In 2014, a company could get good results from a cold email campaign by buying a list of potential customers, adding them to a Mailchimp HTML campaign, and sending a mass email using a custom {{First Name}} field to personalize the message. This approach kept the company busy with incoming leads.

By 2016, large email marketing services like Mailchimp started limiting the reach of such campaigns. However, companies could still use Excel to create a list of prospects and then use Outlook to send automated emails.

By 2020, the demand for Sales Engagement tools grew significantly. Tools like Apollo.io, Zoominfo and Outreach.io, established between 2007 and 2015, gained popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic as businesses needed to send more emails. This has created increasingly diminishing returns on campaigns as using multiple accounts non-stop under one domain causes immense damage to the email reputation.

Past that point, most email marketers increasingly struggled to avoid the spam filter, and thus many believe that email - to date - is a slow growing sales channel.

Today, in order to optimize for delivery into your prospects inbox, it's a scientific endeavor. MX, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records need to be aligned and validated on the DNS.

Each inbox that you create needs to be on a domain that is completely separate from the main domain to keep all live communication and opted-in marketing email out of the spam box.

The inboxes need to join a warmup pool of others that are evading the spam filters in order to fake real engagement. Artificial Intelligence is needed to send messages back and forth that make Google believe it's real traffic.

One day, 100% unique emails will probably need to be sent in order to evade the spam filters. Luckily we aren't there yet.

Palmstone Growth Partners manages and advises on these processes, builds custom email infrastructure, Whitelist IP and AI for all of our clients in order to ensure optimized inbox placement.

In the past, buyers could only access information that was directly presented to them. For instance, if someone was looking for accounting software, there weren't many ways to find and compare different tools.

Sales representatives could simply compile a list of Accounting Managers or Accountants, use tools like Outreach.io or Apollo.io to send emails with a company-approved email template, and reach every potential buyer.

Because managers had limited information and options, they would often agree to meetings to learn about new software.

This approach kept the sales team's outbound efforts running smoothly, allowing them to focus on other tasks. Starting a conversation with prospects required little relevance, segmentation or personalization.

However, with the emergence of data companies like Lusha, Apollo, ZoomInfo, Seamless, and LeadIQ, every company can now access LinkedIn data and send emails to their entire market. This widespread capability calls for a new approach.

Today, buyers have access to an overwhelming amount of information through blogs, videos, LinkedIn posts, TikToks, podcasts, and more.

They already know what problems they need to solve and can easily research who can best help them.

Because of this, they're less likely to welcome unsolicited sales pitches. Instead, the new approach involves using data to identify companies that match the ideal profile of past successful customers.

For example, you might target the VP of Marketing at companies with 50-100 employees that are hiring a graphic designer and mention "wholesale" on their website.

However, no single database contains all this information accurately. Data companies, like any business, specialize in only a few areas to maintain their market share.

At the Palmstone Growth Partners, we have access to over 164+ custom scrapers, our own database with 1.6 billion leads and 54 billion unique datapoints as well as 27 enterprise databases (that each cost upwards of $50K annually).

This allows us to cross-reference information when building a list of your Ideal Customer Profile and enables us to reach out to prospects with pinpoint accuracy as well as tailoring our messaging precisely.

At this stage, you likely have a good idea of what I'm going to discuss and can recall how cold email outreach used to be at one of your previous companies.

The subject lines would be sensational, saying things like, "Don't hire another VP until you read this!" The email body would consist of 2-3 paragraphs detailing all the features and benefits of your product or service.

Back then, this approach worked because information was scarce, and prospects often relied on these emails to learn about solutions to their problems.

Nowadays, this strategy is ineffective because information is readily available everywhere. Many people are using the same generic "Hey {{First Name}}" with a templated message that follows.

No one responds because the emails lack compelling content.

From a young age onwards, we're being taught to write as complex as possible, use complicated, big sounding words.

And this is one of the if not biggest mistakes any marketer can make.

And in todays' world, we have data to not only back this up but help us write much better emails.

Emails under 62 words receive the highest response rates.

Interest-based calls to action outperform "book a call on my Calendly" by eight times.

Writing at a 5th-grade reading level boosts response rates by 39%.

Using subject lines that resemble emails from customers or colleagues (without being deceptive) increases responses by 57%.

Adding personal touches based on technologies of their company, their LinkedIn profile and website, such as mentioning when they started their role, increases responses by five times. Additionally, we can utilize all the data gathered in step 2 for our outreach.

However, this doesn't mean AI generated junk outperforms a well written (with well written I mean easily understandable for a 5th grader), and most importantly relevant email.

If I were to tell you that I saw that you go speer fishing on the weekends and then talk about email marketing, most people will tell you that you're a creep.

Ergo: Be relevant and easily understandable.