Email prospecting is the process of finding, researching, and qualifying prospects for a cold outreach campaign. It’s an essential part of any outreach campaign for two reasons:
It ensures you’re not wasting time emailing unqualified “prospects.”It helps you track down key information that allows you to personalize emails, and increase response rates and conversions.
That said, like with almost anything we do in life, there are ways to do prospecting right, and ways to do it wrong.
Here are seven email prospecting best practices to follow if you want to get the best results possible from your outreach campaigns.
**Gathering names and contact details of potential prospects is easy. It’s when you start digging a little deeper to determine whether a prospect’s actually worth contacting that things start to get tricky (and way more time consuming).**
Unfortunately, you cannot skip this step if you want to get the most out of your email campaigns – period.
It’s absolutely essential for the two reasons mentioned above.
So where can you find this information?
Social media is an obvious starting point. Twitter and LinkedIn are typically your best bets, largely because users tend to make their profiles, and their posts, public.
That’s not to say it won’t be worth your while to look up prospects on platforms like Facebook and Instagram; you’re just more likely to find their profiles in lockdown.
Beyond social media, company ‘about’ or team pages and personal websites should give you at least surface-level insight into a prospect’s skills and interests. Better yet, see if they’re actively writing blog posts, and read (or at least a scan) one or two of their latest articles.
You can even use B2B data platforms (such as SalesIntel) to find the target companies as per your requirements and create the list of individual prospects at those companies.
It’s easy to get carried away when prospecting – especially when we feel super confident in a prospect’s fit for our product. This means being really strict with how we use our time.
Sure, the more you know about a prospect, the better – but educating yourself on everything about a prospect just isn’t realistic.
You could spend hours learning about someone you want to contact, and still get a “no” in return (or worse – no response at all).
Here’s what you can do to avoid falling into this trap.
Set a time limit for each prospect and stick to it. Once that time’s up, you should have enough information to determine whether someone’s worth contacting.
Exactly what this time limit should be will depend on how big a prospecting list you’re trying to build, and how long you have to spend building it – however, around 10 minutes is generally a good cut-off point to aim for.