A wild west of prospecting: The 12 pitfalls of mass email

Today, we’re going to venture into the vast frontier of email prospecting. The data repeatedly shows: there’s gold in them there hills.

But you have to keep your wits about you to reap the benefits. Watch out for snake-oil salesmen and shady traders selling fool’s gold.

We’re talking about high-volume (read: low-quality) email campaigns. The bad practice and poor advice of these lawless cowboys is a stark contrast to the sheriff-like approach of a professional, legitimate prospecting service. 

There are a huge number of reasons why the “spray and pray” approach should ring alarm bells, but we’re going to focus on the top 12 below.

Poor targeting

High-volume messaging is like firing wildly into the horizon. With your eyes closed. It severely limits your ability to target your ideal customers due to the sheer volume of email prospects required.

The reason outbound marketing fell out of fashion was because of it used to use this blanket approach, whereas inbound allowed you to target only your addressable market. 

Outbound became a brilliant addition to the marketing mix once targeted prospecting lists were used (among many other improvements!). Winding the clock back makes no sense at all.

Domain blacklisting

Sending a sudden barrage of 30,000 emails is not natural marketing behaviour, and it could land your domain on the wanted list for all the wrong reasons.

While Email Service Providers have complex range of signals to identify spam, they don’t need a rocket scientist to work this one out: a mass send of that size absolutely screams spammer.

Brand reputation

Recklessly emailing 30,000 prospects every month – many of whom may not even be in your target market at all – will dent your brand reputation faster than a stagecoach robbery.

Message relevance

Precision targeting allows messaging to be tailored to recipients. Audiences can be segmented to create different templates based on personas, industries and so on. But like a hat that’s too large, mass emails often fail to fit the recipients.

This generic approach not only misses the mark in terms of the desired impact, but may even inflict further reputation damage.

Unsustainable send rates

High-volume tactics burn through your data faster than the fuse on a stick of dynamite, and the results can be just as explosive.

Let’s say your high-volume, low-quality partner can find emails for 75% of the names they have on the list. In order to send 30,000 emails a month, they would need that list to be almost a quarter of a million names, just to run a campaign for six months!

Overexposure

Chances are, they don’t have 240,000 names for you. That’s a huge number of people, companies, job titles, and email addresses to get right. So they’ll cycle through their smaller list in much less than six months.

Recycling your data in under six months can damage your brand through overexposure, the same targets getting more and more frustrated with your non-stop emails. Remember, some of these folks aren’t even in your target market.

Product/Service relevance

As well as being a colossal waste of resources, annoying thousands of people, and making your campaign unsustainable, poor targeting makes you look like an idiot.

What will a person think of your brand if they receive an email that has an attempt at personalisation but is completely irrelevant to them? 

Consider your partners

Do you ever get the feeling you’re being sold a monorail? 

High-volume spam campaigns are almost exclusively offered by two-person micro-agencies that invariably skip town at the first sign of trouble.

That in itself speaks volumes about the sustainability and overall customer success rates of the high-volume approach. And it’s a world away from a 300+ strong team that’s been going for over eight years.

Compliance risks

Here today, gone tomorrow… it’s not really the type of company that you want to trust with data, when falling foul of compliance regulations can have such a huge impact -both financially and reputationally.

As they tend to be small scale operations, the chances of them having an in-house Compliance Officer are tiny, which makes the risks involved huge.

Poor service levels

A good partner is more than just a hired gun. They ride with you, invest in your success, and continually adjust their aim to hit your goals.

The level of service the Sopro team deliver is repeatedly cited in the lovely reviews from our clients:

• “what really stands out are the campaign team”
• “a collaborative team effort”
• “tactical adjustments”
• “super transparent and extremely proactive”
• “an extension of our own team”

A spray-and-pray cowboy simply won’t offer that level of service.

Efficiency

Working with a dedicated partner should should take the stress out of outreach and help make you more efficient. Campaigns should integrate with your CRM and drive sales-ready leads to your team. 

But with a cheap outfit, you might find your time is taken up wading through low quality leads. Many of these solutions give you a list of names rather than a CRM sync. They certainly don’t give you total transparency on templates, email chains, results and more in a sales engagement platform. 

Poor ROI

Sopro are not the cheapest solution on the market. But we believe we’re the best.

You might think £3 per prospect is a lot if you’ve been offered them at 20p each. But you only need to follow the maths to understand the true cost. One of our clients was approached by a mass email company who promised to send 30,000 emails a month for just 20p a prospect. 

However, the case study on their website –  likely picked as a top-performing campaign – only boasted a lead rate of 0.13%.

So besides tarnishing your reputation, brand, and domain, and potentially alienating your audience, the cheap option might end up costing you more. Like in the wild west, it pays to have a trusted partner by your side. Choose wisely.

Heading off into the sunset 

What’s the alternative to these low-down hustlers? Well, with Sopro, here’s what you can expect your campaign to look like.

Step 1: We learn about you ❤️

Your dedicated outreach consultants work with you to understand your business, its uniqueness, your ideal customers, and typical deal size.

Step 2: Target audience discovery 🎯

We employ multiple data sources to generate a live, bespoke, compliant data set of your target audience. Every contact is individually selected for your campaign.

Step 3: Crafting your messages 💡

Once the audience is approved, our copywriters compose effective, engaging sales emails. A sequence of messages, fine-tuned to your satisfaction, prepares your campaign for launch.

Step 4: Multi-channel integration 🛠️

We’ll help you install the Sopro plugin, connecting your website to your campaigns to convert anonymous website traffic into real people. You can enhance campaigns with LinkedIn Outreach and even incorporate redeemable gifts into your emails.

Step 5: Campaign launch 🚀

Your 1-1 personalised email campaign kicks off, with all responses logged in your real-time portal.

Step 6: Hot leads in your inbox 💌

Sales-ready prospects respond directly to your inbox. We continually optimise your campaigns, but if you want to peak under the hood, the 24/7 Sopro portal is a treasure trove of results and actionable data.

Get in touch with our outreach consultants today and discover how you could be heading off into the sunset together in no time at all.