Before officially launching yourselves into the huge pool of sales prospecting through email, through outbound services, you must decide which solution to choose. It’s important to make a difference between an email marketing tool, such as Mailchimp or Mailjet, which will help to give new resources and updates to potential and current customers, and a sales emailing solution, allowing you to source new leads.
Here are our advice for easily choosing a tool which will support your growth.
The possibility to import your contacts for your sales prospecting
The first factor to take into account is the possibility to import contact lists directly from your CRM, a CSV file, manually, or even via the API. In this way you will be able to multiply acquisition sources without risking being dependent. Another big asset is the possibility of building contact lists directly from the tool, via professional social networks for example.
Segmentation options for the prospect lists
Once your contacts are in the tool, it seems important to be able to create segmented mailing lists. By doing this your emails will be even more relevant for your target audience. Ideally, it should also be possible to synchronize personalized fields from your CRM, in order to keep your sorting and work habits the same.
Configuring sending out emails and sales prospecting
Several tools, such as emailing marketing solutions, send out emails directly from their servers. Your emails are guaranteed to flop because now the majority of messaging services recognize mass send outs from this type of tool, with the mention via service.entreprise.com, or worse by filtering your message straight out as a promotional email.
By offering to connect your own server (on imap/smtp), or from your own Gmail or Outlook account, emails will be sent out as if they really come from your own mailbox. So the delivery rates are at the highest level.
Creating personalized email campaigns, automatically managing relaunches
One of the key functions of a sales prospection solution is the possibility of creating real email relaunch scenarios. Managing five or more relaunches manually is quite simply impossible for a salesperson. This has been confirmed with studies by scripted.com and marketingdonut.co.uk: 44% of salesperson give up after only one relaunch whereas 80% of sales need at least five relaunches.
Moreover, personalizing emails by inserting personalized fields according to surname, forename, business, or any other segmentation factor, is an important point for maximizing opening, click, and response rates.
Automatically sorting responses by type
You might as well make the most of the arrival of artificial intelligence to save more time for your sales team. Some tools allow you to pre-sort your email responses by type: positive, negative, absent, automatic, wrong contact, or undelivered. So your salespeople’s inboxes won’t fill up after one mailing with a slew of useless emails, only positive responses will appear there.
What’s more, the possibility of creating model emails according to the type of responses and then sending them out automatically is a significant feature when choosing a sales prospection solution.
Sending emails automatically instead of your salespeople
A final feature which is essential and very interesting, particularly for larger sales teams, is the possibility to send out emails from another person’s account, as if it were from the salesperson’s outbox. By doing this you can generate a flow of leads for your salespeople, without having to prepare the campaigns themselves, and they can concentrate only on the available prospects who have responded positively.
