In this guide I'll show step by step process how to develop GDPR compliant cold outreach email campaign that will have a high response rate and generate quality B2B leads.

To help me make this guide more valuable, I invited to contribute cold outreach professional Guillaume Moubeche, founder of lemlist.

So in this guide you'll learn:

• The not obvious truth  about cold outreach email in the GDPR era
• Why blog posts about cold outreach email will destroy your campaign beforehand, and how to avoid the most common mistake
• The step by step process on how to arrange effective outbound lead generation campaign and write cold emails that get responses
• How to automatically warm up target accounts before reaching them out
• Perpetual non-pushy follow ups or what you should do with the prospects who didn't engage with your campaign
• How to make several decision makers talk about your product
• The old-fashioned but very effective method to pass the gatekeeper

Chat With Guillaume Moubeche About Cold Outreach

Behind the scenes of this episode

During the last week I received 20+ similar LinkedIn messages and cold emails like this.

This a typical crap email which decision makers receive dozens every day.

Still, so many marketers and founders prefer to play a game of numbers by scrapping the emails and sending cold templates in a bunch in order to generate leads.

What if instead this spammy message you'll see a picture of a guy wearing a t-shirt with the logo of your company? Would you reply?

At least, this email will attract your attention amongst dozens of other emails.

This is exactly what my guest Guillaume Moubeche do by sending a picture of him wearing a t-shirt with a prospect's logo 🙂

About the guest

Guillaume is a founder of lemlist, the first automated outreach email platform with personalized images.

Together with Guillaume we wrote and published the first B2B growth ebook, where he shared the step by step process how to warm up your target account and automate outreach on Linkedin, Twitter and email according to the GDPR rules. 

Guillaume's cold outreach email approach

Here is a step by step process Guillaume use when developing outbound lead generation campaigns.

1. Create an ideal customer profile
2. Get as more data about target accounts and decision makers as possible
3. Warm up your prospects on social media
4. Find their contacts
5. Reach them out, thanks for their stuff and suggest to talk about their industry.
6. Personalize your emails as much as possible
7. Add personalized images, videos and humor to outreach email
8. Follow up by phone when necessary
9. Retarget disengaged leads with lead magnet or other MOFU content that can drive back your target accounts to the lead nurturing sequence

Key takeaways

How legit is to scrap emails and automate outreach in the GDPR era?

GDPR'S Article 47 says that you are allowed to contact people if you have a legitimate interest to reach someone. GDPR just wants to stop mass spam and unsolicited emails like CNIL is doing this for 20 years in France.

Of course, they got millions of complaints, but they don't penalize small companies because they simply don't have such resources to investigate every issue.

They are pursuing big companies.

The same is going to be with the GDPR. They won’t pursue those who make less than $100 million in ARR.

Just be sure your outreach email is GDPR compliant:

​+ Add opt-out links,
+ Personalize email copy as much as you can
+ Don't send spam emails like in the example at the beginning of this post

What are the most common mistakes with social selling and outreach email and how to prevent them?

The biggest mistake with the cold outreach is a blind copying of "what works".

Once, someone wrote a guide about successful cold outreach, 200 marketers reproduced it, and the internet is full of the bad advice like:

+ Your headlines should be like this
+ Your copy should be like this
+ You should send emails on 8.00 on Tuesday, and you are done.

Here is how to do the old outreach email the right way.

First of all, you should catch the attention. You should be different.

Create personalized images, videos, use humor. Here is a great example in action.

Whenever you'll send an email, remember that the core goal should be building relationships instead of selling. 

This sounds controversial but it is nearly impossible to sell from cold email to the account who knows nothing about you in the modern B2B world.

Here are 3 important things you'd work on before sending an outreach email: 

1) Subject lines. 

Always test them. There aren't magic copywriting bullets.

2) Catching attention with personalized images or videos. 

3) Clear CTA. 

Don't use several CTA's. Your prospect must clearly understand what he should next.

Most marketers will send an email like: 

Hey, FNAME.

We are from industry X. We do this and that. We worked with these and those companies.

When you'll have time for a chat?

In the end, I always ask them: why don’t you care about me and telling all this stuff.

People want to feel their importance. They want to talk about their challenges and goals. They don't want to feel "being sold".

Social selling approach is very similar.

You should send very short messages and talk about your target account interests like: 

Hey Guillaume.

I checked your profile and your content. Looks awesome! Let’s have a quick chat about B2B marketing and exchange experience. 

Are you open to the 15-minutes chat?

During the chat, you can talk about the specific topic, introduce yourself, and if you'll both see you are a good business fit, you can talk about the business. You can also present an interactive branded content to enable prospects to calculate the ROI and see the business value of your product.

What should you learn about target accounts before sending outreach email?

If you really want to succeed with cold emails, you’d not learn only about target accounts but mostly about decision makers you want to reach out.

So, let’s divide this process into 2 stages.

1. Accounts

First of all, create an ideal customer profile. 

Here are a few things you’d know about the company:

• Who is their target audience?
• What are their challenges that your product might solve?
• On what stage of business growth they are right now? E.g. seeking for investments, scaling their revenue from 6 figures to 7 figures, etc.
• What is their experience with buying products like yours? Try to figure out whether they’ve ever bought a similar product and how satisfied with it they were.
• Who are the decision makers and who’ll be involved in the negotiation process?

When you try to find this information, don’t only visit company’s website and LinkedIn page.

Find the C+ company’s employees on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook) and check their profiles. They can post much more relevant things about their company then media.

Also, do a Google Search and figure out whether these employees gave an interview or gave a talk.

This information can help you to personalize your message and show your prospect you’re well prepared and interested in fruitful cooperation instead of just “sell at any price with template cold outreach” like lots of spammers do.

2. Contacts

By contacts, I mean both decision makers and employees, who’ll be involved in the negotiation process.

Don’t even think you can easily reach the CEO, sell him your product and miss these guys 🙂

Here are core points you’d learn about your target contacts.

1.Name and Surname 🙂

Simply?

But if you want to personalize campaign, you’d remember the principles of Dale Carnegie 🙂

Of course, we won’t stop on this, but, still, when you call a person by his name, it looks much better then “Dear business owner” 🙂

2. Job role

When you know their job role, you can make a research or brainstorm the challenges the person might have in this position and your product might solve.

In such case, you can start a conversation with open questions like What's your current challenge with... (the problem your product solves)?"

Or, if you want to apply more salesly approach and pitch them, you can simply point out to the challenges they have and your product can solve.

The same approach you can apply to all contacts who are involved in the negotiation process with your company.

3. Exact benefits they'll get from your product

It's so obvious that CMO and CIO have different challenges, tasks, and KPIs but when it comes to cold emailing, marketers try to craft a universal template for both.

Figure out the exact benefits and challenges that will be solved for every decision maker.

4. Try to figure out their hobbies

Let's back to Dale Carnegie 🙂

You probably have heard that the best way to build great relations is to speak about things that matter to your companion.

That's why it is so important to use specific slang or refer to the things which important to your contact.

For example, if your target account is a big fan of Real Madrid you can talk about the previous match or refer to the latest goal scored by Cristiano Ronaldo.

5. Find common connections.

It would be much easier to start a conversation by referring to the common connection (Did I miss to say you'd ask your colleague to introduce you to the target contact?).

When your contact will see at the beginning of your email or in the headline the name of the common friend, the chances he will reply would be much higher.

5. Add case studies related to their industry and testimonials from the folks who have the same job role.

Of course, the presence of any case study or testimonial is much better than their absence. But let's remember Robert Cialdini:

The best social proof is when we see that the people who have the same job role and work in the same industry succeed with our product.

How to warm up target accounts before reaching them out

In this video Guillaume shares the exact process he uses to warm up target accounts automatically before reaching them out.

What works great as a conversation opener?

Here are 2 approaches.

First is the same, like with social selling. Here is an example.

Hey,

I just checked your LinkedIn profile. I think what are you doing is great. Are you open to chat about B2B acquisition?

The second approach to outreach email is called "rack the shotgun".

Think about the free industry report or white paper you can send to your prospect.

In such case, you can outreach your prospects and simply ask whether they want to get it. Those, who have replied positively, are leads whom you'd follow-up.

All others you can retarget with Facebook or LinkedIn ads.

The best about this approach is that you have a moral resolution to follow-up your contact once more without being annoying.

As well, you don't look like a spammer and don't burn the database of potential customers.

How to pass the gatekeeper and reach the decision maker?

Some people never check unsolicited messages and delete them. Try to combine different channels of communication.

 If they don’t answer at all, just pick up a phone and call this company. You should pretend as you a very important person and you know the decision maker.

Just call the gatekeeper and tell you had a chat with the decision maker on LinkedIn. Can she connect you to him?

 If they don’t engage, move to another lead, as you can’t make every sale.