How Reply helped Leadworx scale their business

As the CEO and co-founder of Leadworx, there’s been plenty of challenges. Until a couple of months back, the biggest challenge was product ideation, making sure our service was the best out there and that it solved a real problem.

Right now, it’s all about scaling.

How do we take our business to the next level, how do we acquire the next set of customers, and how do we provide the maximum value to those customers?

Finding the right scaling solution

Outbound emailing was something we’d used in the past and we’ve found it to be very effective. We tried several different solutions before finally choosing Reply.

Moreover, if you have any questions or problems, you get replies in a couple of minutes. The combination of those three factors made us confident Reply was the tool to go with.

Reply now handles all of our outbound processes, so it’s helping us generate a lot of leads every day. Typically we’ll use our own tool, Leadworx, to find email addresses. Then we’ll just add those into a Reply campaign and the whole process is automated.

We’ll send out emails to a bunch of people every day, then our SDRs and AEs will pick up the replies and follow up with them.

One feature we find particularly helpful is the analytics. If I have a sequence, with four different emails, I can easily see each email’s individual performance.
Essential information like how many people have replied is available right at the top of the page.

Numbers can be misleading a lot of the time, but this helps us have a better understanding of our campaigns’ real performance.

Moreover, Reply can also be used for more than just outbound emails. For example, we’re currently looking into using Reply for customer onboarding. Originally we’d created our own onboarding campaign internally using SendGrid, but it’s a very restrictive solution, where we can’t make changes to the campaign on the fly. So we’re moving our future inbound campaigns over to Reply too.

There is no way that we could ever go back to emailing manually.

Writing a cold email that gets results

First of all, I would like to set out that cold emails definitely work. We have achieved tremendous success, as have a lot of our customers who’ve used our product to find leads’ email addresses.
The only thing that turns people off is they initially go through a lot of trial and error before they get to the point where they understand how to do cold emails. You can’t just email five people and start getting demo requests and sales.

To measure the results, we typically look at four different metrics:

• How many people are we emailing?
• What’s the open rate?
• What’s the reply rate?
• What’s the positive reply rate?

So we aim to email about 100 to 150 prospects a week. We aim for a 50 to 70 percent open rate. If it’s 15 to 25 percent then something needs to be changed. We also aim for a 15 to 30 percent reply rate.

For our positive reply rate, which is where someone has shown interest or requested a demo, we aim for something like six to eight percent.

Identifying target audiences

To get these kinds of results, the first step is understanding who you’re emailing; what kind of company is it and what kind of people are inside the company. That forms the basis for our new customer profile and buyer persona.

While we do check our emails with Reply’s email quality check service, every email is still unique and will be differently worded for different reasons. For example, sometimes the email will be worded in a very rigid format, other times it’ll be more relaxed.

Once you have your ICP and the buyer persona then it becomes about how many people you’re emailing. If you’re emailing too many people in a day, Google will just start flagging your emails as spam.

No matter how good your email copy is, or how good your subject line is, you’re not getting replies because people aren’t opening your email. You have to be mindful of the number of emails you’re sending out. For us, that meant sending out less than 40 email a day, including follow-ups.

The second thing we try to do is keep our subject line and email very short and concise. I’ve rarely seen any email with more than 120 words get a reply, so we usually keep them between 80 and 100 words with the subject line less than three words to four words. The shorter the better.

From there it’s a case of doing lots of testing, carrying out some a/b split testing, and just trying out a lot of different things. Every two weeks we’ll try out a very different campaign and see if that increases conversions or not.

That way we’re always improving.

If you want to convert more of your anonymous site visitors into customers, make sure you sign up for your free trial of Leadworx.