It's hard to imagine successful business growth when a brand fails to engage its customers. Even established businesses have to pour resources to ensure consumer happiness.
For smaller companies, it could be particularly challenging, especially if they operate in a competitive industry.
Outreach marketing could help your small business stand out. The question is, how do you create an outreach strategy that works?
Identify what customer outreach channels offer you the most value to ensure your outreach strategy succeeds.
Successful customer outreach benefits
Customer outreach aims to attract new customers to your business. However, it's worth mentioning that the benefits go beyond that.
1. Brand authority and awareness
Brand authority and awareness are the standout benefits of a successful outreach strategy. The more people you impress with your outreach, the more exposure your brand gets.
Ultimately, people share their thoughts with others, and customers who have good things to say about a business get the word of mouth going.
2. Increased revenue
Conversions lead to sales, and businesses grow, having more room to reinvest money in various marketing campaigns, including outreach.
It's also worth pointing out that more revenue attracts attention from investors who are more likely to invest in a healthy business.
3. Customer loyalty
Great outreach leads to customer loyalty. Your messages aren't just cold emails, for instance. Nurturing relationships with current customers and making them happy are critical as well.
Reach out to them and offer exclusive discounts. Create a newsletter that covers bits that might interest your audience. Take advantage of every asset you can to encourage customer loyalty.
4. Potential for new long-term relationships
A successful outreach strategy could lead to business opportunities. A customer may turn out to be a valuable asset for future opportunities ventures. Don’tDo not discard it as a possibility.
The whole idea is akin to influencer marketing. You are not reaching out to social media celebrities directly, but if you find potential partners and build relationships, there's room for ways to collaborate and build a stronger presence.
5. More customer feedback
Releasing a new product or looking for ways to upgrade your current goods can be tricky. It's where reaching out to customers and asking for feedback is handy.
Honest shoppers are less likely to be biased. Not to mention that they also bring different perspectives, sharing ideas you would not find anywhere.
6. Chance to promote content
You could use your outreach strategy as a channel if you collaborate with content creators and want to strengthen your relationship by promoting their content.
Similarly, it doesn't have to be content from others. Driving traffic to your own website via outreach marketing can be worthwhile. benefit. Some pages are harder to rank organically, and outreach could be the solution to drive traffic to such pages.
7. Lead generation
Generate leads via outreach. In a competitive market, engaging prospects without a good outreach strategy is tricky.
Each potential customer has specific problems. You can treat the lead generation aspect as a learning experience. The offers you submit to prospects work as valuable references to determine which areas need improvement in your overall outreach strategy.
Successful customer outreach strategies
Familiarizing yourself with potential customer outreach channels is the first step. What follows next is crafting an outreach marketing strategy that succeeds.
1. Rely on insightful data
Avoid adjustments based on random guessing. Assess different campaign aspects by reviewing looking at insightful data.
Most automation tools for outreach offer monitoring and metric features. Tracking solutions help identify good-performing and bad-performing areas.indicate solid areas and lacking areas.
To make things easier, segment customers and analyze specific characteristics. If you are reaching out via multiple channels, determine which brings the best results and which are not working. You may need to cut a channel or change its setup entirely.
2. Utilize automation tools
It's hard to imagine a scenario where a business runs an outreach campaign without automation. Even small businesses aim to contact as many people as they can.
Outreach requires repetitive tasks, such as follow-ups or warnings about expiring discounts. Thankfully, there are enough AI-driven tools to simplify and automate repetitive tasks.
You don’t need a separate tool for that, though. Capsule CRM, for example, can help you automate your sales workflows. It supports sales reps and managers at every stage of the sales cycle.
With Capsule CRM, you can set up automated tasks and reminders to keep deals moving forward. This includes activating tasks, moving deals to the next stage in your pipeline, and assigning ownership – so that no opportunity is missed.
3. Personalize messages
Customers can easily connect to a brand when they receive a personalized message. A one-on-one interaction feels more meaningful than a generic offer they receive via email or text.
Small yet significant steps, like adding the recipient's name to the message, improve the outreach. In the case of existing customers, you can send weekly reports or let them know how much more they have to spend to receive a VIP membership, for example.
4. Use different channels
As mentioned earlier in the article, there are different customer outreach channels. It's up to youbrand, to determine which channel suits them the most.
A multi-channel approach means spreading your resources. On the other hand, a competitive business environment requires covering as much ground as possible. Your customers live and interact on different platforms and can be reached via different means.
Besides, having your presence on different channels means you can fall back on one and focus on it if another suddenly stops bringing results.
5. Set realistic goals
Realistic goals are crucial to anyany marketing campaign. With an outreach strategy, it is tricky to determine how much you can accomplish, especially if the campaign is fresh.
Underestimating the potential is probably better than reaching for too much. If the outreach process turns out to be lackluster with low response rates, you’ll feel discouraged.
Set goals for each campaign, and if it's clear that the idea isn’t working out, move on to the next campaign instead of wasting resources on one that isn’t working.
6. Send follow-ups
Outreach doesn't end with initial messages. Often, a recipient sees the original email, for instance, but forgets about it.
A follow-up works as a reminder. If the prospect doesn't respond to the first message, send one after a few days.
And the data speaks for itself here. According to some follow-up statistics:
- On average, you can reach 9% reply rate if you don't follow up on your opening email.
- Your average reply rate goes around 13% if you include at least one follow-up message in your email sequence.
- An effective follow-up can increase conversions by 22% compared to no follow-up.
There’s simply no excuse for you NOT to follow up.
7. Show value
An outreach message ought to show clear value to the prospect. Tell them how your product or service can solve the problem.
If they don't know how to get rid of other storage on Mac, explain that your software automates the process and deletes the digital clutter. If they don't know how to care for their skin, showcase how your product helps.
Ideally, a clear message offering value should come with appropriate visuals, such as images or video instructions, to persuade the potential customer.
Different customer outreach channels
1. LinkedIn
LinkedIn exists to build and nourish relationships with potential business partners.
As a concept, social media marketing has been around for a while. LinkedIn is different from traditional platforms like Facebook or Instagram. It is business-driven. Most users want to expand their network, requiring a comprehensive outreach marketing strategy.
Depending on your business type, finding leads on LinkedIn could be tricky. Nevertheless, you can expect prospects to convert higher than on other platforms if you play your cards right.
Whether it's a personal or brand profile, reaching out to customers with a well-built and professional profile is imperative.
2. Emails
Cold email outreach is one of the easiest ways to launch outreach marketing campaigns. Some refer to the method as lazy prospecting. You get a list of leads, create email copy and send direct mail to inboxes.
Email outreach campaigns have some nuances. For one, email marketing relies on understanding how deliverability works.
Let's say that you have 500 prospects. You shouldn’t reach out to all of them on the same day using the same inbox. The email service provider will flag the activity as spam and might even block the email account.
3. Facebook
According to Hootsuite, Facebook has more than 2 billion users. It's the social media platform for all kinds of marketing strategies.
Social media outreach doesn't always translate into a successful outreach campaign. Common pitfalls involve identifying who is the right fit and who isn't.
Facebook is a social media juggernaut, so going through various groups and individuals to find prospects consumes time. Still, it's one of the best platforms to find your target audience.
4. X
Similar to Facebook, X is another popular social media marketing platform. Ensure your X bio is optimized before you commence the customer outreach strategy via X.
Optimizing the profile also helps others discover you. A potential lead may seek out a solution and reach out to you instead of the other way around.
5. Instagram
Instagram began as a platform for people to share various photos. But since it was created, it’s use has evolved,
Nowadays, Instagram is the place for influencers to promote different products and services. From a business point of view, you could use influencers as a go-between and reach out to your audience indirectly.
Wrapping up
To sum everything up, there are a lot of different considerations when working on an effective strategy. From building new relationships with customers to other key things, such as personalized messages and link-building, each step is crucial and determines how your outreach strategy pans out.
Make the most out of the information provided in this article. Marketing exists in a digital landscape, and it's hard to imagine a functioning system without automation and other marketing tools.
Put useful tools to use. They exist to help you automate mundane tasks and unblock your time and creativity. Putting your workflows on autopilot is easy with Capsule CRM – but it’s only one of the features that can help you in your everyday work. How about you check them all out during a free trial ?
