected some Gsuite accounts it, wrote some generic messaging and hit send. And like most of the customers before they come to us, it barely worked. Although the personal approach the founders of each of these startups took a lot of manual effort, it was the only thing that was working.

Eric knew the only way to truly scale would have to include a process that would keep emails out of the spam box and was able to say something relevant to each and every prospect as if the research was done manually.

Today, Eric has taken that process and formed Growth Engine X to help other companies scale their outbound email process using the lessons and processes he learned with working with 32 startups at once building their outbound engines.

Cold Email in the Past

In 2014, a company could have seen results in a cold email campaign by buying a list of prospects, adding them to a Mailchimp HTML campaign, and send out an email blast with a {{First Name}} custom variable and stay busy with the leads that rolled in.

In 2016, large marketing SMTPs like Mailchimp started cracking down and throttling your reach if you did this. No matter. You could still load up prospects into an Excel sheet and mail merge them into your Outlook account and send emails automatically.

In 2020, the need for a Sales Engagement tool took over the market. Although it was founded in 2014, Outreach.io made huge strives when Covid-19 hit and the world needed so send far more emails.

This has created increasingly diminishing returns because of the hammering of the domain reputation that using multiple inboxes on one domain causes.

Cold Email Today

Today, in order to optimize for delivery into your prospects inbox, it's a scientific endeavor. MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records need to be aligned and validated on the DNS.

Each inbox that you create needs to be on a domain that is completely separate from the main domain to keep all live communication and opted-in marketing email out of the spam box.

The inboxes need to join a warmup pool of others that are evading the spam filters in order to fake engagement. Artificial Intelligence is needed to send messages back and forth that make Google believe it's real traffic.

One day, 100% unique emails will probably need to be sent in order to evade the spam filters. Luckily we aren't there yet.

Growth Engine X manages and advises on these processes for all of our clients and partners in order to ensure optimized inbox placement.

Building Lists in the Past

In the past, buyers only had access to the information that was presented to them.

If they were looking for an accounting software, there weren't great ways for them to find and compare tools.

So what a full cycle sales rep could do is load up a list of Accounting Managers, send off emails through Outreach or Apollo and deliver their company approved template to every buyer.

Without much knowledge or options, a manager would take the meeting to learn about the new software.

This would keep a sales team's outbound engine running smoothly and their time could be spent on other tasks.

Very little relevance or personalization was needed to start a conversation with prospects.

With the onset of data companies like Apollo, ZoomInfo, Seamless, LeadIQ etc. Now every company in the world could unlock LinkedIn data and fire off emails to everyone in their market.

A new approach is necessary.

Building Lists Today

Today, buyers have an overwhelming amount of information. Blogs, videos, LinkedIn posts, TikToks, podcasts, etc.

You name it and they already know about what problem they need to solve and they can research at any time who is going to help them solve it the best.

Why would they need to be interrupted by a sales rep solicitation? The new method to doing this is by leveraging data to find companies that fit your perfect template of the situation past customers have been in.

Your perfect template could include reaching out to the VP of Marketing at companies with 50-100 employees who are hiring for a graphic designer and mention "wholesale" on their website. The problem is that there isn't a single database that has all of this information accurately.

Just like your business, these data companies must specialize at only a couple things in order to keep gaining market share. Here at Growth Engine X, we have access to over 20+ databases that we can cross reference when researching and building a list of your Ideal Customer Profile.

That way we can leverage the data to reach out to prospects with laser accuracy, and it also empowers WHAT we can say to them.

Your Dad's Cold Email Template

As you get to this step, you probably know generally what I'm going to say and can even harken back to how cold email outreach used to sound at one of your prior organizations.

The subject lines were exploding with language like, "Don't hire another VP until you read this!" and the body of the email was filled with 2-3 paragraphs of copywriting explaining all of the widgets and features that come with your product or service.

Again, because information was not readily available, this was often the only information a prospect could find about a solution to one of their problems.

Today, this doesn't work because information is everywhere. Everyone is sequencing the same Hey {{First Name}} with a templated message that follows.

No one is replying because you have nothing good to say to them.

Data Empowered Copywriting

Now we have data to leverage in order to write far better emails. Emails under 75 words get the most responses. Interest based calls to action out perform "book a call on my calendly" type calls to action by a factor of 5. Speaking to prospect's with a 5th grade reading level increases response by 32%.

Using subject lines that look like a customer or colleague sent them an email (without lying of course) increases responses by 47%.

Adding personalizations based on their LinkedIn profile and their website as simple as calling out when they started at their role again increases responses by a factor of 5. Not to mention all of the data that we gathered in step 2 that we can leverage in our outreach as well.

Check out our copywriting training on YouTube for more but I hope I made the point that we don't need to blindly be writing emails anymore. There are frameworks and guidelines that we write all of our first drafts under for our clients in order to increase the odds of success.