Visual prospecting examples
Visual prospecting involves more than simply adding a photo to your email and calling it a day. As you get started with visual prospecting, you’ll have three considerations:
- Your message objective
- The type of visuals you’ll use
- The level of personalization
Message objectives
While there are lots of reasons you might want to use visual prospecting, they tend to fall under one of the following:
- Grabbing attention
- Building relationships
- Conveying information
In the initial outreach, the SDR’s priority is to get attention. Remember, your prospects are likely dealing with hundreds of messages, not to mention the countless other tasks and distractions that fill the day. Images and videos are a great way to differentiate your messages and stand out from your competitors.
Throughout your messages, visuals can also be used to build relationships. The simplest and most obvious example is including a photo in your signature, like this one (which has been created with the help of our Email Signature Generator).
When you’re reaching out to prospects who might be in a different city, country, or continent, using a photo or video allows prospects to quickly put a face to your name. Rather than just another anonymous salesperson competing for their time, you become a real person and lay the foundation for a strong customer relationship.
For conveying information, whether you’re trying to describe the problem you address or illustrate the solution you offer, a picture can economically paint a thousand words. This is especially useful for complex problems or new solutions, where the prospect may need additional education before you can move onto the next stage in the sales funnel.
For example, rather than writing a detailed explanation for how our tool works, this simple visualization makes it easy to understand at a glance (plus, it can be easily personalized as we’ve explained earlier).
Types of visuals
Once you’ve decided on your goal, the next step is to choose the type of visual that’ll best support those objectives. These can be broken down into three categories:
- Illustrations
- Photos
- GIFs
- Videos
Illustrations and drawings are great for explaining difficult concepts, while photos are ideal when you want to show physical products and results.
For example, a cosmetics company might use an illustration to explain why their fancy new shampoo is different from the competition, then follow that up with a photo of someone with beautiful hair to show the end results. However, an SDR at an AI company would have to use an illustration to show how machine learning works because it’s impossible to show how the product can improve their business with a photo.
This is often the case for SaaS sales. Illustrations containing numbers, statistics, or visual representation of the results (before and after) work pretty well in my experience. However, it’s important that the information is presented in an appealing and easy-to-digest form.
As for the GIFs — animated images — we often use them in follow-ups and especially in LinkedIn touchpoints due to the specifics of that channel. Including a witty or relatable GIF in your message is a great way to add a dash of humor and break the ice. As a result, a follow-up might look like this:
Hi {{First Name}}.
It’s me trying to break through your inbox 🙂
Videos — whether they’re animations or live action — require more preparation and planning, but are generally more effective and have a greater impact. While illustrations may not reflect reality and photos can be easily edited, videos can build trust by showing your product or solution in action. Instead of clicking through a gallery of images, prospective customers can watch a quick video demonstrating every step of the process and showing your product in action.
Level of personalization
One of the most important decisions you’ll make is whether or not to tailor your visual prospecting to the recipient. Obviously, it’s easier to use the same image or video for every prospect, and sometimes that would be sufficient. For example, you can safely use the same photo of yourself in your signature for every prospect.
However, in most other cases, personalized images and videos will get the best results. For example, in what Kyle Racki at Proposify described as the best cold email ever, the sender included a video of them using their solution to interact with Proposify’s website.
Of course, creating a 100% personalized video is time-consuming. While this might be worth doing for high-value prospects that perfectly match your ICP, creating unique videos for every single prospect would be a lot of work and is unlikely to be cost-effective.
Instead, most companies will find it more effective to personalize existing images and videos, making small changes to the visuals to make them more relevant to the recipient. Just as an email message can employ personalization tags to use the recipient’s name, job description, and any other relevant details, it’s now easy to add and modify dynamic text within an image.
One of the most popular examples is a photo of the sales rep holding up a blank card, whiteboard, or a coffee cup with the prospect’s name added.
As we’ll go on to see, the latest image personalization software makes this easy. As technology advances, it’s now possible to even create personalized videos at scale. For example, this upsell video from Barclays uses the prospect’s name in creative ways throughout, along with other relevant customer information — in this case showing what kind of loan they could expect based on their unique situation.
Tools and resources for visual prospecting
You don’t need much in the way of software or hardware to get started with visual prospecting.
For capturing simple photos and videos, the camera on your phone or your webcam will be more than sufficient. Free software like Canva can be used to quickly edit photos, build flowcharts, and create any other kind of image you might need. For videos, tools like Vidyard can help you package your videos, track views, and more.
If you want to send personalized images, it’s entirely possible to create your own custom script that will grab images and add them to your email (something we dive into in greater detail in our series on personalized outreach at scale).
However, in many cases, it makes more sense to use a dedicated tool. Here are some of our favorites (psst, there’s more in our Sales Tools Catalog).
Nexweave
Nexweave lets you send your prospects personalized images, GIFs, and interactive videos. There’s support for plenty of different prospecting channels, including email, SMS text messaging, WhatsApp, LinkedIn messages, chatbots, and more.
You can try out Nexweave with 100 free credits (enough for 2,000 images or 100 video views), then jump onto one of the paid plans starting at $49/mo.).
Hyperise
Hyperise makes it simple to add dynamic personalization layers to your images, videos, and website. With 16 points of personalization, you can ensure that every visual feels completely unique to your prospects. As a bonus, Hyperise has a native Reply integration, making it even easier to use with your outreach campaigns.
There’s a 14-day free trial, with paid plans starting at $49/mo. for personalized images and going up to $149/mo. for videos.
Bannerbear
Bannerbear takes a slightly different approach with a focus on using an API to connect your software and auto-generating images and videos. You can create reusable templates that combine different elements, which you can then use to personalize your prospecting. Other features include Optional AI, which detects faces in photos so they’re positioned properly in your images.
Their free trial offers you 30 API credits (equivalent to 30 images) with pricing starting at $49/mo.
PicSnippets
PicSnippets is primarily focused on image personalization, allowing you to add dynamic text to your photos. The app comes with over 100 templates you can use, or you can create your own with the image designer.
A big advantage is that rather than needing to buy credits or subscribe to a higher plan to send more images, PicSnippets offers a full featured plan with unlimited sends/personalizations for $47/mo.
Pandapose
Pandapose enables you to automatically generate personalized images for your outbound emails. Their built-in design editor lets you create and tailor images to your prospects, using their name, company details, logos, and more. Pandapose works with any email tool — including Reply — so you can easily embed images in your next campaign.
Pandapose offers a free trial to get you started, with their essential paid plan coming in at $99/mo. (equivalent to 250 images every month).
Idomoo
Idomoo is a personalized video platform with an impressive client list, from Audi and Walmart to Ubisoft and Samsung. You can personalize text, audio, images, and video-in-video. There are plenty of features here to explore, from personalized GIFs that auto-play in emails to “living” videos that automatically update in real time based on user data.
Pricing information isn’t available on the site, but you can request a demo to see exactly how Idomoo’s platform can help you.
