How to reach your clients

This is the final video of a 3-part series on identifying your best clients and then getting more of them.  By now, you have a list of your best clients, and you have expanded that list with their competitors.  These are your ideal target companies.  So what’s next?  How to reach your clients!

There are 2 approaches here: you can send them an email – or a series of emails called a cadence – or you can INmail them, which is the way LinkedIn sends messages to people you’re not connected with.

Send emails

How to find email addresses

You can either go on Fiverr.com and pay a lead generation freelancer to find you the emails for specific job titles at these companies, or you can us LinkedIn.  If you go on Fiverr, you’ll find hundreds of lead-gen data experts.  Make sure your task is very well defined.

Write for example: I’m looking for the verified work email address of the VP or Marketing or Director of Marketing at each of the companies in this spreadsheet.  And make sure to note that only work emails will be accepted, and they have to be 100% verified with a service like Voila Norbert.  If a freelancer doesn’t know what you’re talking about, move on to the next one.

For a project like this, you should expect to pay approximately 30 to 50 cents per verified email, and they should turn it around within a couple of days.

The reason you’re asking for verified addresses is so that when you send out your emails they don’t bounce back.  Because when emails bounce back, internet service providers see that as an indication that you’re sending out emails to people you don’t really know, which means you’re spamming, and they can flag your email, which can impact the emails from everyone within your organization.  So be very careful when you’re doing outreach!

Check the spammyness of your emails

It may actually be a good idea to check the spammyness of your emails.  You can use a tool like mail-tester.com, where they give you a temporary email address, you send your email to that address, and they run it through a bunch of filters.  You get a score from 1 to 10.  The lower the score, the more likely that your recipients will never receive your email.  So even if you send out 50 emails but your emails are already blacklisted, very few may actually get them!  You want to get a score higher than 8 out of 10 to make sure that the majority of your recipients get your messages.  That’s critical when you’re doing any type of outreach.

And that’s why sometimes it’s a good idea to use a service provider to do the outreach for you.  Because they can set up subdomains and warm them up so you don’t trigger spam alerts, or at the very least they protect your core email addresses.  And when the sub addresses get blacklisted they can move on to others.

Send LinkedIn InMails

An alternative way to reach your targets is to use LinkedIn, where you can pinpoint exactly the person you’d like to reach.  Depending on your account, you probably get a number of free InMails every month, which means that you can send a message to someone you’re not connected with.  If you’re out of InMails, a workaround is to request a connection and include your message as a note to the connection request.

HOWEVER, be careful not to overdo it because if more than 5 people IDK you – which stands for I don’t know that person – LinkedIn blacklists your account and won’t let you connect with more people.  If you do it once or twice they’re lenient, but if it happens more times you may burn your LinkedIn account and that’s not good at all.  Especially as LinkedIn is becoming a key method of connecting with potential clients these days.

A best practice here is to reach through LinkedIn by a) mentioning a specific problem you can solve, b) mentioning a specific competitor of theirs you’ve helped with that problem, and c) making your note REALLY short.  The shorter the better.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received InMails that look like a wall of text… I just don’t have the time to read and decode their message.  The simplest thing is to ignore them.  Besides, what’s the probability there’s something worthwhile in a long message?  Very slim, since they don’t know the basics of outreach, which is summarized with the KISS acronym: keep it short and simple.

Send video in your outreach

Another practice that’s becoming increasingly commonplace is to send video in your outreach.  Why?  Because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to explain your point of differentiation, but it’s also critical in order to engage your target audience.  At the same time, you have to keep your text messages short and simple.  So on the one hand you need more time to engage and explain how you’re different, but your audience will give you less and less time.

That’s where video can help: intrigue your target with a message about a problem you solve for one of their competitors, and then direct them to a video where you give details on the case study.

And if you want to take it a step further, “gate” your video, which means that after 1 minute or so you have a pop-up that asks for their email, so you can send them a template, or custom proposal, or a calculation based on their specific situation, or updates on what the industry is doing like offering them free competitive business intelligence… whatever strong lead magnet you can think of, but the more custom the better.  Otherwise it will feel like something they should be able to download without providing their email address.

A good explainer animation or professionally-produced ‘talking head’ video is becoming standard for the best of breed companies.  If your competitors start leveraging video, they can easily jump ahead and stand out.

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