Tim: We’ve been talking a lot lately about what to do once you actually get somebody’s email address. Today’s episode is a little different though because it’s about how to get better results with cold emails, specifically how to get somebody to click a link in a cold email. The tactic itself has wider application than just through cold emailing you know and it’s one of the more unique creative ones I’ve heard.
Our guest is Alex Berman from Inspire Beats and you’ll love what he has to say so let’s do it. I’m Tim Paige, the conversion educator here at LeadPages and this is ConversionCast.
Hey Alex, welcome to ConversionCast thanks for coming on the show.
Alex: Thanks for having me Tim.
Tim: Absolutely. So let’s start this off. This is a unique case study and it’s a tactic that I’d be willing to be very, very few people have ever thought of trying before but I love it because it is so unique. Can you share with us through what were the results that you were able to get from this tactic?
Alex: Sure. So we send cold emails for a living and using the tactic we’re about to share, we were able to boost our click-through rate by 18%.
Tim: I love it. An 18% boost in click-through rate that’s a huge boost especially with a volume of emails that you’re sending so I love it. Let’s talk a little bit about who you are and what you do. Tell us all about that.
Alex: Sure. So I’m with a company called Inspire Beats. So I’m the chief marketing sumo over here and we are targeted lead generation and outbound selling for startups and agencies. Basically what we do is we handle the entire process of getting customers interested and getting them on the phone with the companies salespeople. So cold emailing, lead generation, research that sort of thing.
Tim: Perfect. So that really you know, it’s a good find considering the work that you do to be able to get these kinds of results. Can you tell us what you did? What was the tactic?
Alex: Sure. So we ran a test on an email campaign where we were sending to a thousand emails with the same subject line pitching our service to other people. Sending cold emails. 500 of them were just these regular outbound emails where subject lines personalized. We pitched our products, you know, everything is super customized. Like we normally do for an email. We had a link back to our site at the end of the email to test. So that was 500 of the emails.
Tim: Got it.
Alex: The other 500 we sent out we did the exact same thing except the only difference is we viewed their LinkedIn profile right after sending the email so that our name would appear on the recently viewed list on their LinkedIn profile.
Tim: That’s so unique I love it. You know it’s like it’s almost a little bit of like psychology hacking. You know like getting your name in the top of their mind so that when that email comes in, it automatically feels like they already know who you are right?
Alex: Exactly. In sales, they call it multiple touch points and what’s normally been recommended is following up with someone like four, five, six times if they don’t message you back with a cold email. But what we found is yeah viewing the LinkedIn profile or following someone on Twitter or something like that can also count as a touch point and you don’t have to think of another email sent.
Tim: Right, yea that’s great. A lot of the time if you do send another email that almost can come off as like annoying if they didn’t open the first one or if it’s a cold email they’re not really interested in you yet. That can be a reason to not want to open an email whereas something as simple and relatively harmless as a LinkedIn views it just makes it seem like you’re already a person that they would know or have some kind of connection with.
Alex: Exactly and what’s so interesting about this test is it wasn’t even a LinkedIn connect or a message or anything. All we did was literally go over to their LinkedIn profile and it boosted our click-through by 18%.
Tim: So here’s the question was this something that you just manually went through in did. You looked at all the emails on the list and went through and looked at all their profiles?
Alex: Yeah. It was a thousand profiles that we viewed. LinkedIn has something’s in their code base that will auto ban you if you use bots or automation.
Tim: Got you.
Alex: So yeah we had to do it all manually. It took a few hours but it was worth it.
Tim: Yeah for sure. So I’m wondering if there’s a way to make this a little more scalable? Because I think you know with every campaign that you try to send out, every cold email campaign, It would be really difficult to go through and do that. I could think of some really simple practical uses like for example the first time you’re going to email somebody just you know if it’s a one on one email with somebody you’ve never talked with before. You could that, look at their LinkedIn profile and then again your name comes up.
But I’m wondering if there are some ways to really scale this to a larger level in case you want to get that higher open rate. Does anything come to mind?
Alex: Yeah. So there’s this guy who’s a LinkedIn pro Cocas Sexton and what he recommends doing is posting the LinkedIn like 35 times a day. So that’s something to get. You know, that’s a more scalable way because you can post it 35 times with a bot without getting banned. Also, you could favorite somebody’s tweet. It’s easier to build a saleable Twitter bot than it is for a LinkedIn bot.
Tim: Interesting.
Alex: So favoring a tweet or following is another thing that you could do automated.
[0:05:00]
Tim: I love it. So the key takeaway I would say for this is to find a way to get that touch point before you get into the more I don’t want to say aggressive but the more friction laden method of the actual email or the call. Find another way to get your name in front of them so they feel like they know who you are and that’s more likely to get them to open an email and in your case, you even had a higher result of either clicking through or responding right?
Alex: Oh everything was [indiscernible [0:05:29]] so on the control group we had an 86% open rate, 37% click-through rate and a 13% response rate on 500 emails. And then for this test group of 500, we had an 89% open rate which is 3% on top of the other one, a click-through rate of 44% which is 10 more than the other one and the response rate of 19%, which is what is that? 6 more than the other one?
Tim: That’s really great. I love that. That’s really cool. Well, thanks this is a reality you know, simple tactic but it does make a difference. So thanks so much for sharing this on the show, I appreciate you coming on.
Alex: For sure, Tim. Thaksin for having me.
