Table of contents
Batch and blast. Creating an abundance of emails and putting them into circulation in one big blasted batch. Seems like a good strategy right? After all, the more the merrier.
But batch and blast is a dangerous game when played indiscriminately, and can be the downfall of Lead Generation.
A lot of companies will spend heroic levels of energy on campaign copy and prospect research, yet still find their emails are ending up in spam.
That’s because of something that is often overlooked in Lead Generation. Email Cadence.
Email Cadence is the process of finding what the optimal frequency of sending emails is that increases the overall likelihood of opens and replies from your prospects. It’s basically the number of sends and the timing of those sends that you strategically set up to yield more success.
You can’t batch and blast emails all at once without caution. It is necessary to space things out or else you’re going to run into major issues.
You can think of a good Email Cadence as a cocktail funnel. There’s only so much that can get through a funnel at one time. It is extremely important to first learn the element of a great cold email.
If you’re trying to get too many emails through to your prospects at once, then the pipeline gets filled, with the overflow begins triggering issues like spam.
Let’s be clear. The problem is not that you actually have a limit on how many emails you can send per day. You can send out nearly infinite.
Statista, a German online portal for statistics, makes the assertion that, by 2022, an estimated 330 billion emails will be sent and received each day. Each day!
The problem is not that you can’t send out immense volumes of emails per day -the amount of data traffic on the internet is close to unfathomable- but rather, it’s the safety threshold.
There is a threshold that Google and other email providers have on the number of emails coming from a single domain per day. If you go above that threshold, overflowing the funnel, then you’re going to lose your sender score and get marked as spam.
Only so many emails can safely go through an outreach process at once, and Email Cadence spreads that out.
Reply Detection
Email Cadence is often thought of in coupling with Reply Detection.
In the past, if you batch and blasted any number of emails, let’s say 1000, in a campaign, then after you hit send you normally just sat back and waited for the responses.
The brief reprieve was nice. Crack open a beer. Put your feet up. Maybe even dive into a little bit of gaming on Fall Guys. Chase that crown!
But once the replies came rolling in, you had to begin manually sifting through them. No more beer. No more Fall Guys.
Before Reply Detection, you would have to compare every reply with your sent folder, trying to see who's who and organize who has responded, what type of response you've gotten, and how you're going to proceed next.
This was a massively time consuming and mind-numbing process that, thankfully, you don't actually have to do anymore.
Reply Detection does this grunt work for you.
Email Reply Detection is the method of tracking replies to your various email campaigns and having an automated and organizational queue sort them where they need to go.
It determines who has and hasn’t responded to your cadenced emails, and you can create customized and unique segments, as well as follow-up campaigns, to sort cold and warm prospects.
So what does that mean, exactly?
It means Reply Detection takes into account the number of emails sent in the cadence, the content of those emails, how they are spaced, and the audience who is receiving them.
Just having a good routine is not what makes your email cadence successful.
It's the strategy and value of using Email Cadence and Reply Detection together.
Email Scheduling
Email Cadence is the reference term to discuss the overall topic, encompassing every aspect of sending out emails, but the foundation of Cadence comes down to this one thing.
Scheduling.
The cadence is ultimately determined by the oscillation between batches of sends.
But why does this matter so much? It’s more than just breaching the safety threshold. It actually has more to do with who is receiving your emails.
People unsubscribe when they get too many emails that fill up their inboxes. They often get what’s referred to as decision fatigue or readers fatigue.
The human brain can only handle so much information and make choices a finite amount of times. That includes reading emails. Too many emails and they get annoyed, but too little outreach can allow a warm lead to go cold.
Finding the right cadence and scheduling your sends is a trial and error process, and it changes dramatically depending on what type of emails you’re sending.
This doesn’t mean that prospects don’t want emails though.
In a recent study from MarketingSherpa, an overwhelming 91% of respondents reported that they want to receive promotional emails, but 86% said they'd prefer to see those emails just once a month, and a mere 15% said they'd like daily emails.
The takeaway here is this: Prospects and potential customers are interested in hearing from you, but your timing and pattern need to be on point if you want to hook and hang on to them.
Cadence Beyond Emails
A tried and tested successful cadence is able to create progressive content by walking your prospect through the sales process, without overwhelming.
Anything from sending a new product announcement, then testimonials from happy customers, then maybe a special offer for the product.
But it’s not just limited to email.
Using this method, you can map out your cadence steps to engage with your prospect on different channels and platforms.
You can actually tweet at them, start following their LinkedIn page, and interact with them outside of their inbox.
This idea of cadence extends outside of emails and can cross into various channels.
Not All Email Cadence Content is Equal
Not all email campaigns are created equal, and this type of approach is not a one-size-fits-all type of concept. Things like HTML emails, transactional emails, newsletters, and drip campaigns all require a different cadence.
These content pieces don't play by the same rules as cold email cadence for sales prospecting, so don't get caught up trying to adjust that side of your email campaigns to fit into this idea of cadence.
Let's break each of these down:
Transactional emails: These emails are often triggered by some sort of action. Examples include confirmation emails and alerts.
Newsletter emails: These emails are typically sent from marketing automation platforms and are very HTML and image-heavy.
Drip emails: These are a series of emails sent over time that are usually triggered by an action like tutorial emails.
Cold emails: These are a series of emails that are designed for cold email outreach to sales prospects and typically look as if a sales rep wrote or customized the email. They are usually sent in a bulk fashion.
Adjusting your cadence for different types of content that you’re sending allows the variability of getting all your campaigns through to your prospects and subscribers.
SalesHive Top 6 Picks
What wouldn’t good advice on Email Cadence be without some opinions on which tools to use? Mediocre advice perhaps?
So here are the SalesHive top 6 picks for email cadence tools:
Salesloft.com
SalesLoft is helping to transform companies into modern sales organizations. Their sales engagement platform helps teams set and execute on a cadence of phone, email, and social communications to convert more target accounts into customer accounts. The platform equips sales leaders with new capabilities to test, learn, and adapt to ensure their sales reps execute on the most effective selling process for their account-based approach. SalesLoft also delivers access to an ecosystem of 3rd party software products allowing teams to perform all their sales engagement from one platform. The SalesLoft platform is helping sales professionals believe in the process they’re following, in the product they’re selling, and in themselves, delivering a modern sales experience to their target accounts, prospects, and customers.
Outreach.io
Outreach is the #1 sales engagement platform. They help sales teams secure more meetings, drive more pipeline, and close more deals. Thousands of companies like AdRoll, Okta, Zillow, Adobe, and Cloudera use their system of action to achieve extraordinary results and see increases of 30% more meetings booked, 30% more opportunities, and 10-25% more revenue. Headquartered in Seattle, WA but with offices in San Francisco and Tampa, FL, Outreach was named Seattle Business Magazine's #1 Mid-size Company to Work For in 2017 and was feqatured in the Forbes 2017 Next Billion Dollar Startup list. Outreach has received $60M in funding from top tier investors including DFJ Growth, Trinity, Floodgate, Mayfield, and Microsoft.
ToutApp
ToutApp builds software that helps salespeople close deals faster with the power of email tracking, templates, and analytics. Founded in 2011, ToutApp has more than 100,000 salespeople using its platform, with over 500 enterprise customers including Atlassian, Dropbox, Optimizely, Namely, and more.
ReplyApp
Reply automates one-to-many communication for you and your team, dramatically scaling your outreach capability while keeping it 100% personal. Reply began its journey in August 2014. They noticed that the world of direct sales is changing dramatically. With data available online it became possible to find the right people at the right time when they need your product. Honest and supportive sales teams come in place, replacing old school pushy sales with their low effective cold call approach. They strive to build the best sales acceleration platform and allow new types of sales teams to perform their best.
ZenProspect
ZenProspect is the ultimate all-in-one sales platform. It integrates the highest quality data with world-class sales communication software, for easy, efficient, and effective sales. They help teams identify and acquire target prospects with a best-in-class database, A/B test drip campaigns, convert into qualified appointments, and get predictive analytics with our simple, all-in-one platform. ZenProspect serves hundreds of customers worldwide including Mercer, Lyft, Interana & WeWork. The company is backed by top investors like Y Combinator, SV Angel, Social Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners.
Growbots
Growbots created the first all-in-one outbound sales platform. Enjoy automatic lead generation and managing email drip campaigns with CRM integration. All you need to do is set up a customer profile and schedule an email campaign to automatically generate new sales opportunities. Access 200 million high quality contacts and send email drip campaigns with help from outbound experts!
Batch and Blast
Indiscriminate batch and blast issues are the downfall of traditional automated email campaigns. That’s the benefit of a good email cadence.
Batch and blast can be a dangerous game if played indiscriminately, but the value of Email Cadence is it removes the subjective and data lacking approach, cementing it with a successful and efficient method to get outreach into the inboxes of prospects and subscribers.
When it comes to Batch and Blasting, Email Cadence keeps your batch safe, and your blast powerful.
That’s the value.