Multichannel outreach will always beat a single channel approach – it speaks for itself, right? Let us explain.
It’s logical. Increase your chances and your rewards will follow suit. As opposed to limiting yourself to one channel when reaching out to your prospects, whether it’s email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Tinder (as per Commander Joe’s advice) or text, why not add another channel to the mix?
Zaplify was actually born based on this insight. Back in 2020, we identified a target audience of 30,000 people. We then divided this group into 3 different sample sizes. Group A we reached out to through social selling – a connection request on LinkedIn followed by a conversation in hope of booking a demo. Group B we reached out to through a cold email. A simple email to the prospect’s business inbox with the ambition of booking a demo. Group C we reached out to through a multichannel approach. At first, we connected on LinkedIn, we then drove the conversation to the prospect’s business email. By doing this, we saw a 500% increase in the amount of meetings we were able to book. At that point, we knew that we were on to something.
Utilizing digital channels to improve ROI
In a world gone digital, we’re witnessing how companies across all industries are investing into digitalizing their sales strategies. Being able to automate your B2B prospecting and including multichannel outreach as part of your outreach is no longer a luxury for a selective few – it’s here, and it’s here to stay.
So what is multichannel outreach? To put it simply, it’s the process of using different channels to reach, connect and engage with leads. Channels come in all shapes – it can be a text message, your website, email, this blog post, social ad, LinkedIn and much more. The most common ones are LinkedIn and email, as these are the channels that we most often use for business purposes.
In a perfect world, you’d want to download a list of warm leads and simply drop this list into a mass message tool where your future customers would book a meeting through your generic “Book a meeting in my calendar” hyperlinked email, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
Decision-makers are getting bombarded with these types of emails. You know what I’m talking about, this is usually how it goes:
Hi “name”,
I hope you are well!
I noticed you work as a “title” at “company”. I have a lot of clients in the “industry” sector. I am confident that you would find a lot of value with our product. Are you free for a 15 min call this week?
Feel free to book a time in my calendar here.
Best regards,
Josh Ellis.
Trust me, it won’t work (if it does, you should be buying a lottery ticket). This is where social selling becomes interesting.
The importance of social selling in B2B
As I previously mentioned in this article, we were able to see a 500% increase in the amount of meetings we were able to book by using a multichannel approach. How was this possible?
In the B2B industry, negotiations are wildly driven by trust, credibility and relevance. Whenever you receive an email from a person you don’t know, you lack the appearance of all these ingredients. You don’t know whether or not the person writing to you is legit, a total scam or even a real person (yes, catchfishing is real within B2B as well).
This is why social selling works so well. LinkedIn is the most common platform within the social selling space and it really delivers on its promise. The reason for this is because you’re able to see a person’s face, common network connections, where he or she works, studied, who they interacted with on the platform, what they like, don’t like and so on. You are able to put a face to a name, and this my friends, is more important now than ever.
Let’s rewind back to the year of 2020 when we were testing our 30,000 respondents. The reason why we were able to see a 500% increase is because we used LinkedIn to create a personal connection prior to connecting through email. Even if the prospect hadn’t accepted our connection request on LinkedIn, we were still able to say “I tried connecting with you on LinkedIn, but I appreciate that you’re busy and figured I’d drop you a note here instead” in our email introduction. The person who received the email was then able to check the connection request on their LinkedIn, read the message, but most importantly – put a face to the email of which they had received.
How to win with multichannel outreach
Understanding the value and potential reward of multichannel outreach is just the first step in the process. It is definitely much more complex than simply activating messages on a couple of channels. But don’t worry, we’re here to walk you through it.
This is probably the most important variable of them all – understanding your Ideal Customer Profile. The multichannel outreach is client focused, this means that you must know who they are and what they want. A lot of companies today don’t know what their buyer personas look like which in return makes it super difficult for your sales team to successfully convert in meetings.
For example, if you’re addressing a CFO, the person will most likely be interested in statistical data with an overall colder and direct tone throughout the message. Whereas if you were writing to me, a CMO, I’d love to hear about your brand story, culture and people prior to making a business decision.
It’s not only the person you write to, but equally important, the type of company. What is the common thread across your ideal customers today? Do they fall within a specific company size? Industry? Location? We help our clients understand who their Ideal Customer Profile is before we do anything else, without this, we are shooting in the dark.
Once you’ve nailed your Ideal Customer Profile (FYI, it’s called “ICP), the next step is to create content which resonates with your ICP within each respective channel. As I mentioned before, the content within a message to a CFO and CMO must differ. The same applies to different industries, company sizes and so on. It should also vary depending on which channel you’re using. A message on LinkedIn should not be the same as your email. Each platform has its own unique formats with its own creative outputs. This is also something that we help our customers with by conducting a lot of A/B testing.
Lastly, what channels and in what order should you be using them when reaching out to your prospects? When applying channels like LinkedIn to your outreach, industries such as machinery and construction are probably not the best fit. As opposed to a more tech-savvy company, like Klarna, where all executives will have a LinkedIn. Testing different workflows is an important step in the process of understanding how your customers want to be approached. We help our clients set up multiple campaigns where we test audience groups, content and workflows to understand what is the magical formula for success is.
How to get started with multichannel outreach
I hope you feel inspired and can bring at least a little bit of value to your team after reading this article. Breaking through the noise is more difficult than ever. It’s no longer enough being an analytical expert or fantastic writer – you must know who your audience is, where they spend their time and how they want to be approached.
At Zaplify, we’ve helped more than +250 customers within our first year to understand how to best approach their ICP. As a first step in the process, please feel free to book a short demo with our team to see if the multichannel outreach space is something for you.
We hope to speak to you soon.
All the best,
Josh.
