Table of contents
Introducing Email Cadence
Email cadences are defined by three things: text-based, email scheduling/automation, and reply detection. In combination, these give you a distinct advantage in making those connections and increasing your success rates.
Alright, let's talk reply detection.
Typically, if you batch and blast 200 emails in a campaign, you hit Send and then sit back and wait for the responses. Once they come rolling in, you have to start manually sifting through them, compare them with your Sent folder to see who's who, and organize who has responded, what type of response you've gotten, and how you're going to proceed.
This is a massively time-consuming and mind-numbing process that, believe it or not, you don't actually have to do anymore; reply detection does this grunt work for you.
Email reply detection is a method of tracking replies to your various email campaigns, and by having this automated organizational queue of who has and has not responded to your emails, you can create customized and unique segments as well as follow-up campaigns to cold and warm prospects.
Aside from reply detection, email cadences eliminate the generic and often-times smothering frequency of emails and replaces it with more organic and personalized patterns of emails.
We dive more into this in Part II.
So what does that mean, exactly? It means, taking into account the number of emails sent, the content of those emails, how they are spaced, and the audience who is receiving the email. Routine is not what makes your email campaign successful - It's the strategy and value, and that's the big benefit of email cadence.
Consider this; 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. Your 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 them and hang on to them.
The Benefits of Email Cadence
Email cadences give sales reps a road map to success. Batch and blast issues are often the downfall of traditional automated email campaigns, but most reps don't realize it - Their focus is on quantity instead of quality. With email cadences, you can create custom templates for individual segments to automate emails and actually use merge fields to insert customization fields like someone's first name and their company. You're also able to create progressive content by walking your prospect through the sales funnel. This means you can start by sending a new product announcement, then testimonials from happy customers, then maybe a special offer for the product.
Always use data to monitor your email campaign's effectiveness.
Using this method, you can also map out 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 solely emails and can cross into various channels.
What Email Cadence Is NOT
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 - These content pieces don't play by the same rules as email cadence for sales prospecting. So don't try 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 a 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 the tutorial emails you will receive every 2-3s after signing up for a new product or service.
Cadence emails: These are a series of emails that are designed for cold outreach to sales prospects and typically look as if a sales rep wrote or customized the email although they are usually sent in a bulk fashion.
Our Picks For Top 6 Email Cadence Tools
We know, we know - You're ready to try this email cadence thing out and you want to know how. Here are our top 6 picks for email cadence tools:
SalesLoft.com
SalesLoft is helping transform companies into modern sales organizations. Our 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. We help sales teams secure more meetings, drive more pipeline, and close more deals. Thousands of companies like AdRoll, Okta, Zillow, Adobe, and Cloudera use our 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 it’s journey in August 2014. We noticed that world of direct sales is changing dramatically. With data available online it became possible to find 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. And here, at Reply, we are striving to build the best sales acceleration platform that would allow new type of sales teams perform on their best.
ZenProspect
ZenProspect is the ultimate all-in-one sales platform. ZenProspect integrates the highest quality data with a world-class sales communication software, for easy, efficient, and effective sales. We 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!