Blog Post
Our 10-Step Outbound Playbook
We have sent a lot of emails over the past 15 years. You can use our 10-Step Outbound Playbook that we have mastered, from our own trial and error, to build your own or to get a better understanding of the structure of sending outbound email.
1. Determine your best-fit customers
One of the most important steps in setting up an outbound email campaign is deciding who your best-fit customers are. If you’re operating in a niche such as veterinary, this is already a given however if you sell to multiple industries it’s important to figure out who you should target. One of the best ways to find out is to look at your existing list of customers and you can ask any AI tool to look for similarities. Creating an outbound campaign is time consuming and the email infrastructure can get expensive. Determining what criteria makes your best-fit customers will help ensure you achieve the best ROI.
2. Build a list of companies
Once your criteria is set, you can start building a list of companies to contact. We use a variety of tools to search for companies such as ZoomInfo, Apollo, Sales Navigator, and even Google Maps. Each tool has some basic filters you can apply to find companies, but unless you are operating in a very specific niche, you’ll need to verify the contact using AI. That’s because the filters are still very broad. You can apply a filter to display “financial services” but that will give you contact to major banks and other companies you might not want to contact.
3. Verify and score companies with AI
To determine if your list of customers are in your best-fit criteria, you can use AI to search and summarize the company’s website. You can then ask AI to read the company summary and score the contact from a scale of 1 - 5 how “fit” they are. For example, if your best-fit customers are service-based contractors who are HVAC technicians you can instruct the AI to rank them a 5 while disqualifying others. Once your companies are verified, you can export contact information of decision makers.
4. Segment companies
Use AI to niche down companies into as many segments as possible. If you’re targeting veterinarians, don’t stop there. Niche down to mobile veterinarians, equine, emergency services, and rehabilitation specialists. The more you niche down, the more relatable your emails will sound and the more people will pay attention to them. Those bad spam emails everyone receives, is someone blasting the same template around and they don’t work today.
5. Verify contacts
It’s best practice to double verify every email before hitting the send button. Just because you received a contact from a database, doesn’t mean it’s valid. Email verification providers such as ZeroBounce or Debounce can ensure the email is valid by sending an SMTP ping test that checks if the mailbox exists without sending an email.
6. Manually write every email
We always start by manually writing emails to every segment. Despite the temptation to use AI, the reality is that AI does not sound human. It’s verbose and writes like an alien. We believe natural sounding emails get the highest responsive rates while protecting your brand from being associated with spam mail. After your emails are manually written, we will use AI if necessary to personalize specific parts of the email. For example, we can use AI to find out if some of your contacts appeared in a podcast recently and mention it in our opener and tie it to a specific message we control.
7. Setup email infrastructure
This can be the most tedious part. Large amounts of email volume can’t be sent through a single mailbox or domain because it will be immediately flagged. To circumvent this, we set up an email infrastructure that mimics natural sending patterns ensuring near perfect deliverability. Each mailbox sends a maximum of around 18 emails per day spread out throughout the day. Our mailboxes or legitimate Google and Microsoft with separate logins, passwords, and authentication codes.
8. Warm mailboxes
If you think about a new mailbox, it usually doesn’t start sending similar sounding emails right out of the gate. New mailboxes lack a sender reputation making them susceptible to being tagged as spam. To ensure emails get delivered, every mailbox is “warmed-up” for 3-weeks which means it sends emails back and forth to other mailboxes with more established reputations.
9. Start sending
Once a campaign is launched we continue warming the mailboxes and progressively scale outbound by 1 email per day. This ensures a strong sender reputation is established for long-term success and deliverability. We start seeing more replies around week 5 when the email sending is fully ramped.
10. Optimize
We select the winner from our A/B testing and start writing the next copy to test, building off the last. Over time, each email gets better once we learn what copywriting resonates the most with each audience segment. We have found that a compelling offer people can’t say no to has the greatest influence over reply rates (assuming the copywriting isn’t bad).
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