What is 'success' when it comes to cold emailing?
When you start an email campaign, keep an eye on the following metrics: open rate, reply rate and interest rate. These metrics will help answer the question. Before we begin, let’s recall that our goal is to book qualified meetings in your sales calendar, and to achieve that, we need to follow a set of stages.
Here’s how the process works:
We look closely at all these metrics because each stage depends on the other. Firstly, nothing happens in cold outbound without deliverability (open rate). Secondly, you'll need content that generates replies (reply rate), allowing you to book meetings (interest rate).
Open Rate
In practical terms, it shows all the prospects that opened your email, hence, the personalised message providing a solution to their potential problem. Different factors can impact these percentages, such as subject lines and the first words of your email copy.
Important: it’s a crucial metric to evaluate your deliverability - spam problems and set-up settings have negative effects.
We target to get over the 60% in open rate to achieve considerable opportunities.
Let’s reflect on this:
- From January to May, beginning the year on the ‘right’ foot - it’s crucial to start strong, to be prepared for the summer months.
- Summer Months, June, July, and August decrease impacted by summer vacations - we need to be prepared and overcome this in the best way possible by defining specific strategies.
- In September, prospects are back - time to put the machine at full power and get your head in the game!
- December is the challenging ‘Xmas’ month - it can be an opportunity to shift the focus for the upcoming year and strategically plan the next steps.
Reply Rate
To simplify, this is the percentage of prospects who replied to your email. A wide range of replies can appear, from the classic ‘no’ to the trilling ‘yes’. But, it's always necessary to understand the reasons for the different prospects’ decisions. If it’s negative, we need to comprehend why to improve the message; if it’s positive, let’s focus on closing the deal. There’s still a third option, covering everything between the ‘no’ and ‘yes’. Here, the mastery and experience of Outbound Experts must intervene and efficiently deal with these potential clients - for example, the complex and challenging art of following up.
We fit all our replies into a spectrum to clearly understand the next steps.
Reply Spectrum:
- No - the hard ‘no’, unsubscribed, not interested, marked as spam, …
- The ‘meah’ - not right now, no budget, not the right person, already solved, …
- Yes - the classic ‘yes’, but there’s always room for the ‘yes, but…’
But, enough theory, let’s analyse our results.
Deep diving on this graph:
- January and February are usually strong - prospects want to kick the year in full power and are in the market for new ideas, initiatives, and insights.
- Between March and May, some challenges appeared - companies focused on their processes and executing the business decisions opted for at the beginning of the year.
- Summer months, during June, July and August, you already know - the priority of their decisions is not work-related.
- September to December, it’s time to close the year strong - prospects want to achieve (or exceed) defined goals, and they’re more receptive to new (or more) inputs and business strategies (time to put all in!).
Interest Rate
And, now, the one that tells us if we’re being efficient and booking with those qualified leads our clients are looking for. The interest rate gives us the percentage of prospects who converted into new valuable opportunities and are one step closer to becoming clients. Here, we can evaluate if all our teamwork since the beginning of the partnership is productive. From this point, you’ll have qualified booked meetings in your sales calendar with valuable contacts based on your ICP.
Important: one thing that can influence these results is that these meetings may not be scheduled at the very first touch. There’s a need to continuously and by different approaches go after these prospects to pass leads (including all the ‘yes, but...’ replies and everything that falls into ‘the meah’ category on the reply spectrum).
It means that values from a specific month don’t necessary represent our efforts from that month but rather in a set of strategies we have been focusing on up to that point.
What can we learn from this:
- January and February with equivalent values to the previous graphs - it’s the same interpretation during the two first months where prospects are more receptive to new products and search for solutions.
- April and July had interesting positive results - both months initiate quarters (Q2 and Q3), probably translating that decision-makers have the same mentality as the beginning of the year to have a 'boost' start.
- Small note for May and August (we can also consider March as well) - different factors have influenced these bad percentages, but one thing is certain we needed to overcome it, and that’s what we did!
- November and December might represent the ambition to close the year strong - never too late - or the anticipation for a good start to the upcoming year - better safe than sorry.
To conclude...
As you may have noticed, along this analysis, different timings and months (or even days) may require different approaches and strategies. The market is continuously changing, so prospects are always looking for solutions. You need to be present when the need emerges, or go for it and be present - it's better sooner than later.
Our expertise and experience, along the way and across different industries, allow us to be prepared for the outbound sales game, adapting to all external factors. And, now that you get to know us, it’s time to introduce yourself so we can start boosting that sales pipeline and walk towards your quota!
