As a digital marketing agency and a data provider, we get asked many times “Should I use email to warm up my data or should I be cold calling?” There’s no simple answer, as it depends on the business goals, and the data itself. But in today’s digital world, we’ve questioned whether cold calling remains of value, or whether it’s obsolete. You cannot go cold calling or cold emailing any leads or prospects that haven’t opted into receiving communications from you unless you are targeting a B2B audience in which has shown legitimate interest. This makes email blasting a cold data list tricky, and GDPR must be considered at every step of your campaign. We have seen many email domains risking their reputation, and sometimes, actually getting blocked by sending cold email blasts to a high volume of data. So how should you warm up your data?
The Warm Up Steps to Follow to Ensure Success
The first step you should take is to refine the data. Whether you have collected the data in-house, or purchased the data from a third party, refining the data is a crucial step. Contact validation, data deduplication, formatting and finally suppression are all real methods of extracting, processing, and refining data. It’s in this final valuable form that it is ready to be marketed to.
Next, ensure you have set up your email server correctly. Once you’ve set up your email account, learn about its capabilities, set up a reply to and from address, and verify these domains. These are the best practices to follow when creating an email campaign. Your SPF DKIM records will need to be managed, and your developer or IT specialist usually takes this care of. You should then think about sending emails to warm data, and few at a time. This will warm up your email domain and minimise reputation issues when you send your email outreach campaign.
You should think about sending a small amount of emails daily to warm data, encouraging replies. These emails can be sent to friends and family, or data you know have opted in to receive communications. Not only does this warm up your domain and sender reputation, but it gives you the chance to test your content and your message. A good, initial, email campaign will give your prospects a quick teaser about who you are, what your business does, and what you can do for them. At the end of the email, the prospect should be able to associate themselves with you, or at least trust you, or become engaged with your brand based on the information they got from the email. If you send a warm email to a group of people who do not have your email address, then you are not doing your job as a marketer.
Once you have spent several weeks warming up your email domain, you can start sending your emails to the cold data. You should not blast thousands of contacts at once, and instead, segment that data and upload it in small clusters. This will prevent any spamming issues.
Lead Nurturing
You need to warm up your email list by sending emails that apply to them and make them feel comfortable with you and your brand. To warm up your prospects, many companies use a marketing automation system that scores the prospects based on their engagement with the email and your brand. You can implement tags that group the prospects and serve them automated follow-up emails based on their interaction with the initial email, and your website (if that’s where you have directed them). This method is great for personalising content- By setting up automatic emails at pre-arranged intervals, emails are targeted and provide valuable information to the lead.
It is imperative to keep in mind that the autoresponder is only as good as the emails you send it. A single bad email can cause the autoresponder to shut down. It is also vital to make sure that you do not set up tags that duplicate email addresses. Serving communications to duplicated data means it becomes harder to locate answers to that customer’s problem, which is ultimately what you don’t want.
Hopefully, this article has provided some insight on why use email to warm up your database. If you follow these simple steps, you can expect to decrease the risks when marketing to cold data, and see a significant increase in the number of sales. However, you must ensure that you do not blast emails to thousands of contacts at once. That way, you can ensure that each email you send is of high quality and does not end up in the spam folder. Your cold email should introduce your brand, and your warm emails should encourage your customers to purchase more of your products or services that are most relevant to them.
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by Listencat
