How to Create an Email Campaign that Closes Deals

An email campaign is still the most powerful way to reach your prospects. While the phone can feel intrusive and not everyone is on social media all the time, chances are that your prospects check their email several times per day.

But just sending out emails blindly is not going to work. If you want to generate leads and close deals with your email campaigns, you have to follow some best practices.

In this article, we’ll outline some basics about email campaigns and some tips on how to create the best messages to convert your prospects into customers.

What is an Email Campaign?

An email campaign is a sequence of email messages that you send during a specific time period for a particular purpose, from setting up an appointment to downloading an ebook or buying a product.

There are different types of email campaigns, although sometimes they can be just different terms referring to the same concept of email sequences.

For example:

Email Marketing Campaign. Marketers use email marketing to communicate with prospects and customers, provide valuable content, and promote products and services, in order to generate marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

Sales Email Sequence. Sales reps also create email campaigns or sequences to warm up prospects and start a sales conversation.

Email Drip Campaign. A drip usually refers to automated emails sent over a few days or weeks after a prospect subscribes to an email list, usually with the purpose of converting them into a customer.

Email Newsletters. Email marketing campaigns or drip campaigns eventually end. But you want to stay top of mind with your subscribers. The solution is to add them to an email newsletter. This can be a weekly or monthly email with news, tips, updates, and whatever you can think of.

Best Practices for Creating Email Campaigns

The cold email is your first interaction with good-fit leads you’ve worked hard to find. With all that potential, and inbound momentum in some cases, you need this interaction to solidify a positive relationship with your leads and a game plan informed by competitive knowledge and specialized domain expertise.

When following up with an email campaign, focus on value as perceived by the prospect, not you. This means, you’re turning around your arguments and questions, not speaking from your perspective, but from your prospect’s perspective.

Focus also on deliverability, above all, so your own email content gets to the inbox, not the spam folder, and content for conversion, with the best tips in the industry.

Here’s a checklist for evaluating your email campaigns.

1. Ensure deliverability

• Eliminate bullet points, and bolded or italicized text
• Don’t use “spam” words like Cost, Payment, Friend, etc.
• NO Attachments in step 1 email, no images
• Less than 2 links (or none at all – as links drive up bounce rates)

2. The opening line

• No selfish openers – “Hi, my name is … I work for … I want to …” > stop talking all about me, me, me. Talk about the problem that keeps this contact up at night.
• Bring up a specific problem the contact wants solved.
• Or, explain how you discovered them and why that matters to their goals – “Came across your website while researching / auditing…”

3. Get specific

• Don’t use general problems or statements
• Turn general statements like “better,” “faster,” into specific outcomes (better sales = repeatable process, or better fit leads, or more context on your target accounts, or analytics suggesting changes to your ICP.
• Put metrics on WHATEVER you can quantify.
• The more specific your statement or impact, the more convincing and valuable this information becomes.

4. Focus

• Have ONE thing to learn from this email… and that’s it.
• People have little attention span, just like us. Asking a perfect stranger to read an essay about your agenda and value is unfair. Let the contact learn ONE important thing about you per email. And, rank what you choose to teach about yourself and company by its importance to your contact.

5. Include Calls To Action

• Always include at least 1 ask - what is the one thing you want someone to do when they consume this email? 
• Also, suggesting a specific date for your call helps make a decision to call easier. You can even use Advanced snippets to suggest a time based on when the email is sent.
• Directly ask for your desired outcome – “click this link” or “read this blog”

6. Overall Sequence Length

• 33% of responses come from emails 5-8 within a sequence.
• Sending less than 5 emails in a sequence is a waste of good leads.
• Persistence pays off when you’re consistently adding value to your contacts.

Using Apollo.io for your Email Campaign

As you can see, conducting an email campaign is no walk in the park.

But, with a powerful, “all-in-one” sales and prospecting tool like Apollo, you can take these best practices to the next level.

Before you even begin creating your email content, Apollo is there to help you with your sales prospecting. After all, a huge part of a successful email campaign is finding the right leads to target.

Apollo’s database is one of the most expansive on the market, offering you over 210M prospects and 65+ filters for laser precision and targeting. With Apollo’s Searcher, there is no more scanning LinkedIn (or, even worse, Google!) for prospects’ email addresses. On our Searcher (and on LinkedIn with our trusty Chrome Extension), you can find all of the verified emails you ever need and have it all completely synced to your CRM.

Now, it’s time to organize your campaign and you’re going to want to use Sequences. 

Sequences is Apollo’s hub for strategizing outreach campaigns. Here, you organize and create emails and tasks as a series of steps. This ensures that your team is delivering the right emails to the right prospects at the right time.

From Sequences, you can also A/B test message templates and strategies to confirm the best version of your email campaign!

Check out this video to see how to add a contact into a sequence step-by-step.

Optimizing your email campaigns is an important part of an outbound strategy. And it’s now easier than ever with Apollo!

In the Apollo app, navigate to the header and click Campaigns > Analytics. Here you’ll find your Analytics dashboard.

This is where you can track, build out, and customize dozens of reports including reports specific to your email campaigns like:

• Percentages of Emails Marked Interested by Rep
• How Many Contacts Added to a Email Sequence
• High/Low Performing Sequences
• SDR Email Efficiency Stats
• And More