Tired of the generic spammy emails you get in your inbox every day? So are your prospects. In this episode of The Growth Pod, Angela shares why cold outbound marketing is dead and what you can do to get better results in your marketing.
Specifically, Angela shares:
Why outbound marketing is ineffective (and illegal).
The #1 growth strategy that gets better results than cold outbound.
How leading with value will grow your brand now and into the future.
Angela Frank is a fractional CMO with a decade-long track record of generating multimillion-dollar marketing revenue for clients. She is the founder of The Growth Directive, a marketing consultancy helping brands create sustainable marketing programs.
Her new book Your Marketing Ecosystem: How Brands Can Market Less and Sell More helps business owners, founders, and corporate leaders create straightforward and profitable marketing strategies.
Angela is the host of The Growth Pod podcast, where she shares actionable tips to help you build a profitable brand you love.
Transcripts
Angela Frank:
Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to learn why, in my opinion, outbound marketing is dead and I'll be sharing what I'm doing instead.
I'm your host, Angela Frank. I'm a fractional CMO and founder with a track record of generating multi million dollar revenue for my clients.
In:
So if you're like me and love learning about how to grow your business more efficiently, you've come to the right place.
The subject line Let us get you customers the body of the email Angela I put together a video going over how the Growth Directive can exploit a pay per success model and bring in new buyers. Mind if I send over a fast video describing how this is a real cold email that I receive probably several times per day?
This is called cold outreach or cold outbound. And it's one of the many hacks that people employ with growth marketing that I'm certain we're all sick of.
And not only is this relevant in email, but I'm sure you've seen this all over LinkedIn as well. But here's the thing, as more and more businesses employ this growth hack, its efficacy continues to decline.
And as this happens, what should we do instead? Well, let's talk about that first. Let's set the record straight.
What I'm talking about today is when a marketer acts like they've never heard of can spam and begin sending out spam to people en masse. What we're not talking about today is outbound sales, which employs many of the same techniques.
But with outbound sales, a representative sends these prospecting emails in much smaller quantities and usually are personalizing to the individual or the business who is receiving them. So essentially with cold outbound marketing, you're doing one too many communication disguised as one to one.
And with outbound sales, you're actually just doing one to one communication. And the other big caveat here is that one is against the law and the other one isn't.
And listen, I'm not your lawyer and I totally understand wanting to use a growth hack that makes an impact on your revenue.
But the truth of the matter is everyone is safe of receiving these fluffy, unhelpful emails and they're really not having the impact on your business that you're hoping for.
But at One time, cold outbound marketing was very effective and marketers could soup up the sales process by employing these tools that would quasi personalize emails. Using directories like Zoom Info or Apollo, and then using an email tool that's designed to send sales emails to the masses.
And using these tools, you could auto populate the recipient's name, their business name and industry, as well as any exciting things that happened recently, like closing a successful fundraising round. So the emails looked just personalized enough where they would pass people's filters.
And because not many marketers were doing this type of work at scale when cold outbound marketing started, these emails worked ridiculously well. But that's kind of the trend with growth hacks, right?
Something is new and scrappy and it works well until every everyone else starts doing it and prospects and customers start recognizing what you're doing. And then you've got to go look for your next quick hit of growth.
Right now we're at a place where marketers have already exhausted cold outbound marketing as a growth hack. People really don't want your low value fluff in their inboxes, and it's because they're looking for real solutions to real problems.
Which side note is why when cold outbound is done legitimately from a sales perspective, it still can work. Someone is literally taking the time to dive deeper and hyper or individualize each email, which by nature makes them more successful for your brand.
So aside from hiring a huge team of sales reps to handle individualized outbound, what can we do to achieve growth in a new way? And this is the part of the episode where I spill all of the beans.
And here is my number one growth strategy that works better than cold outbound marketing. Creating content. No, I'm serious here. Let's look at the goal of cold outbound from a marketing perspective.
One, get in front of as many people as possible in a given day. Two, pitch your solution and three, get the prospect to book a sales call or take the next step in your buying process.
When you do cold outbound to the masses, you're sending super low value emails to as many people as possible per day, which maxes out usually at about 500 emails per day per email inbox. So let's say you're a medium sized startup and you're sending 500 emails per day per inbox, and you have for inboxes.
And let's say you're getting a pretty average 20% open rate on those emails. That means you're getting about 400 individual eyeballs on those emails each day.
But the caveat here is that most of those eyeballs aren't going to be people who are actually interested in your product. A lot of those people are going to open your email and be straight up annoyed that you'd be sending them spam.
So taking this scenario, you would probably be getting one new customer per week from these efforts, maybe. And in the process, you would be annoying thousands of people per week.
So instead, let's imagine our growth strategy that's rooted from a place of value, and we'll use this to create a content strategy that gets even better results. So let's say you're creating one to two high value pieces of content per week and sharing them on your socials and cultivating a community.
If I look at 8 sleep as a case study for this, they're a startup who recently raised an $86 million Series C, and from what I can tell, they're doing about eight figures in revenue. This company, eight Sleep, puts out about one to two Instagram reels per week, and on average, those reels get viewed over 9,000 times.
And these viewers are genuinely interested in 8 Sleep's products and they want to learn more about them.
So you can see pretty simply the difference with a brand like eight Sleep and the brand like the one I shared earlier in this episode, who is just spamming me and wasting my time. And as a founder, you have the choice.
Do I want to make a quick buck with a legally gray or straight up illegal growth hack, or do I want to create a strategy that will succeed not only now, but also into the future? And more than that, a strategy that provides value to my community and encourages a relationship before, during, and after purchase.
And it seems almost silly when I teed up this way, but I've met a lot of founders who opt to spam out a bunch of emails to people who have never wanted to hear from them in the first place because they think that's an easier route to their growth.
But if you're like me, you want a growth strategy that's in it for the long haul, and one that's not just a quick hit of growth, but one that's proven itself to be successful now and into the future. And creating high value content is going to be the growth strategy that smart brands continue to lean on. Not only now, but well into the future.
I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of The Growth Pod. I look forward to seeing you in the next one.
