Boosting your warm lead conversion rate is one of the best ways to hack your growth. Since most of the success of your sales pipeline depends on your conversion rate, just a small bump can make a huge difference in the overall success of your sales team. So if you are in a situation where you need to boost your team’s performance, your warm lead rate is a good place to start.
Of course, it is not as simple as snapping your fingers. I imagine a lot of you reading this have been devoting a lot of time to improve the effectiveness of your outbound campaigns with little to show for it. So the question is: how do you improve your conversion rate?
Your warm lead rate has a huge impact on your sales results
Warm lead rate: The percentage of people who respond positively to your initial outreach. Thanks to machine learning, our software is able to recognize your warm leads, saving you the hassle of personally going through and sorting each of the messages you receive from your campaign. (it also recognizes out of office replies, negative responses, and bounces)
Your warm lead conversion rate has probably the biggest impact on the final outcome of your outbound sales pipeline. Because of the early position that it has in the outbound equation, doubling your warm lead conversion rate essentially means that you will be able to double the number of customers you generate without having to change any other parts of your pipeline.
Boosting your conversion rate can sometimes be as simple as making small tweaks to your messaging. For instance, adding a bit of humor to your messages or a catchy gif to your follow-up can increase your positive response rate significantly, even to the point of doubling it.
A small change can make a big difference
Not only are these changes small but also they can double your campaign outcome without increasing its volume. That means you don’t need to hire any new people for your team or contact any more prospects to make more sales. If you are unconvinced, have a look at the outbound equation again. Enter the metrics specific to your pipeline and see what happens when you double your warm lead rate. You can do this easily with our outbound calculator.
While a humorous line can work in your favor, there are Double your warm leads by using personalizationa number of other factors that can have an influence on your warm lead rate. Before you try anything else, make sure you have applied all of the basic rules from our How to write a killer email campaign blog post. Once you have crossed those suggestions off your list, it is time to go to the next level by adding a personal touch.
Write a personal campaign
Making your campaign personal means a bit more than just putting the recipient’s name at the top of your message, but it does not require a major time commitment. Adding information that you have found on your prospects’ websites or LinkedIn profiles can go a long way toward making your prospect feel that you have taken more than a cursory interest in them and their company.
Showing that you did some research on a prospect signals that you are serious about doing business
More than any other hack or tweak to improve your warm lead conversion rate, showing your research makes the biggest difference. It shows that you have devoted time and resources to learn about your recipient and that you haven’t simply included them in a catch all cold email blast.
Personalization is the best way of increasing results without increasing your campaign’s volume
If you are on a starter package with a limited number of prospects, you want to focus on maximizing your conversion rate. The rise in warm leads that personalization brings is the best way to get more warm leads without needing to contact more people.
Here are some types of personal information that bring warm leads:
What kinds of information can be used to make your email personal? Almost anything you find about your prospect or their company. Here are some ideas of what you can glean from a few different courses:
Prospect’s LinkedIn profile:
- title
- job description, responsibilities
- experience from previous companies
- career path
- interests
- skills
- mutual connections
- his recent shares/blog posts
Twitter:
- recent shares
- who the prospect is following
Company LinkedIn profile:
- company description
- specialities
- number of employees
- company structure
- job openings
Company website:
- technologies they use
- their customers (numbers, examples)
- recent events/news
- their product
The three ways in which you can include your research in your campaign
Manually
You can go through your list of prospects and look for what information is available about each one of them. It is really time-consuming but you can be sure you will be able to find some information about everybody.
Semi-automatically
This method involves looking for the same piece of information about each prospect. This has the advantage of being a lot faster since you always know what you’re looking for. It is also easier to measure how adding a specific type of personal information influences the success of your campaign; you can test which information brings the best results.
Automatically
Using this method, you work backwards by deciding on a piece of information first and then searching for prospects that match the type of information you want when prospecting. To do this, look for patterns. For instance, does your ideal customer often use a specific technology? If so, then generate a list of prospects who use this technology and send them the same message.
Your message still looks as personalized as the messages that you send using the manual and semi-automatic methods since the personal information still matches the recipient. Despite that, it takes a lot less time.
At Growbots, we let our users search for prospects by technologies, and a number of other categories of information, so that you can use the automatic method when prospecting for your campaign. This is one of our favorite strategies that we use ourselves. You can see here how we ran a campaign focused on Marketo users:
Always personalize the beginning of your message
It only takes 3 seconds for your brain to register the first impression so it is important that you make it a good one. By including personal information in the first sentence of your message, you show that you are serious about providing value to your recipient’s specific situation and value is the primary factor our brain uses to form our first impressions.
This initial value impression will make your recipient much more receptive to what you have to say and tees up your pitch to convert your prospect into a warm lead. All you need is a piece of software that allows you to personalize at scale.
Regardless of in what way you add research to your campaign, it is important to be able to add custom fields to your mail merge campaign so that you can add personal elements automatically. Luckily for you, Growbots lets you use as many custom field as you want in your messages.
What you can expect
At Growbots, introducing personalization to our campaigns was an absolute game-changer. It basically allowed us to go from 200 to 400 demos per month without hiring any people or sending any more messages. These results have gone far beyond what we expected and we have never looked back. Now every message we send is personalized, no exceptions.
Now that you have doubled the number of warm leads you generate, it’s time to learn how to get the most out of them. Check out our next post here to learn how sales persistence can double the number of warm leads you turn into meetings.