Case Study: B2B Inbound Marketing & Linkedin Outreach for an Enterprise HR Consultancy
Generating SQLs from Email DatabaseInbound + Outbound B2B Enterprise Marketing
Churning High % of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) without Spammy Emails
It so happened that at DigiWhirl (my social media agency) we were running an inbound lead campaign for an HR corporate client. We had a targeted email database of a few thousand people to use for outreach. Typically, at this company, the sales team would start bombarding this database with emails, salesy emails as you can imagine. And it would have negligible response. So they wanted to do something different. Could this become a social media campaign to nurture leads?
We took it up.
#1 Offering Value: Lead Magnet
First step was to set up a basic lead capture flow with a valuable downloadable content. The corporate team was quite keen to keep this project very light on time and revenue spend. So we actually used an existing report that was available for free download (without signup) on their website. Anyway, their website and report hardly got any traffic, so it was practically non-existent.
So a basic lead capture form and the lead magnet – a report prepared by them – were put in place.
#2 Emails are a strong currency in the digital world
Second step was to figure out the social media outreach. We used the emails in multiple impactful and cost effective ways to connect with the target group on the various platforms. Most of them highly cost effective. It included,
- Linkedin Outreach & Ads
- Twitter Outreach
- Facebook Outreach & Ads
The ad budget wasn’t anything major, but we wanted to try it out.
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As it happened this email database was of C-suite members of medium sized corporates. And most of them weren’t active on Twitter or Facebook. So it all boiled down to Linkedin.
We managed to connect with most of the email group on Linkedin. Our plan was to use normal messages where possible and inmails for others.
Problem: However, we got a very low response rate to our Linkedin Outreach. About 1 in 12 people we messaged were acting on it. Very low conversion. After being worried about this through the night (yea, it happens) a team mate woke up early next to day to message some more. Voila, response rate jumped to 1 in 4 people! Signups started pouring in.
Learning: It was the timing! When we messaged early in the morning the response rate increased 3x.
Once this was cracked, we had a resoundingly successful campaign. Over 25% of the email list had signed up for the report. Along with Linkedin outreach we had also sent a couple of emails promoting the report to the group.
The report signups were then sent a few more nurturing emails. And later pursued by the corporate sales team.
Final Conversion Numbers
Finally, they had over 10 hot leads to pursue with key decision makers of these medium sized enterprises. Because of the earlier content engagement with them, these were nurtured leads and were found to be easier to crack than a lot of other leads. Moreover, considering the cost of the work we did, these leads were of much more value. Even a single project for them would mean many times the revenue than what was spent on our campaign.
The percentage of conversion – from being cold outreach targets on an email list to hot leads – was a little over 1%. It would have been even higher if we would have worked closely with their corporate sales team and had higher control over the kind of emails that were sent via their tech team which was extremely old school. However, the organizational silos were such that we couldn’t do that. And even so, this was a highly successful corporate experience for us and also for them because as mentioned earlier their sales email bombardment strategy would get negligible results. So 10 hot leads from that same database was a huge improvement.
Soon this company which was a global player was acquired by another global conglomerate and there was a complete change in the management. So, unfortunately, we couldn’t pursue the project further and refine our work to hit higher conversion numbers.