Background and challenge

App Marketing Minds (AMM) recently completed a lead generation campaign with an innovative startup offering a SaaS Instagram growth hacking tool. Our client's product automates brands' Instagram efforts through automated postings and messages, and automatically engages selected profiles based on criteria such as geography or targeted hashtags by liking and commenting on Instagram content.

The primary objective of this engagement was to support client's ongoing PPC campaign by building a new outbound sales channel. Given that AMM's key service is lead generation, the client selected our outbound sales service to support their under-performing previous attempts.

Approach and project delivery

Analysis

The project commenced with an analysis of our client's past cold email campaigns and their performance. This allowed for an assessment of various marketing angles in relation to different industry segments. Gaining an insight into industries that are most likely to adopt the product is essential for prioritizing list building and outreach. We were able to achieve this by administering our thorough situation analysis questionnaire.

The next step of the campaign involved building ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and customer personas. Customer personas are semi-fictitious representations of ideal buyers. AMM developed several personae to understand the types of organizations to target,who will be targeted in each organization, what are their motivations, and what selling angles/hooks will be used when addressing these individuals. AMM decided to target between 2-4 decision makers in each organization.  

Strategy

AMM planned out a personalized and scalable approach for each segment, orchestrating the entire campaign by using cold emails, social media (Linkedin outreach and Facebook retargeting) and in-app messages and onboarding emails.

The key metric of this lead generation campaign was to generate free trial sign-ups.

Prospecting and list building

Next, AMM conducted the initial list building in a timely manner, building the initial database of prospects consisting of 3 segments (industries), with 600-800 prospects in each list.

Outbound lead generation

The lead generation strategy relied on personalized outreach with multiple touch points across several channels.

• Cold email: up to 6 follow-ups across a three week period if the prospect didn't reply to an email in the cadence
• Linkedin: relationship building through sending an invitation to connect, and automated message with resource following a time delay

The campaign progressed through continuous A/B testing and building of prospect lists in various industries.

Return paths

Due to the relatively low price point of our client's product, it was not feasible to use human involvement in the follow up process. Instead, our personalization efforts were channeled into the research phase, allowing us to gather sufficient data to use in our follow up emails.

Secondly, we separated "engaged" prospects into two groups, and targeted these groups with different return paths. Based on established criteria, we recorded interactions with our email cadences. The groups were labelled as "low engagement group" and "high engagement group". The "no engagement group" prospects  were re-engaged by follow-up emails.

1) Low engagement group: prospects that clicked on a link inside the email - these prospects were re-targeted with Facebook ads directing them back to a free trial registration landing page or a value-giving content piece 

2) High engagement group: prospects that sign-up for a free trial - these prospects were re-engaged through a behaviour based onboarding sequence, where targeted messages were sent according to what in-app actions were taken