How to Increase Cold Outreach Response Rate by 70%

Add City and Country to your prospect profile

Reply has a pretty cool feature that allows you to identify prospects’ time zone based on their location and tailor your email sending time accordingly.

So when you research your prospects, don’t forget to add the city and country as data points and import them to Reply along with other important variables like First Name, Last Name, Email, Company, Title, LinkedIn, etc. Reply will automatically identify and fill in the Time Zone field once you import your prospects to the platform.

To prove that location and time zone actually have an impact on the campaign performance, we’ve divided all the prospects added to Reply within the last few months into 2 categories: 

• prospects who have City and Country (and, as a result, Time Zone) fields identified and
• those who have been imported without these fields and don’t have identified time zone.

And here is the result: 

an average response rate for prospects who don’t have a time zone is around 6.5%, while the prospects with identified time zone have an average 9.3% response rate.

As you can see, there’s a pretty obvious tendency here. This means you can easily increase your response rate by around 70% just by taking into account your prospects’ time zone when sending your emails.

Adjust your sending schedule

Reply is quite flexible in setting up your sequence schedule. For example, you can set up your sending window for your business hours – 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. PST.

If all your prospects are located in the PST time zone, there is nothing to worry about. All emails will be sent based on your schedule and since your prospects are located in the same time zone, they will receive your emails during their business hours as well.

But what if some of your potential customers are located in Australia or New Zealand? If you email them during your business hours they will get your emails at night (which is not cool).

So how do you fix that?

Take a closer look at the screenshot above. Have you noticed a small toggle called “Use contact’s specific time zone if set” at the bottom of the screen? Just activate it.

Once you do that, Reply will ignore your original schedule settings and will send emails based on the prospects’ time zone instead. This means your prospects from Australia and New Zealand will receive your emails within their business hours and not yours.

Needless to say that this little hack can also lead to a significant boost in email response rate with little to no effort.

To prove that, we’ve conducted one more experiment with over 60 million emails I’ve mentioned earlier. Namely, our data scientists analyzed 4 sequence types with 4 sending schedule options, i.e.:

• Use Contact’s specific time zone if set, leads don’t have a Time Zone field (i.e. City and Country fields lacking).
• Use Contact’s specific time zone if set, Time Zone field identified.
• Use Contact’s specific time zone if set turned off, leads don’t have a Time Zone field. (Users that rely on this schedule option tend to have dozens of dedicated sequences for leads from each country with corresponding schedules, so that’s why they don’t need the time zone fields).
• Use Contact’s specific time zone if set turned off, Time Zone field identified.

The first two options are the most common and used by almost all Reply customers. The latter two cases are quite rare and used mostly by advanced customers.

So here are the results (drumroll, please):

Let’s take a closer look at the results. Option #1 (the only one that doesn’t have the identified time zone, so the emails are sent regardless of the prospects’ time zone) has the worst performance – only 3.7%. 

On the other hand, just by adjusting your sending schedule to the recipients’ time zone, we can get up to 70% more replies – around 5.28% as in case of options number 2, 3, and 4.

The takeaway is pretty obvious here.