B2B SaaS Email Marketing Strategy: Increase Lead Generation By 200% With Multiple Touchpoints.

Koen Claes Rouire

People love to badmouth cold emailing campaigns.

Cold emails are too intrusive. Too salesy. Too demanding and just cold, freezing cold. Well, they have the right to say that because everybody (at least) once was a victim of a poorly planned and designed cold emailing campaign.

However, we’re here to prove the opposite. Cold emailing is our bread & butter lead generation strategy, and we’ll share why and how it works for us.

Look at the statistics from the first month of this case study:

68% open rate
54% reply rate
200% increase in leads
+1 product demo call each day.

Before we reveal our strategy, we want to talk about the customer and problems to give the context of this story.

The brand

Creates logistic software for companies
Previous strongest marketing channel: word-of-mouth
Pain point: manual outreach process → time and labor-intensive

The brand’s needs

Increase sales leads
Schedule meetings automatically in sales reps’ agendas
Generate extra income from new clients

We came up with a strategy that included:

Finding your target audience (prospecting)
Preparing a lead list
LinkedIn ads/message testing
Creating an outreach strategy
Writing nurture emails
Automating the cold emailing process

Now, let’s talk about the core idea of why this campaign was a success.

Multi-touch attribution to trigger conversions

Here is the hallmark of all bad cold emailing campaigns: they’re out of the blue.

On the other hand, we create as many touchpoints as possible to earn some familiarity. We make sure that the email is lukewarm when it hits prospects’ inbox. The magic of 68% open rate is hidden in the multiple touchpoint customer journey we execute beforehand.

Prospects are already familiar or possibly interested in our product way before we send them our first email. Below you can see our customer journey.

So here is the action plan step by step:

Finding the niche audience with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
First touchpoint with LinkedIn ads.
Automated LinkedIn connection request with a personalized message.
Cold email number 1
Follow up on LinkedIn.
CE2-CE3-CE4

The formula: the more visibility and touchpoints = the more conversions. Now, we’ll elaborate on each step of the action plan.

5 Steps to get Hundreds of Qualified Leads in a Month

Step 1: Finding qualified prospects with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator the most precise and probably only B2B tool to pinpoint your audience. It requires some learning on the way, but it could help you grow rapidly once you get the basics in place.

Why LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn has the most expansive data pool of business professionals.
With over 25 filter options, you can reach decision-makers.
Excellent features to create super-targeted segmentations.

After an intake session with our client, we already knew who we were looking for. As a result, we created a LinkedIn segmentation and found over 1500 highly qualified decision-makers.

Step 2: Extracting prospects from LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Now, we have a list of 1500 potential clients. We need every bit of data to create a hyper-personalized customer journey. Remember, one of the most effective ways to increase conversions is to personalization

In this step, we used marketing automation tools to extract prospects’ data from the LinkedIn database. You can also try to DIY this process with tools such as Phantombuster or Dux-soup. These tools allow you to extract the information of thousands of leads in a few minutes. And once you get to their LinkedIn data, it’s child’s play to find their GDPR-friendly business email addresses.

You see, in this step, we get all the information to create a super personalized customer journey + made a verified email list for our campaign.

Onwards!

Step 3: Breaking the ice with LinkedIn ads

In this stage, we use LinkedIn ads to create awareness. We want our potential clients to see our brand, value proposition, product and nothing more really. The intention here is to get them ready for the upcoming steps of the customer journey.

So here is the strategy behind the LinkedIn ads.

We only targeted those 1500 highly qualified prospects.
LinkedIn ads were purely optimized for awareness and impressions.
LinkedIn ads were created based on the data we extracted (roles, interests, company info etc).
We created three LinkedIn ads to test three different value propositions.

As a result, we entered the feed of our customers for the first time. Also, we found out which value proposition was getting the most attention. Testing the messaging here was crucial because it enabled us to write better marketing messages later.

Step 4: Social engagement on LinkedIn

At this point, most prospects are familiar with our brand. That’s why shortly after our LinkedIn ad campaign, we send them a connection request on LinkedIn. The intention here is not to sell anything but to tap into their awareness field for the second time. Here, we choose to send prospects connection requests, including warm messages. All automated and 100% spam-safe.

The result: from all the connection requests we sent, we had a 42% acceptance rate. This second touchpoint is a game-changer for the campaign. Many of our prospects know who we are now, + we’re friends on LinkedIn.

We can assume that most of them already checked the contact person’s profile, know her name, and what she posted on her profile. Therefore, they’re more likely to click our cold -or lukewarm- emails.

Step 5: Drip email strategy – 4 consequent emails

Up until now, we have had a lot of qualitative insights about our audience. Based on those findings, our conversion copywriter composed four emails + value-driven subject lines.

Above that, we always make sure not to sell anything without cultivating a relationship first. A straightforward approach: giving some value yourself first to then seize some. This gesture can be an eBook, webinar invite, use-cases or anything that carries value.

So once you finish the first email, you then write at least two follow-ups for the receivers who haven’t responded yet. Usually, we optimize our email follow like this:

Introduction message + call invite (usually we mention earlier touchpoint (LinkedIn) here to get more replies)
A shorter version of the introduction message.
Reminder
RE: Last call (more emotional)

Note: in this example, we only aimed dutch-speaking prospects to communicate in their mother tongue to increase personalization, therefore conversions.

Bonus touchpoint – LinkedIn follow-up message.

To boost conversions even more, we send a follow-up message to our prospects on LinkedIn and mention our email. And this is our formula for a 68% open rate, 54% reply rate, 200% increase in leads, +1 product demo call each day for a B2B SaaS company.

Now, we have all the written material, we can set up marketing tools, automation, and integration.

Step 6: Marketing automation and integration

All the steps above look easy when it’s on paper. But it’s extremely difficult to run and control this process if you don’t know which tools to use and how to use them. At this level, such questions may arise:

How can we track the process?
Are we sending these emails manually?
How do we know when someone replies to an email?
How can we integrate all these automated emails with our CRM system?

To answer this question once and for all, we set up everything for you. For this specific case, our tools stack, respectively, consisted of Phantombuster, Lemlist, Zapier, and our client’s CRM system for this campaign. After this automation and integration step, the only thing our clients had to do was just show up in the generated meetings. Here are the results.

Besides the 200% increase in lead generation, the client now also has a lead generation blueprint, which he can repeat to other target segments over and over again. All he has to do is find another highly targeted audience, replay the strategy, and reap the conversion results again.

Here we conclude this specific case for this B2B client of ours. Of course, every case is different, so we change our approach and create separate strategies each time.