Last updated on August 1st, 2023
In this article, you’ll learn exactly how to run your client outreach campaigns to get a higher meeting booking rate.
If you don’t have an inbound sales and marketing machine in place for your business, you’ll need to know how to get clients with outreach.
Conducting some client outreach can help you acquire new clients, re-engage past clients, encourage repeat purchases, or upsell opportunities among leads who are already familiar with your brand.
And to separate yourself from the thousands of others who do outreach, you’re going to need to stand out, which is why the steps in this article are so crucial.
To make the most of your client outreach campaign, we’ve rounded up 14 critical steps to keep your marketing and sales efforts running smoothly while scaling your business.
- Set Goals For Your Outreach Strategy
- Target The Right Lead For Efficient Customer Outreach
- Contact The Right Person
- Create A Strong Brand Presence
- Choosing The Contact Method
- Respond To Customer Comments
- Use Personalization In Your Customer Outreach Strategy
- Trigger Immediate Responses
- Create A Multi-Plan Outreach Process
- Provide Value
- Include A Case Study
- End With A Compelling Call-To-Action
- Track Your Campaign
- Automate Your Customer Outreach Process
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1. Set Goals For Your Outreach Strategy
The first thing you’re going to want to do before you start your client outreach campaign is to set some goals.
When you’re reaching out to leads, you should have a clear reason why you’re reaching out. Your goals should be measurable, attainable, and realistic, to make the most of your client outreach effort.
For instance:
Whatever your goal may be, make sure it’s at the forefront while developing your strategy. You might want a certain percentage of your lead list to respond, or a specific increase in revenue from re-engaging past clients (if you’re doing retargeting).
If you have clear goals in mind, you’ll be able to measure the success of your client engagement initiatives and use those goals to inform the message you’re trying to deliver.
For example, if you want to re-engage with ex-clients who have been inactive for a while, you might consider messaging centered around new offerings and brand updates. But if you’re reaching out to cold leads, you’re going to want to have a value offer based on their needs.
Some simple goals you could set include:
- MRR (monthly recurring revenue)
- The number of clients you want
- And the size of the businesses that you will reach out to (if B2B)
- The ideal client you’d like to work with
And this brings us to an essential part of the planning stage:
2. Target The Right Lead For Efficient Customer Outreach
What I mean by this is, know who your ideal client is, what niche they’re in, and how much revenue they’re pulling in. This is possibly the most crucial part of setting out your goals.
If you’re a marketing agency that prefers to work with CBD e-commerce industry, don’t run a campaign targeting any e-commerce brand under the sun.
And when you get your targeting niched down, your outreach gets a lot more personalized automatically.
Think about it:
What would be more flattering for you if you were a CBD company?
- Being contacted by an agency that helps everyone.
- Or, having an agency that specializes in helping businesses just like you.
If you said #2, you’d be correct.
Then there’s the side benefit of becoming an industry expert when you focus on a specific niche of clientele.
3. Contact The Right Person
If you’re planning a customer outreach campaign, you want to make sure that the message makes it to the right person. This is especially important for larger, B2B brands that might have multiple higher-ups who call the shots.
When you’re developing your cold lead list, don’t just look at names and email addresses. Look at job titles, income information, and any other pertinent demographics that might indicate that the person on your list is the purchase decision-maker.
Luckily, if you’re engaging with past and current clients, you should have a good sense of who holds the purse strings.
However, larger businesses in a cold outreach campaign might have decision-makers involved who don’t know you exist, such as executives, operations managers, and budget committees. This is precisely why it’s essential to contact the person who makes the final decision when it comes to working with vendors such as yourself.
For example:
If you sell PPC and are targeting a big company that does $80 million in revenue, it’ll probably be best to contact their chief marketing officer. But if it’s a smaller company, that — for example — does $1 million in annual revenue, contacting the CEO may be a better choice. You’ll have to use your best judgment on a case-by-case basis.
4. Create A Strong Brand Presence
Regardless of your business industry, its size, or location, having a strong brand presence will support you to:
- Stand out from your competition.
- Build and grow your reputation.
- Positively influence your customers to make a purchasing decision.
- Acquire new customers easily.
- Engage and connect with current customers to turn them into returning customers.
- Develop loyalty and trust.
- Ultimately increase your sales.
A powerful brand presence means much more than just creating a website for your business. It includes leveraging any online tools or offline approaches that allow you to target and connect with your customers.
5. Choosing The Contact Method
In most cases, the message is just as important as the medium you choose to use to contact.
Depending on your leads’ demographics, history, and business goals, you’ll find more success with specific mediums over others.
Email Outreach
One of the most popular digital contact methods and the oldest — is email. And with email, you can rarely go wrong.
However, there are other methods you can use, too. LinkedIn, Twitter, other social media, and cold calling are all alternatives ways to do your outreach. When deciding which medium to choose, ask yourself this question:
Where is my ideal client?
If your ideal client is constantly active on Twitter, then that might be your best bet. But if your client is an HVAC company, cold calling may be better.
Social Media Outreach
On average, people spend 2 to 3 hours scrolling through their social media. According to Statista, a total of 3.6 billion people were using social media in 2020 globally while projecting an increase to almost 4.41 billion by 2025.
These statistics clearly show that it’s crucial to incorporate social media marketing into your customer outreach strategy. A solid social media strategy will also support you to build an online presence and drive traffic to your website.
Getting your business on social media means you’ll be reaching out to your prospect and current customers where they spend their free time.
What’s best about social media is that it allows 2-way communication, meaning a prospect not only sees your posts but can have a conversation with your brand directly.
Which social media platform you should use for successful customer outreach depends on where your ideal customer personas spend their time. For example, while a certain group of people might be using Twitter, another one is active on Instagram.
To decide which social media platform to utilize for your business, do market research and develop your customer persona first. This will help you develop a social media marketing strategy that targets your prospective audience.
Once you’ve identified where your customers spend their time, you should provide relevant and valuable information by posting consistently. Make sure to create posts that provide valuable information that customers can relate to and make them want to engage with your business.
To get the most out of your social media marketing efforts, you should get your business on more than 1 social media platform. This way, you’ll be talking to different types of customer personas you might have.
Pro tip: Make sure to get your customer service team on social media so that customers can get their relevant questions answered right away.
Personalized Outreach
If you want a more personal and direct approach, you can pick up the phone and call your prospect, or send snail mail.
Either way, personalized outreach is more memorable since you’re directly talking to your customer.
However, make sure that your conversation with customers doesn’t feel like a sales pitch. Customers can actually spot when they’re being pitched and start resisting to defend themselves from being sold.
6. Respond To Customer Comments
Responding to customer comments is one of the most effective, yet easy and budget-friendly ways to reach out to your customers.
For sure, you need to respond to comments people leave on your social media posts. But you can even expand your customer outreach by finding your target industry-related posts and jumping into conversations.
This way, customers will see your business as an expert in the niche and would even lead them to your website to see what you’re offering.
7. Use Personalization In Your Customer Outreach Strategy
Personalization is one of the most significant factors when it comes to client outreach. And directly addressing messages to individuals and their specific companies is extremely simple with variable data.
Most email systems will easily allow you to add these merge tags to an email message, no matter how simple or complex your design is.
Personalization doesn’t just make you look good — it maps directly to ROI. In fact, personalized email messages deliver a 6x higher transaction rate than generic messages.
With some slightly more advanced systems or careful list segmentation, you can also personalize the messaging even further. Speak to prospects about specific products and services they might be interested in based on their needs and how they might benefit from these services.
Outreach tip: Always have personalization in the subject and first line. While an entire email doesn’t have to be 100% unique, personalizing these two things can give it that illusion of uniqueness.
The same personalization principles apply if you opt to go with direct mail, phone calls, or another individualized approach. Just be cautious — too much personalization can lead to prospects feeling like their privacy has been invaded. So try to avoid being creepy.
8. Trigger Immediate Responses
Ideally, your customer outreach messaging should focus on getting an immediate response from your customers or potential customers.
First and foremost, an email subject line should grab your prospects’ attention and make them want to open it. Once they open your email, the content should encourage them to respond to the CTA right away.
If someone leaves your message without taking immediate action, it’s unlikely that they return, even if they think to do it later.
9. Create A Multi-Plan Outreach Process
Creating just one outreach strategy that focuses only on getting immediate reactions isn’t enough. The most efficient outreach strategies have multiple layers of follow-up communication that provide long-term results.
The follow-up messaging should give you information about the outcome of your customer outreach strategy. Here’s the list of questions you should be looking to answer with your follow-up strategy:
- Did your customers open your message, or did they ignore it?
- Did they respond to it without following through with your target CTA?
Once you understand what your prospects do after seeing your initial message, it’s easier to plan a follow-up messaging accordingly. What’s more, you should also consider creating follow-up messaging that’s personalized for each segment of your customer base to speak to each potential outcome individually.
10. Provide Value
Personalization begins the sense of perceived value, but you need to back it up with something that your prospects actually want.
This step, right here, is possibly the most important. And it should apply to every single marketing and sales campaign. If you take nothing else away from this list, remember this above all else!
Inboxes and feeds are cluttered as is — don’t be just another message that gets ignored.
Whatever your client outreach goals may be, you need to have a valid reason to be reaching out right now, and a free value offer entices engagement.
You’ll have to decide what value you’d like to include in your outreach yourself.
It’s a free audit for some agencies, and for others, it may be a free consultation call.
11. Include A Case Study
Case studies can be the deciding factor between small and big clients.
If you’re a company that’s been around for a while, chances are you have something to brag about that you’ve done for your past clients.
If you’re a B2B business, it’s usually a best practice to angle your case study in a way to show how you’ve made your past clients more money.
For example:
If you were a CRO (conversion optimization rate) agency, you could say that you’ve increased your client’s cost-per-click by over 50%. Case studies like this can sell themselves.
12. End With A Compelling Call-To-Action
Don’t just give prospects a freebie and hope that it’ll be enough to persuade them to make a purchase — you have to follow up and ask for something concrete in return.
Once you’ve provided something of initial value, ask them directly to take the next step in your path to purchase through a call-to-action (or CTA).
Whenever you’re sending a cold outreach message — always include a CTA at the end in the form of a question.
In the worst-case scenario, you get a simple “no.”
Usually, if you’re a service-based agency, the CTA will ask if they want to book a meeting to discuss your services further.
Something simple you can do to streamline this process is to use a scheduler software like in VipeCloud’s all-in-one system.
Once the prospect books a meeting, it’s time to prepare for a discovery sales call.
13. Track Your Campaign
Remember those goals you set at the start of the campaign? There’s a reason they need to be measurable — to track the success of your campaign.
Measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) is the only way to know if you’re reaching your goals. It’s also a great way to understand possible adjustments you can make to campaign tactics that will increase your meeting booking rate.
Look not only at standard KPIs like open rates and click-through rates, but also look very carefully at the number of messages sent, and response rates.
Track directly through to final conversions, and try to make specific note of conversion rates on each of your touchpoints — this will let you know where your prospects are dropping off.
14. Automate Your Customer Outreach Process
As you can see, a customer outreach process is quite time-consuming. So automating as many processes as you can is a great option for you to keep your business running as smoothly as possible.
For instance, you could get a social media scheduling tool to post on your behalf, get a reliable CRM to track your sales and overall outcomes, get a dedicated team responsible for sales phone calls, and so on.
Simply do a thorough brainstorming session to come up with ideas of which parts of your daily work can you automate or delegate.
Wrapping Up Client Outreach
Client outreach campaigns can be extremely valuable for multiple reasons. You’re not only increasing your potential revenue but also you’re building a name for yourself with new relationships.
You can use client outreach campaigns to gather critical feedback and insights to optimize your strategies further.
Are you looking for a way to streamline your outreach process?
VipeCloud has the software tools you need to simplify and track your campaign. Request a FREE demo today.
Client Outreach FAQ
Outreach is a communication effort an individual or a group in an organization takes to connect its ideas or practices to the efforts of other organizations, specific audiences, groups, or the general public. Unlike marketing, outreach doesn’t center around a product or techniques to increase market share.
Customer outreach is a critical component of business growth. It may also influence how clients see you. You’ll create strong relationships if you make and maintain a good first impression. To enhance your client outreach efforts, keep it simple.
A customer outreach campaign is a company strategy that reaches out to potential clients and encourages existing customers to return. “It’s simpler to maintain a client than it is to get one,” most business owners have heard. An effective outreach approach can aid in this situation.
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