How a B2B Finance Company Generated $20k Additional Revenue in One Month from Cold Emailing

Our client is one of the leaders in the finance industry offering business loans to small and mid-sized businesses.

Before using MailClickConvert, their primary marketing strategies for lead generation include Google PPC, Facebook advertisements and other paid media. 

Challenging to get Consistent Sales Leads with Paid Media Channels

The finance industry is known to be highly competitive and as the competition started to get tougher, it was no longer viable for our client to continue increasing investments into Google Ads, Social Media Advertising, and other paid media channels. It was getting too expensive to maintain and difficult to justify ROI.

With the rising cost of paid advertisements, the client knew the answer to their growth problem was in cold email marketing. So they contacted us, MailClickConvert, to try bulk email marketing for the first time.

Problem - Getting Inbox Placement and High Response Rates

Running cold email marketing campaigns in the finance industry is difficult mainly because of these 2 reasons:

#1 - AVOIDING GENERIC CONTENT

Sending cold emails to business owners who have most likely received similar offers regularly will not cut it. Without a solid strategy and compelling offer, it's most likely going to be a waste of time and money.

#2 - DODGING SPAM-TRIGGERING KEYWORDS

In finance, keywords like 'credit', 'loans', and 'cash' are often necessary but can activate spam filters. This can harm campaign effectiveness. The challenge is to find alternative wording that doesn't trigger spam filters but still communicates a strong offer.

It's a matter of creating content that avoids spam filters while still resonating with potential clients and prompting action.

Additionally, cold email marketing generally faces “the 5 walls of despair”:

1. Domain blacklisting and deliverability

2. Content blacklisting

3. Follow-up strategies

4. Engagement

5. Finding the right send schedule

SOLUTION - Executing Cold Email Marketing with MailClickConvert

Bulk email marketing is arguably one of the most effective low-cost “high-gain” solutions for lead generation – if done correctly! When our experts started on the case, we had to determine what areas needed to be worked on for our clients to be successful in their campaigns.

DOMAIN BLACKLISTING / DELIVERABILITY

For cold email marketing, getting blacklisted is inevitable. There really is no way to get past it. But how MailClickConvert works is we provide proxy domains for our clients to send out their email campaigns from.

We do not use our client’s ACTUAL domain but create domains similar to what our clients have so in the scenario that the sending domains get blacklisted, what is being blacklisted is the proxy we setup keeping their actual domain safe. For this client, we advised to add 5 additional domains for their campaigns and to monitor blacklisting regularly.

Since our client now has multiple domains to send from, their campaigns are ensured to be always sent from clean domains.

The strategy is: If one domain gets blacklisted, they simply use an alternate domain that is clean to send from.Uni

PERSONALIZED EMAIL CONTENT

Email Service Providers (ESPs) not only monitor domains and IPs but content keywords as well. By utilizing our built-in spam score we were able to identify phrases that needed to be replaced. Additionally, we advised to capitalize on the data they have by utilizing personalization tokens (e.g: <#FIRSTNAME#>, <#COMPANYNAME#>, etc.) in both the subject line and email body to give it a more personalized touch.

CONTENT BLACKLISTING

Sending out one email over and over again is going to make ESP’s perceive that email as SPAM. This will negatively affect domain reputation, causing deliverability and overall campaign performance to drop.

We worked together with the client and created 4 different/unique emails to be used strategically on a regular send schedule.

Our system data analysis and gathering is very comprehensive, providing you visibility if your content was rejected by ESP’s due to content black-listings.

FOLLOW-UP STRATEGIES

With the 4 different emails in place, this is the formula we suggested to our client to use for their campaigns:

- Monday = Initial email message to the entire list

- Tuesday = Follow-up email to people who engaged (opened/clicked)

- Wednesday = Follow up email #2 to people who just CLICKED

- Thursday = Break up email to everyone who opened and clicked

- Friday = No emailing

The next week of sending, we start the Monday campaign (initial email message) again but this time only target people who DID NOT open so the client is not sending the same email to someone who has already opened.

ENGAGEMENT

Monitoring engagement (opens/clicks) is extremely important data to know. We helped our client understand their numbers by utilizing our comprehensive campaign reports in order to improve on open rates and click through rates.

Improving open rates: From just a plain subject line, we suggested tweaking their subject line and include personalization tokens, addressing their audience by their first name.

Improving click-through rate: We also advised changing the initial email template from a plain text email to a graphically designed one that is more appealing, emphasizing a clear CTA.

SEND SCHEDULE

This was the last key to the puzzle. Based on our historical data with the industry, we advised to implement a strict send schedule which should be followed religiously. ESP’s love to see consistency. The send schedule is shown in the picture below.

RESULTS - CONSISTENT LEAD GENERATION THROUGH BULK COLD EMAILING 

The industry standard open rate for cold bulk email marketing is usually 0.5 to 5% and is how majority of marketers who are running cold email campaigns measure success.

By implementing the strategies mentioned, our client was able to maintain a steady 28% open rate with around 400% increase in leads generated monthly.

This resulted in over $20k in additional revenue a month.