Are you spending hours finding your prospects’ information, writing your email copy, and even cold calling - just to end up with leads that don't bring revenue? Not only you're losing your time, but also missing your sales quotas, putting your job and business at risk..
During the past 4 years, we used cold outreach to grow to $20M+ in ARR and helped 60k+ people generate thousands of dollars every month with cold outreach. In this ultimate guide, you'll get our 5-step framework that will help you use lemlist to book meetings with 17% of your leads.
More than 20k people worldwide use it to scale their businesses, so start your free trial and start opening new business opportunities!
Heeey lemlisters!
Most people associate deliverability with email delivery, which is an important metric to consider when sending emails, but its very different from deliverability.
But before sending your first campaign, here are a few technical settings you should configure to build a successful outreach foundation:
You should be able to check each setting within 5 minutes following the guides. If you need help, you can book a call with Alexandra from our customer success team.
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. You can use buyer personas to personalize your cold emails to fit their needs and preferences, which helps you build relationships and book more meetings.
👉 It takes a few seconds to access this 3-step target audience guide and get your free buyer persona template for more replies!
Identify which buyer personas will be the most profitable, so you know where to put the most personalization efforts to stay efficient.
For example, you can identify them into three tiers based on the value amount you're bringing to them, which will later translate to the revenue amount they're bringing to you:
The next step is to find the best time to reach out to your buyer persona. Here, you want to identify the triggers that will tell you: “Okay, this lead fits my targets, but it also seems like it’s the right timing for them to use my product or service.”
👉 To determine the best moment to reach out to your prospects, get 15 sales targeting tactics and boost your reply chances!
Once you have built an email list of qualified leads, the next step is to import them into lemlist so you can start reaching out to them.
Whether you want to import your leads from a CSV file, existing campaigns, CRM, Zapier, LinkedIn, using API, or manually - you can do it from a single lemlist dashboard!
→ Collect LinkedIn leads with the lemlist chrome extension
The quickest way to import leads directly from LinkedIn is to use the lemlist chrome extension.
The extension allows you can scrape all the leads from a LinkedIn or Sales navigator search. It will collect information like first name, company name, or LinkedIn URL, and send them to one of your lemlist campaigns.
You can also send leads individually from their profiles to lemlist with additional information such as job positions, certifications, industry, company information, etc.
On top of that, you can create an icebreaker for a lead from the chrome extension and send it as a variable to lemlist. And if you want to make your message stand out with a custom image, you can use an extension to take a screenshot of leads’ profiles and include them in your campaign.
→ Enrich your leads’ info with integrated scanners
Whether you imported your emails using the lemlist chrome extension or other methods, you can enrich them straight from the lemlist app thanks to scanners:
Finally, don’t forget to verify your leads with tools such as Bouncer or Debounce to avoid sending emails to fake addresses or emails with issues. This will help you keep your bounce rate below 5%, which boosts your email deliverability and helps you avoid the spam folder.
→ Sync leads’ data between your CRM & lemlist
To avoid spending hours manually migrating leads data between lemlist and your CRM, you can integrate your Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive CRM into lemlist:
This will give you a clear and 100% synced leads overview, so you’ll always know where they are in the sales process and how to approach them.
Depending on your setup, you’ll be able to:
Now that your leads are imported, verified, and synced, you can focus on creating campaigns that get replies!
Adding multiple steps to your campaign and reaching out to your prospects on different channels increases your chances of getting a reply. Some leads might be more active or prefer to reply on LinkedIn than email and another way around.
To create your campaign sequence in lemlist, you’ll have automated or manual options to reach out to your prospects on the channels they prefer.
Here are the steps you can run 100% on auto-pilot:
👉 To push your prospects to book a meeting with you, get free access to follow-up email tips and templates
👉 If you’re unsure how to break the ice on LinkedIn, check out this article and get free messaging tips to boost your reply rates
You can also add manual steps, such as:
👉 Get tips from this cold-calling guide to create personal connections with your prospects and overcome objections via cold calls
We recommend you follow up with 5 - 12 steps that add value to your prospects using 3 rules:
P.S. In our multichannel masterclass, you can find exclusive strategies and templates to replicate in your next campaign and book meetings with 10-30% of your prospects!
→ Follow a value-packed structure
Avoid fluff sentences like “I hope you are doing okay” or similar “polite” approaches. They could sound general and make your email copy longer than it should be.
As each part of your cold email plays an important role, ensure to:
P.S. Discover exactly what to write in each part of your email for more replies, with dozens of examples in this free eBook!
→ Add personalization
Personalizing your emails will make you stand out significantly and increase your reply rates. That’s why you want to show your prospect that they aren’t just a row on a CSV and that you can relate to their pain points.
Here are different ways you can personalize your emails at scale thanks to lemlist custom variables:
No matter how many emails you send, you can automatically personalize any part of your message to grab leads' attention and build trust (e.g., intro line, pitch, CTA).
Stand out with personalized images by automatically adding your leads' names, logos, website screenshots, etc.
Give value to your prospects on a more personal level and grab their attention with custom video thumbnails
Build personalized landing pages just for your leads where you can embed your calendar and include assets or CTA
There are 3 types of information you can look into to create personalized elements:
Make sure to personalize each lead and limit yourself to 5 to 15 minutes per lead (or have the same personalization for multiple leads to save time). Remember that focusing on quality versus quantity will bring you more results.
→ Don’t forget the purpose of your email
Sales is about building a relationship. You don’t want to ask for a meeting from the first message. Instead, focus on validating the interest. For that, try to get a reply and start a conversation.
You also want to focus on their pains. Try to help them with a pain you identified. Ideally, you want to focus on a pain they are unaware they have, which will help them reach the metric they are responsible for in their company. This means 99% of your messages should be about your leads.
P.S. To help you get started, check out this free eBook with 20+ cold sales, marketing, and growth email templates you can replicate in your next campaign for more meetings!
The A/B test feature allows you to test different approaches for a set number of leads. This way, you can see what works the best and double down on the most successful one.
When you A/B test, lemlist will reach out to 50% of your leads with approach A and 50% with approach B. You can either A/B test a whole campaign or individual steps in your campaign. At any point, you can choose a winning approach for the rest of your leads in the campaign.
If you want your A/B test to be relevant, you should:
You can test out the subject line, short/long messages, the value proposition, the type of call to action, the order of steps, the multichannel approach, the level of personalization (between custom text and custom images, for example), the goal of the campaign, etc.
👉 To help you choose the best A/B testing approach and double down your success, explore tips and examples from this A/B testing guide.
Did you know that sending inconsistent amounts of emails can land you in spam? If you send too many emails simultaneously, you risk triggering email providers and landing in the spam folder.
In lemlist, you can choose your most suitable sending schedule, so you reach up to the recommended number of max 200 leads per day gradually:
To avoid looking like a spammer, send emails every 10 - 15 min. This setting will give you a number of leads you will reach out to daily based on your email frequency.
Once you have finished setting up your sending schedule, you can save it as a template and reuse it for other campaigns. You can also create a new one if you want your campaign to be active on different schedules and time zones.
Once you finish creating your campaign, lemlist won’t send it to all your leads simultaneously, as you risk landing in the spam folder. Instead, it uses a smart algorithm to make it look like your campaigns are sent manually.
By pressing “review this lead” or “review all leads,” you’re pretty much telling the lemlist “you can send my campaign to this lead according to the algorithm and the schedule I have established”.
Keep in mind that before reviewing each lead, you can modify the messages for each lead and make sure the personalization you added in the campaign (with variables) works properly.
You can auto-review all future leads entering your campaign. This will queue them automatically on the algorithm, so you don’t have to do it manually.
You might want to activate this option if you don’t need to review leads manually and send leads to your lemlist campaign from the lemlist chrome extension, the API, your CRM, or manually via a CSV.
Email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails right into your target's primary inbox. As your emails can land in the spam folder without you knowing, having a warm-up and deliverability booster helps you spot and prevent any deliverability troubles.
For each paid lemlist seat, you'll get access to lemwarm to ensure high deliverability in the long run!
After months of tests with 20k+ users, lemwarm offers you the right deliverability strategy based on your goals and email characteristics, which makes it the most complete warm-up and deliverability tool on the market.
You'll be able to:
The key is to keep lemwarm ON before - during - after sending campaigns, so you keep your emails out of the spam folder in the long run!
👉 To always land in your target audience’s inbox, check out this ultimate email deliverability guide and boost your email deliverability!
Tracking your campaign metrics is important, as that’s how you’ll see if your campaigns are successful and know what to double down to boost your results. To get a clear overview of your campaign results, you can use lemlist’s report section.
From there, you can see how many leads received your emails, how many opened, clicked, replied, and how many are interested. You can also have similar data for your LinkedIn steps: how many invites (or connection requests) you sent, how many LinkedIn profiles you visited, and how many messages you sent. If you have call or API steps in your campaign, you’ll also see them appear in the results.
You can also switch to the negative metrics of your campaigns to access the number of emails that bounced, the number of leads that are not interested, and how many of them unsubscribed.
Based on your metrics, you’ll also get insights into what you should change to improve your results. Here are the most important metrics you want to aim for:
P.S. You can also send your campaigns to our community to get expert feedback. Simply join 14k+ salespeople, marketers, and founders in the lemlist family and receive outreach advice daily!