A successful B to B email prospecting campaign: 5-step guide

What makes a good email prospecting campaign?

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Let's be clear and concise: the best prospecting campaigns meet 5 criteria:

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1. The prospects addressed are representative of your current customer base.

The prospects you contact must absolutely resemble those who have already bought your product/solution in the past.

There are several ways to define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), but a simple one is to :

• classify your customers by taking into account 3 criteria: the sum of their spending with you, their loyalty and finally their commitment/willingness to remain a customer,
• analyze the top 15 on your list: company sector, number of employees, country, position and even the LinkedIn profile of the people who will be making the decisions to adopt your product/solution,
• focus your prospecting efforts 100% on this ideal type of prospect.

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2. Your emails are well and truly received by your prospects: your deliverability is optimal.

Make sure you don't get spammed. Good deliverability ensures that the email you send reaches the recipient's inbox. How can you engage your prospects if they never receive your emails?

To maximize your deliverability, we recommend setting up three technical elements (DNS): SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

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3. Your value proposition is clear and obvious from the first line of each of your emails.

Everyone needs to be able to understand what you do. What issues are you addressing? Is this clear from the very first line of each of your messages?

Your clarity will be the key to success for 2 reasons:

1- It's possible that you're sending your email to the wrong person, who could redirect you to the right person if the email is clear enough for them.

2- Your ideal prospect is also being canvassed elsewhere, so you only have the subject line of your email and its first line to convince them not to put you in their inbox.

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4. Your prospects respond with qualitative information that's useful to you.

Your emails are concise and always invite the prospect to provide you with "useful" information for your prospecting. Here are some examples:

• Does he prefer Tuesday mornings or Thursday afternoons for an exchange?
• If he's already equipped (or if there's a good chance), who is his partner? Is he satisfied?
• If he's not the right contact, who should you turn to?

There are several ways to "gather" this key information for the rest of your prospecting:

• multiple-choice questions (type A, B, C, D)
• closed questions (simple yes/no answers)
• We can't stress this enough: keep emails short and easy to digest.

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5. The number of prospects interested in your offer among the responses received is greater than 10%.

This statistic has to be qualified, because depending on your target, your market or your value proposition, it can be radically different, and yet the results can still be right for you.

Nevertheless, this is the average conversion rate we observe at Blacksales on the email prospecting campaigns we run with our customers.

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