Cold emailing is an extremely tricky process. Without any true relationship with your audience, it’s difficult to get their attention in the first place. Therefore, you won’t be able to gather any meaningful feedback, and will be unable to react in time to save the sale.

Despite this, outbound email can still be an extremely effective conversion channel with a strong return on investment. In fact, a recent survey of marketing professionals found that almost 60% claimed email was their very best source of ROI! Clearly, there is a lot of value to be uncovered if you have the time and the proper cold emailing tools at your disposal.

To help you realize your sales goals and maximize return, we have put together a list of the seven features that the best email automation tools must do in order to order to be worth your time and investment:

Outbound Email Automation Tool

1. Works with Other Communication Channels

Closing a sale requires more touches with your prospects than ever before. Simply emailing them isn’t going to be enough to get it done. You’ll need to talk to them on the phone, send push notifications or text messages, and maybe even send them something in the mail. Truly effective email automation tools will work alongside a well-developed communications strategy, implementing cold email outreach as part of a much larger plan.

2. Optimizes Cold Emailing

Outbound email automation must be at the heart of your email prospecting campaigns. The right cold email software will be able to optimize a number of important criteria, including cadence. It’s likely that your portfolio of prospects has come from various sources that have expressed a varying degree of interest. Your cold email software must be able to differentiate between all your different prospects, sending them a personalized message based on their customer profile. Once you receive responses, it will be able to assist you in prioritizing your sales team’s time by presenting the most valuable prospects first.

Another critical aspect of your cold email software is the ability to A/B test on the fly. No matter how strong of a marketer you are, you’ll never draft the perfect copy every single time. All aspects of each email must constantly be tested and reiterated, from the subject to the body text to the images and the call-to-action. By helping you test and optimize in real-time, your cold email software will help you be more effective than ever before.

3. Offers Lots of Data

As a sales manager, you need data at your fingertips to optimize campaigns and get the most out of every single prospect. The right email automation tools will gather this for you and present it in a simple dashboard with the click of a button. Intuitive, simple sales reports save you a great deal of time and help you build a successful sales strategy without any hassle. Best of all, real-time data will allow you to make decisions in a timely manner, so you can optimize campaigns and processes without having to wait until it’s too late to capitalize on the insights of your cold email outreach.

4. Runs a Successful Drip Campaign

The key to a successful cold email campaign is never overwhelming your audience. If you send them too much information at once, especially when you don’t have a strong relationship yet, they’re going to delete your email and forget about you. A drip campaign is an email journey that provides your prospects the information that they care about the most, one spoonful at a time. Building a successful drip campaign, however, involves a lot of heavy lifting from your sales email system, since it’s not feasible to send so many emails manually to all your prospects at the correct intervals.

5. Integrates with Existing CRM Systems

No outbound sales automation tool worth investing in will work by itself. It will need to connect directly with your CRM system to pull customer data and send follow-up messages automatically when necessary. You should be able to instantly pull reports on email activities within the confines of your existing workflows and campaigns. You will be able to pull directly from this system to enable cold email personalization via data already saved in your CRM system.

6. Goes Beyond Cold Emails

Once you’ve developed a rapport with your prospects and maybe even converted them to a sale, the process can not end. Research shows that improving your overall retention rate by only 5% will increase your total profits by 25%. If your cold email software is incapable of handling other processes, such as optimized transactional emails or fully realized retention campaigns, then you aren’t going to maximize the value of each customer you ultimately do convert.

7. Allows Total Personalization

There’s no easier way to improve your cold email performance than by personalization. An astounding 96% of companies in a recent survey claimed that personalization could or already has improved their email marketing performance. A powerful outbound email automation tool will be able to optimize emails with the information gathered by your sales team and even select the right message for them.

Getting the most from your marketing and sales team means having the right tools at your disposal. Without an effective outbound sales automation tool, you’ll never be able to effectively communicate with all of your prospects and manage them to the point of conversion. Reach out to us here at Koncert Cadence today to talk about how the right cold email software will help you reach your business goals. To get started, simply click here and leave us a message or give us a call at 800-955-5040.