Marketing is a broad, deep topic, with an near-endless toolbox. But if you’re looking at B2B marketing in the USA specifically, you’ve got a potential edge you might not even know about: outbound B2B email marketing.
Cold B2B campaigns are powerful, but often get passed by because they’ve very specific to the USA. However, if that’s where your marketing audience is, you can take full advantage.
Why B2B – and the USA – Specifically?
Cold email marketing isn’t viable in Europe (due to GDPR) or in Canada (due to CASL). In the USA, however, CAN-SPAM legislation gives B2B marketers (not B2C) a bit more freedom. You can send cold campaigns – to another business that you reasonably believe has legitimate potential interest in your offering. (Note: This isn’t intended as legal advice in any way, just a quick clarification of why this works in the USA and not elsewhere.)
What’s So Special About Cold Email?
Put simply: it’s a way to reach your target audience in enormous numbers for very little effort.
Put less simply: cold B2B email marketing is all about generating new leads to go into your funnel. You send well-crafted campaigns to large lists of targeted, cold B2B contacts, providing them a way to convert and enter your nurturing process.
It’s a separate process from “the usual” email marketing, and works best in conjunction with inbound marketing and nurturing, rather than as a replacement.
How Does It Work?
Just like any marketing activity, the first – and most important – thing to consider is who’s on the receiving end. In this case, that means your contact list.
This is absolutely key for cold email: you need a well-targeted B2B contact list from a reputable data provider. When purchasing contacts, the quality of the list is paramount. A bad list will prevent you from getting any kind of results right from the start.
If you’re not sure where to find a reputable data provider, contact us. We partner with a number of them and will gladly refer you.
It’s not uncommon to have multiple lists of, say, 100k contacts – each focused on a specific target audience, like a list of Sales Managers, a list of Marketing Managers, or whatever segmentation works best for your business. That massive scale is one of the main differences between outbound and inbound email.
The second critical thing to have is software that’s capable of handling campaigns that size.
Traditional email marketing platforms/providers like HubSpot or Outlook aren’t built to handle cold campaigns. Sending them could cause major technical issues for them, so they’re outright disallowed.
To successfully send such a high volume of cold emails without just landing in the junk folder, you need a tool built for that purpose.
Finding the Right Software
In order for your campaigns to succeed, they need to end up in inboxes, not spam folders. When you send a high volume of cold emails, spam filters are going to clamp down on your campaigns much harder than, say, on your subscriber newsletter.
To avoid that, you need to take a whole pile of technical factors into account. The good news is that Email Lead Generation (ELG) software will handle that for you, even auditing your content before you send it to ensure there’s no words/phrases/formatting that might scare the spam filters.
In a nutshell, spam filters give your IP address and the domain you send from a sender score. This is a score from 0-100 that tells the spam filter how trustworthy your campaigns are. They’re on the lookout for all kinds of red flags and signs that you might be spamming, which will knock your score down and result in more of your campaigns ending up in junk folders.
It’s critical that you use software designed to protect your sender score, ensuring that your campaigns are always at maximum delivery rate.
Clickback is the premier cold B2B email solution – it cleans bad data/spam traps off your list, helps you create spam-friendly content, and even enables you to track how your contacts engage with your website after clicking an email campaign.
