So Many Leads, Too Little Time

Thursday, 2PM: You’ve just pulled every single one of your competitors’ followers off of Twitter. You then filtered through all these Twitter accounts, and you’ve ended up with a very decent 27,000 prospects who have matched all the keywords you defined in FILTR.

If you have no clue what I’m talking about, check these tools out first.

Thursday, 2:30PM: 30 minutes have passed. You’ve collected all your prospects’ User IDs, User URLs and ended up with about 8,000 e-mails. Or we’ve sent truckloads of high-quality prospects (20,000–50,000!) your way with Astrofuel.

Tracking the filtering process of leads: Filtering according to keywords results in higher conversion probability. Data partially sourced from e-mail prospecting “experiment” (below).

Either way, you’ll be kept pretty busy for… a while. Now then, how do you approach your filtered prospects?

The 4 Laws Of Email

If you decide to e-mail 8,000 prospects, that’s your choice. But please personalize your message enough to start a conversation with them. You want to gradually woo them into trying/buying your product. Whichever way you choose to e-mail your leads adhere to these laws:

#1 Be Straightforward.

Tell them what value you’re looking to bring to the table.

#2 Don’t Oversell.

Especially not in the first e-mail. The first e-mail is a soft-pitch.

#3 Engage Them.

A conversation is a dialogue. It’s not all about your product, it’s about your prospect andtheir needs as well.

#4 Follow Up.

Did they reply? Awesome.

CRUCIAL: Ask them whether they’re interested and invite them to get back to you, whatever their answer is. A cold prospect is a useless prospect, filter them out.

Between 1 to 7 e-mails were sent to prospects. First 100 entries for each e-mail amount was included in the stacked bars. All conversions were for Astrofuel.

Following up has its perks. I followed these four golden rules (or tried to), sending a range between 1 to 7 e-mails (after the 2nd e-mail it either became a conversation, or I considered the prospect as lost). The results above are clear:

• Most prospects, at least for me, resulted in a conversion during or after the 3rd e-mail.
• After the 3rd e-mail, the longer the conversation went on for, the less likely they were going to convert.
• Prospects became fatigued after 7 e-mails. I did too. Emails began to drag on. It’s similar to the idea of knowing when a free-trialist isn’t worth your time.

Leads that take too long to convert can still be worth your time, but you need to pace yourself accordingly. I found that getting them signed up to a free newsletter resulted in 25 conversions (only including anyone who I had sent 4 or more e-mails to).

Timing Is Everything

So, Spaceship’s Leadgen Tools are hammering out targeted leads for customers. Great! We tracked the use of our CRAWLR and how many User URLs were being parsed. Why? We wanted to see when people needed leads.

The amount of e-mails pulled from crawled accounts.

Two Takeaway Points:

1. Peak periods for collecting hot prospects were just before holiday periods. These are indicated by the spikes in the graph.
2. Accounts crawled also indicates another valuable channel to reach out to prospects using their User IDs — Twitter.

I do not recommend contacting hot prospects via e-mail just before holidays. I reached out to about 45 prospects I strongly considered as potential customers just before Thanksgiving. Nobody converted. Nobody!

Instead — and we saw this from ad campaigns of our customers (since we follow them on Twitter!) — target your prospects using their Twitter User IDs. Build a tailored audience around all the prospects you filtered out using FILTR, and target them there. And when they hit your website, start retargeting them. You can also build Facebook/Adroll/Adwords campaigns out of your leads, if you wish.

So use holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday to your advantage. But do so by building audiences.

Hopefully this gives you an idea or two for when you’ve generated your leads 🙂

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