Sales Innovator makes it easy for you to invite team members to collaborate with you. You can invite them one-by-one, invite multiple or post a link and invite a large number. Sales Innovator allows you to assign different roles to members. There are two types of team members you can invite. Some people will be working with you on creating content and getting your campaign set-up, and there will be those who will be sending emails. We will focus on team members. To add a team member, click on Settings in the navigation. Then click on members. Only administrators and owners can add team members. In the member's tab, you will see a list of all the team members, senders, and virtual assistants. You can always change a member to a sender by clicking on the sender dropdown or change roles by clicking on Org Permission. You can assign four roles to a member: owner, administrator, team, or virtual. An owner can do everything. An administrator can do everything except billing and deleting the organization. Team members can create content and manage campaigns. Virtual assistants are robot senders. To invite a member, click on add member button, and you will see three options. The first option is to invite a single team member. You can add the team member's names, email, and a personalized message. Your team member will receive an invite by email. The second option is to invite multiple team members by adding multiple emails and a personalized message. All the emails entered will receive an invitation. The third way to invite your team is to generate a link to share with all your team inviting them to join your organization. Anyone with access to this link can join your organization, so only share it with those you want to have joined. When your email invites are succesfully sent, you will get a notification saying your senders have been added. You will also see them displayed in the member's sections. Invited team members will receive an email asking them to join your organization, containing your email address and personalized message. A team member will need to go through registration first, and then the team member will be directly going to your organization.

Sales Innovator is easy to navigate. Let me show you around to know what you can do and where to perform each task. When you first join or get invited to Sales Innovator, you will arrive at the playbook library. The playbook library has examples of email campaigns you can use to get started. Your company can also add their playbooks that are only available to organization members. Sales Innovator has many reports ready for you to analyze your campaigns. You can monitor all prospects, companies, content, and emails used in your campaigns. You can also see how well your emails are warming up and how many bounces and blacklists you are receiving. Next, you can click on senders to see what senders have been added and those who have not connected their email accounts. You will get detailed analytics per sender. Adding a sender is very easy, and you can create one by uploading a list, searching members, or manually entering a sender. Once a human sender is added, an email will be sent inviting him or her to join. Also, you can create virtual senders to assist you in sending more emails. Manage all your dynamic landing pages from one location. Click on manage pages, and you can see your pages and page analytics. You can also page pages, add content to pages, and use already created page templates. By clicking on content, you get access to a library of content your team can use on pages, email campaigns, and share link campaigns. Creating, viewing, and editing content is straightforward with the content library. To launch your email or link sharing campaigns, you click on campaigns, and there you can manage all your campaigns, add new ones, see a calendar of when emails are going to be sent, and create and manage shared links. You can see all of your companies and contacts and download and upload leads by clicking on the leads tab. By clicking on contact, you can see a list of all your leads and get analytics on each lead. You can do the same by clicking on companies. To administer your organization, you click on settings. Here is where administrators can manage all the email connections, manage email settings, manage their billing, add members, add custom domains, set-up notifications, and configure their organization. On the top navigation, you can access another version of the menu, a link to creating a campaign, and notifications. Notifications will visually sound when a new system notification or a contact engages. Clear notifications when you have viewed them and load more when you want to see older notifications. The final navigation is under your avatar. Here is where each person can manage their parts of the system. Each team member can modify their profile, set-up notifications, manage connections, update passwords, manage accounts, and switch organizations. If you have not signed up, you can get started for free today. Get started and invite your team. Go to salesinnovator.com

Creating a new account with Sales Innovator is simple. There are three steps you will need to take. Go to salesinnovator.com and click on the sign-up button. You can also click on the get started now button. You can sign-up using various methods. You can sign-up using your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google account. Also, you can just sign-up and create your user name and password. By signing up, you are accepting our terms and privacy policy. Sales Innovator is a product built for teams. Your first step is to create an organization where you will later invite all your team members. The URL extension is how we will identify your organization in the links you send. Next, we will ask you to connect your email account. We require everyone to connect their email account to be ready to start sending emails if they are selected as a sender. We support all types of email accounts your company may use for sending emails. The final step is to add your contact information that will enable Sales Innovator to personalize pages and emails to your contact information. If you do not want to fill out all the information right away, you can update it later. You are now fully signed-up, and you can get started. We created some playbooks to help you get started launching your personalized email marketing campaign. In my next video, I will give you an overview of everything you can do with Sales Innovator. If you have not signed up, you can get started for free today. Get started and invite your team. Go to salesinnovator.com

Internet Service Providers (ISP) process billions of emails every day and use artificial intelligence to help them decide what emails should be blocked, sent to spam, or added to the inbox. To effectively and efficiently do so, they assign a reputation score to each sender's IP address. Your score is based on the results from spam filters and your listing on a blacklist. Your score is continuously changing, and it is different for each ISP. At the beginning of the day, you may be marked as SPAM by Gmail and allowed to an inbox by Office365, but then you may no longer be marked as SPAM by Gmail at the end of the day. To better understand what factors are incorporated into your reputation score, we will first describe what actions actual spammers take that ISPs are trying to block. Then we will outline what you need to do to maintain a great email sending reputation. How Spammers Earn A Bad Reputation Spammers typically purchase third party email lists or scrape email from the web. They stand-up an email server and send a few million emails, and then they are gone. After pausing for a few days, they will repeat the same pattern with a different domain and IP. These spammers typical send: Ads - Ads are probably the most common types of email spam. These emails promote products and services, such as weight loss pills and tennis offers. In many cases, the offers may be a scam, but they also can be legit. Chain Letters - These emails tell you an exciting and thrilling story that persuades you to pass the message along under penalty of having something happen to you. Be careful, or you're going to have a run of bad luck. Email Spoofing - These are related to phishing scams can be very costly to those who fall for them. Spammers or phishers impersonate someone or a company and try to fool you into giving them information such as your social security, credit card number, money, user name, password, etc. Hoaxes - In this case, spammers offer miracle promises, such as, for example, "get rich in less than a month" or "gain the body of your dream by eating more and working out less". Spammers capture your attention and direct you to a malicious website. Money Scams - All of us know someone that has received the promise from a Nigerian prince that if we send him a small amount of money, he will reward us in a big way. These lending schemes a small amount of money to get a big payday have cost victims an average $2,133. Other money scams include asking for money for hungry children in Africa or requesting money to help with a natural disaster. Malware Warnings - These types of email notify you that a virus or ransomware has infected your computer. For you to solve this problem, you need to provide some information or download an attachment. Do not do it; if you do, your computer will likely get hacked. Porn Spam - This is a widespread spam tactic to get people's interest to buy pornography and, even worse, blackmail individuals. Some characteristics of spammers that affect their reputation include: Inconsistent Volume - Unlike businesses, spammers do not ramp up their email over a while as their subscribers grow. They acquire lists and ramp up their email sends overnight. Because of inconsistencies in sending volumes, spammers get a lower sender score and domain reputation, which increases their likelihood of going to spam. Blacklists - Spammers are well known for burning through multiple IP addresses as they get blacklisted. Over 300+ blacklists have been created to capture spammers. These blacklists are used by various ISP and filtering software. There are two main types of blacklists: 1. Domain Based - These blacklists look for domains in the email body that have been associated with spammers. These domains include initial email links and final redirect links. Some example of these blacklists include: SpamHause DBL URIBL 2. IP Address Based - RBL and DNSBL are used to identify whether the IP of a sending server is an open relay or has been used by spammers or by an email service provider, allowing spammers to use their infrastructure. Some of the common IP based blacklists include: Return Path Reputation Network Blacklist (RNBL) SpamHaus Blacklist (SBL) Exploits Blacklist (XBL) Composite Blacklist (CBL) SpamCop Blacklist (SCBL) Passive SPAM Blacklist (PSBL) Spammers constantly check if their sending IP is on any of these blacklists, and when the IP is burned, they switch to a new one. SPAM Traps - Spammers encounter spam traps all the time. Because they are purchasing email lists and harvesting websites using crawling technology, they often pick up email addresses published to trap spammers. As the sender deliverability decreases for an IP address due to spam traps, the spammers will eliminate the IP and start fresh with another IP address. Services like Sender Score can help spammers know if they have encountered any SPAM traps. Bounces - Spammers encounter many bounces from their email lists since they purchase or acquire lists that may have spam traps, outdated receivers, and wrong email addresses. Many bounces signal to the email service provider that the sender is possibly a spammer, and consequently, the sender's reputation score is lowered, or the sender is blocked altogether. Two specific types of bounces can occur when a subscriber cannot be reached: Hard Bounce - Hard bounces happen when an email is sent to an address that does not exist. Usually, hard bounces are caused by someone using a fake email or entered incorrectly. High bounce rates suggest senders either have purchased a list or practice bad email list hygiene. Many hard bounces strongly signal that the sender may be a potential spammer. Soft Bounce - These bounces have a much smaller impact on email delivery since a soft bounce signals a temporary failure in email delivery. Soft bounces happen because the recipient's email mailbox may be full, down, or out of the office. Re-trying sending a message may work, but the sender should remove the email address if the failure occurs several times. SPAM Complaints - Spammers most likely will get many complaints from their email. All subscribers need to do is mark the email as SPAM, and the complaint is submitted to the ISP (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Outlook, etc.). SPAM complaints are taken very seriously since the receiver is manually entering the complaint. Even a small complaint percentage such as .3% will stop your emails from reaching your subscribers' inbox. Spammers do not take the time to apply good email list hygiene practices such as double opt-in, simple 1-click unsubscribe, and proper list segmentation that can prevent you from receiving complaints. IP Reputation - Spammers try to work around SPAM filters by using new IPs and rotating them. Spammers are not looking to build a long term reputation, and spam filters know that. For ISPs to identify spammers, SPAM filters look for actions that signal IP addresses permanence. They look at mailing history, past behaviors, and current activities to decide the IP's reputation. Based on their assessment, they may throttle your sending until they feel you are a legitimate sender. Sending too many emails on day one will damage your reputation and will most likely not be allowed. IP's need to be warm up by slowly sending emails over time. Only when ISP see a consistent pattern in sending engaging emails will they lift any throttling restrictions. Your IP age plays a significant role in your sender's reputation. Subscriber Engagement - Spammers have low subscriber engagement rates, and for mailbox providers such as Gmail, low subscriber engagement is a vital metric signaling SPAM. Suppose SPAM filters detect that subscribers are not opening their email, clicking on your emails, not adding you to your contact book, or moving emails from spam to an inbox. These actions signal to the SPAM filter that your audience does not find value in the message being shared, and over a period of time, the mailbox provider will start sending all sender's message straight into SPAM. By learning how spammers act and how they are detected, we can know what not to do to keep an excellent email reputation. The next section will address the steps senders should take to build and maintain a strong email sending reputation. How To Maintain An Excellent Sending Reputation Maintaining an excellent sending reputation is similar to keeping a good credit score. It takes time to build up a good credit score, but you can also destroy it overnight with a few wrong choices. Those with good credit scores can borrow at a lower interest rate, and those with good sending reputations can get their emails delivered. To build an excellent sending reputation; it starts with your IP address and domain. SPAM Filters and ISPs use your IP address and domain to determine your overall sender reputation. The better your domain reputation, the better deliverability and open/click-through rates you can expect, and the more emails you can send. If your domain gets burned, it will be practically impossible to fix its reputation. Select The Best IP Strategy For Your Sending Volume There are two types of IP addresses you can use to send emails. Shared IP Address - On a shared IP pool, such as G Suite, Office 365, and other ISPs, you will have many companies sending from the same IP address. The benefit of a shared IP pool is that many companies sending emails will lead to a consistent email volume that will improve your email deliverability. If your email deliverability and open rates are below average, you will most likely get an uplift in deliverability. On the other hand, if your deliverability is better than the other companies, you will likely see a dip in deliverability. Additionally, if you receive a few complaints, you will most likely see yourself disabled and even fired by your email service provider. Leading ESP's have a lower tolerance for spam and will try to keep their complaints to less than 10 per 10,000 emails. Shared IP addresses are suitable for smaller senders with fewer subscribers, and the sender does not have a consistent volume of sending emails. Dedicated IP Address - Dedicated IP addresses are best for larger email senders sending a consistently high volume of emails. Companies sending more than 200k emails consistently per campaign would be a great candidate for having their IP address. Having a dedicated IP will allow you to control your email deliverability since only your campaigns will use that IP address. You can also use your dedicated IP to isolate and fix address deliverability issues, and you have more tools at your disposal to help you secure deliverability. Over time as you build your sending reputation, your IP will be a valuable asset. On the flip side, inconsistent sending patterns or dips & spikes in sending may lead you to be classified as a spammer. Also, dedicated IPs take a good amount of time to warm up, and if you are looking to start sending a lot of emails immediately, a dedicated IP is not the solution. To pick the right IP strategy, you will want to take into account how many emails you are sending and will be sending and how vital sending emails is to your long term strategy. If you plan to send a lot of emails and build the core competency to make sure your emails are delivered successfully, you will opt for a dedicated IP strategy. If you are unclear of how many emails you will be sending and do not have time to manage your email reputation, you may want to start with a shared IP strategy. In the long run, a dedicated IP address will make the most sense if you are committed to building a strong email marketing strategy or have a lot of transactional emails. Domain Address Matters and You Must Protect Your Main Domain Your brand matters and your domain is your brand when it comes to email marketing. If your domain is listed on a blacklist, then all of your emails will likely end up in spam. Consequently, it is not a good idea to use your main domain for sending marketing emails. Look at the newsletters you receive; you might notice that most companies use subdomains, other extensions (com, io, and co..), or various domain names to prevent affecting their main domain from one single IP's bad reputation. If your domain gets blacklisted, you will have to follow the time consuming and uncertain process of cleaning up your reputation. If you are uncertain if you should get a new domain, ask yourself this question: "Is there a risk that I may be considered a spammer by an ISP or one of my recipients?" If there is a risk at all, then consider using a new domain. For example: You just bought a domain, launched your website, and now you want to start emailing people. In this case, your domain has not been warmed up, and you are at a super high risk of getting blocked. You should buy a new domain similar to your main domain and use it for your emailing people. If your current domain is mydomain.com, then you can use mydomain.co. You are a growing startup with an expanding sales team. If your sales team is growing, the number of emails you are sending will increase heavily. As new people get new email addresses, their emails will likely not be adequately warmed up, and your domain will probably be at risk. In this case, you should also buy a new domain for sending sales emails. You are an established company with an excellent domain. In this case, your company has built a fantastic sending reputation. You have invested a lot of time and effort to make sure you get high engagement with your senders. But, you have specific senders that have not engaged for over 90 days, or you want to reach out to customers that have left you, or you want to contact active prospects that have shown interest but have not engaged. In each of these cases, you run into a risk of being marked as SPAM, and in these cases, you should probably use a different domain. Similar to an IP address, each domain needs time to earn a good reputation. Before purchasing a domain, make sure your domain is not blacklisted. You can use MX Toolbox (https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx) or Neustar (https://www.ultratools.com/tools/spamDBLookupResult) to check your domain status. You can create one or more domains for sending marketing emails if one of your domains ends up on a blacklist. To start your domain will be added to four SPAM eating Monkey (SEM) blacklists that expire based on the domain's age: SEM-FRESHZERO: For new domains created within 24 hours SEM-FRESH: For domains registered within five days SEM-FRESH10: For domains registered within ten days SEM-FRESH15: For domains registered within 15 days SEM-FRESH30: For domains registered within 30 days If you start sending many emails, you will immediately damage your reputation since you are already being monitored. So ramp up slowly and make sure you have great engagement. Also, if you know, you will need to purchase domains for sending emails, make sure to buy them as soon as possible so they get out of SEM-FRESH. For each new domain, make sure to set-up redirects or landing pages so participants can learn more about your company. Make sure to set-up Whois, Email Profile, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, TLS, and BIMI for the domain to make sure the domain is certified and authenticated. We will cover more about each of these authentication messages in the next article. If you consider using a free email service like Gmail, AOL, or Yahoo for sending emails, we would highly recommend you do not do it. Using a generic domain will significantly increase your risk of not having your emails delivered (No DKIM, SPF, or DMARC); it reduces customer trust in your brand, making your interactions less professional. Basic Principles Required To Maintaining A Strong Sending Reputation Now that you have selected our IP strategy and are using a separate domain name for sending emails, you should follow five core principles to make sure you maintain a good sending reputation. Volume and Consistency - Do not send a lot of emails at once or at random intervals; if you do, you will negatively impact your brand. Make sure to increase the number of emails you send gradually. Start sending a few emails to people you know and get them to engage. After that, you can increase your email sending list with known or engaged recipients, and as you build your reputation, you can take more risks sending it to people who have not engaged with you recently. You can use a tool like Sales Innovator to spread out sending so they're not sent as a blast, but like a human would send. Also, make sure you maintain a consistent incremental volume of emails sent. Each month ISP's benchmark your send to your previous month, and if they see random spikes, your domain will be affected. ISP's like to see consistency and growth. Just like a health business would be growing. Finally, as you warm up your email, start with one sender and slowly scale senders as your domain is warmed-up. We will cover this principle in more detail in another chapter focused on warming-up emails. Complaints - Do not purchase email lists and send out mass emails to people who are likely to mark you as SPAM. If you get added to a SPAM folder, your reputation will be affected. Maintain the lowest complaint rate possible. Make sure the content you create is personalized and adds value to each of your recipients. If you provide your recipients a lot of value and your recipients can tell you are looking out for their best interest, they will want to engage and not report you. Blacklists - Do not purchase email lists, stay away from spam traps by practicing good email hygiene, and warm up your domain. Buying email lists, spam traps, and sending bulk emails will damage your reputation and get you blacklisted. If you get blacklisted, it will be challenging and time-consuming to get your domain removed from a blacklist, if even possible. Tracking - Make sure you track each of your email campaigns and that your senders are engaging with your emails. If senders are not engaging, remove them from your lists to make sure you maintain an excellent reputation. If you start to see your emails going to SPAM, you should slow down your campaign, make adjustments, and start your warm-up process again. When tracking your open rates and your clicks, make sure you are using a custom domain for tracking instead of your ESP's generic tracking link. Having your tracking links match your sending email will help with deliverability. Also, make sure you are monitoring blacklists to make sure your IP or domain has not been marked as SPAM. Another helpful strategy is setting up email accounts across various email service providers and sending emails to those accounts. Setting up eight email boxes may be sufficient for testing. Then you can monitor if your emails are reaching the inbox or going to SPAM. Otherwise, you can use services such as Sales Innovator who monitors your emails for you and reports if they are going to SPAM. Permission and Engagement - Permission is the cornerstone of maintaining a good sender's reputation. Without subscribers' consent, you are giving them many reasons to file a complaint and damage your reputation. Only a few complaints will get you blacklisted, so watch out. Do not give subscribers a reason to complain. Here are a few that you may receive if you do not have permission: If subscribers have not permitted you to email them, they will complain. If subscribers have not allowed you to email them frequently and do it, they will likely complain. If subscribers do not receive what they signed up for, they will complain. Subscribers may report you if you do not follow the best practices outlined by Can-Spam Act and the CASL. Mailbox providers track how engaged subscribers are with an email and its sender, and the type of engagement highly influences your reputation. Engagement ratings give you a very compelling reason to use only opt-in or confirmed opt-in email marketing lists. Those who opt-in permit you and are more engaged. Here are actions that mailbox providers monitor to score your reputation: Positively affects your reputation - opening a message, adding an email address to a contact list, clicking through links, clicking to enable images, and read rates such as scrolling through the email. Negatively affects your reputation - reporting the email as spam, deleting an email, moving an email to the junk folder, or ignoring an email. To ensure you are getting positive engagement with your emails so you can maintain an excellent reputation, here are some best practices that can help you: Send relevant content. Set subscriber's expectations from the beginning. Give people who opt-in to your mail choices on how often they'll receive emails from you. Ask subscribers to whitelist you as they opt-in. Deploy an onboarding program educating subscribers on expectations. Keep your lists clean. Block spammy, personal, or role-based email addresses when people register. As your list ages, weed out non-engaged subscribers. Use double-opt-in to confirm a subscriber is interested in receiving emails. Validate each subscriber's email's integrity in real-time before sending that subscriber an email. This way, you know the email is valid and will be less likely to bounce or be a spam trap. Segment your subscribers and personalize messages to each segment. Better To Do It Right Than Damage Your Reputation A lot of effort is required to maintaining a good reputation. You cannot only invest time up-front and expect that things will work out. If you want a good reputation, you need to be strategic, monitor your progress, continually optimize, and creating value for your subscribers. The time you invest will be worth it as your emails reach inboxes and engage subscribers. If you do not invest the necessary time and resources, you will likely end up blacklisted, which will require months to fix, if even possible. In the following chapters, we will provide more details on ensuring you are doing all you can to ensure an excellent reputation and that your emails get delivered to your senders. Notes Gonzague de Bellaing, How to avoid landing in spam (full guide)., January 2021, Mailwarm https://www.mailwarm.com/blog/how-to-avoid-landing-in-spam-full-guide Gatefy, 7 most common types of email, December 7, 2020, Gatefy https://gatefy.com/blog/7-most-common-types-email-spam/ Katharine Trendacosta, Here's the Best Nigerian Prince Email Scam in the Galaxy, February 12, 2016, Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com/we-found-the-best-nigerian-prince-email-scam-in-the-gal-1758786973 Varun, A Definitive Guide to Email Deliverability [Updated 2021], SendX https://www.sendx.io/blog/email-deliverability/ Upland, Dedicated IP vs. Shared IP Addresses for Sending Email https://uplandsoftware.com/postup/resources/blog/dedicated-ip-shared-ip/ Email manager, Why do you need a Dedicated IP to send email marketing? https://www.emailmanager.com/en/blog/1/2066/why-do-you-need-a-dedicated-ip-to-send-email-marketing.html Chris Nagele, The false promises of a dedicated IPs, May 21 2020, Postmark https://postmarkapp.com/blog/the-false-promises-of-dedicated-ips Guillaume Moubeche, How to warm up your email account [2021 in-depth guide], August 22, 2019, Lemlist https://blog.lemlist.com/warm-up-email-account/ Tonya Gordon and Avi Goldman, IP Warm-up Strategy Overview, October 29, 2020, Sparkpost https://www.sparkpost.com/docs/deliverability/ip-warm-up-overview/

Email SPAM has become a significant issue for consumers and businesses. At times SPAM can be funny, annoying, and, unfortunately, very dangerous. Over half of the email traffic is SPAM. For April 2020 alone, an analysis from Cisco Talos Intelligence put the average daily spam volume at 320 billion. Google's email service blocks more than 100 million phishing emails every day, and during the pandemic, they said out of those, 18 million were related to COVID-19 in some way. 94% of malware is delivered over email, and one in every 3,000 email messages contain malware payloads. 76% of companies have fallen prey to phishing scams. Every year SPAM costs businesses over $20.5 billion. In a few years, analysts predict it will reach $257 billion annually. Email SPAM is a big problem. Companies are investing a significant amount of money in fighting email SPAM. The global enterprise SPAM market is growing at such a rapid pace. In 2018 the market was valued at $849 million and will increase in the next several years to $2,675 million at a CAGR of around 17.5%. Significant money is being invested into fighting SPAM, making it very hard for companies to send cold outreach emails. Google's machine learning algorithm that powers the SPAM filter for 1.5 billion Google email users is believed to be 99.5% accurate. As more advanced SPAM technologies are being developed, businesses need to understand these technologies and learn how to play within the rules to ensure their emails get delivered. SPAM Technologies Protect The Inbox To solve the massive SPAM problem, mailbox providers ended up inventing SPAM filters, Firewalls, and Blacklist directories. SPAM technologies is software that uses artificial intelligence to decide what emails should exist in your inbox and which ones should go to your spam folder or blocked altogether. Inbox providers are highly incentivized to provide better SPAM technologies. Since 70% of email is SPAM, a good SPAM filtering technology will reduce the number of emails being processed by your inbox and increase the businesses' profit margin. Also, SPAM technologies protect their customers from malware and phishing attacks, which helps drive customer loyalty. In a highly competitive market, like the inbox market, it is essential to maintain a reputable brand to keep your customers from opening another email box with your competitors. How Spam Technologies Work To understand SPAM technologies, we must first understand the building block technologies ensuring your emails get delivered. Here are some of the tools you need to know: Email Service Provider (ESP)- ESP or email marketing software (like Sales Innovator) helps you send emails at scale. Internet Service Providers (ISP) - ISP stands for Internet Service Provider. When we're talking email marketing, ISP refers to the major email providers: AOL, Hotmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast, and so on. Their customers are commonly your email recipients. It's the job of the ISP to protect their customers from receiving unwanted or unsolicited emails. Spam Filters - Decides whether the email should be present in the inbox, promotions tab, spam folder, or whether it should be blocked altogether. Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) - This is a unique public address of the server over which your emails go. Your ESP typically maintains your IP Address. Blacklists - Databases that store IP/Domain spammers. There are a lot of them, and their criteria are specific. Just keep in mind that they mainly refer to your email sending activity: sending frequency, sending volume, bounce rate, spam reports. Custom Blocking - It is common for ISP's and corporate networks to create their SPAM blocking criteria. ISP uses information from blacklists and content filters in a "weighted" system that gives "spam points" for each offensive piece of the message. Domain Name System (DNS) - The domain name system connects URLs with their IP address. With DNS, it's possible to type words instead of a string of numbers into a browser, allowing people to search for websites and send emails using familiar names. An email address is matched to a domain name, and the domain is matched to an IP address. The DNS matches the address on the email message to its destination and delivers the email. The DNS can access the public key to decode your DKIM and publish the SPF record to authenticate your email. Now that we are clear with our definitions, you can better understand how these technologies work together. Business senders use email service providers to send emails via ISP's. ISP's use SPF,DKIM, DMARC, and MX Records to verify the sender and recipient's identity. Once a connection is made SPAM technologies help determine if emails should be blocked, added to the SPAM folder, put in the inbox, or filtered to another destination. SPAM technologies use customized technologies such as SPAM filters and blacklists to decide where the emails should go. For the rest of this article, we will further describe how SPAM technologies work and how you can learn how to play safe and maintain a high email deliverability level. Types of SPAM Filters There are broadly three types of SPAM filters that you will encounter: Gateway SPAM Filters: A gateway spam filter is an on-premise software solution for filtering spam. This software is installed as a virtual appliance behind the network firewall. Gateway SPAM filters are the first line of defense against spam. Companies providing this solution include Cisco's IronPort and Barracuda. Hosted SPAM Filters - These types of SPAM filters are cloud-based solutions. Instead of supporting one company, these solutions support various companies and access a lot more data, giving them a more sophisticated SPAM filter. Hosted SPAM filters deliver messages to an inbox, move messages to spam, quarantine messages, and block messages. Two of the leading solutions in this space include Cloudmark & MessageLabs. Desktop SPAM Filters - These are third-party SPAM filters that exist in a user's system. Desktop spam filters are highly customizable and are more personalized to a specific user. Outlook uses Microsoft's SmartScreen anti-spam filter to filter email. Major Factors Influencing Spam Filters Whatever type of SPAM filter your inbox provider users three major factors will impact their decision to filter your message: Email Reputation - Email, sender, or domain reputation is the measurement of your email's sending practices and how closely you abide by the standards set by your Internet Service provider (ISP). ISP's use different criteria to filter spam and unwanted email. Your email reputation is primarily measured for a sending IP address. Your email reputation is comparable to your credit score. It takes time to build up a good credit score, but it is easy to destroy it if you are not careful. Email Authentication - Email authentication is a technical solution that certifies your email as a valid email. It affirms that your email comes from who registered your email. Email authentication is used to block harmful or fraudulent uses of email, such as phishing and spam. The most common types of email certifications include SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Email Content - Email content is the analysis of your email content and how it follows the guidelines set by your ISP. Email filers tool for emails containing "spammy" language, too many uses of images, broken HTML, attachments, proper use of hyperlinks, and many other variables that signal SPAM. Most importantly, if email content is low-quality, your users will not engage, and your reputation will be affected. How GMAIL's SPAM Filter Works Google's SPAM filter is most likely one of the most advanced SPAM filters. Each day over 1.5 billion people use Gmail, and over 5 million businesses pay Google to use Gmail as part of G Suite. Gmail is the second-largest email client (38%), next to Apple Mail (40%). G Suite is the leading office suite provider with a 58% market share vs. Office 365's 40.93% market share. With a commanding market share, Google's SPAM filter claims to have a 99% accuracy. Reputation Gmail looks at both the domain and IP address of senders when determining where to place an email. Setting up proper authentication for your outgoing email is very important for your email to get accepted and not filtered or blocked by Gmail. Ensure you properly authenticate yourself with your ISP and setup your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. User Engagement User engagement is vital to Gmail's algorithm for determining what should be filtered or blocked. Gmail looks at each person's action in their inbox when deciding what should be filtered. What could be SPAM for one person could be a valuable email for another person, so personalizing filtering is important to Gmail. Here are some examples of the user actions Gmail algorithms take into account when filtering: Messages deleted before being read. Messages marked as SPAM Emails voted as not SPAM Messages moved to the promotions folder Starred messages Messages read Messages replied to SPAM reports or complaints Because Google highly values engagement, companies need to clean up their subscriber lists and remove subscribers with minimal engagement. Emailing those users will bring down your overall reputation and will send more of your emails to SPAM. Keep the same email cadence with your active users and choose an alternative strategy for your passive subscribers. By segmenting your emails by engagement, you will maintain a good reputation with Google for your engaged subscribers while using an alternative email address and domain for your riskier subscribers. Content Content is another factor Gmail analyzes when deciding what content should be blocked or sent to SPAM. Gmail will analyze your email's header, body, images, and links to determine where they should send your email. Avoid "spammy" words is important, but it is not as crucial as a sender's reputation. Gmail highly ranks a sender's reputation as a critical factor in ensuring your emails reach the inbox. Sending History If you are using a dedicated IP and have a new IP address, you should warm up your email. Instead of sending a lot of emails right away, you should slowly scale your sending. Gmail blocks new IP addresses for the first 2-24 hours, and after that, it starts delivering a few emails into the inbox and sends some to spam to test recipients' reactions. If their initial test results in high complaints, then your emails will most likely all land in SPAM. On the other hand, if your emails receive a high engagement rate, you will most likely end up in the inbox. Your first set of emails is critical to determining your future relationship with Gmail. If you were not successful passing Gmail's test and need to be rescued, your recipients will need to go to their spam folder and mark your emails as "This is not spam". After you receive several of these, your email will be marked safe for the inbox. Monitoring Your GMAIL Reputation Gmail provides a tool, "Postmaster Tool" to give you visibility into your current domain reputation, IP reputation, spam complaint rate, and other deliverability statistics. Use this tool to monitor your reputation with Gmail continuously to ensure deliverability. https://www.gmail.com/postmaster/ How Outlooks SPAM Filter Works Microsoft is the oldest webmail provider, having launched Hotmail.com in 1996 and then rebranding Hotmail.com to Outlook.com. Currently, Outlook has over 400,000 active users. Microsoft also supports businesses with its Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 email and office products, which control 87.5% of the email and authoring market. Microsoft SPAM filters look at engagement, complaints, spam traps, and other factors similar to other service providers. Although, unlike their competition, they use the Microsoft Sender Reputation Data Network to decide what emails are spam. Microsoft Sender Reputation Data Network (SRD) The SRP or SPAM fighters program uses a panel of voters selected randomly from active outlook users to help train their filters. These voters are asked to vote whether the original email was "Junk" or "Not Junk". The votes decide your fate on having your emails sent to SPAM or not. The spam fighter program has been more reliable at finding spam instead of just monitoring complaint rates. Complain rates are a lot easier to manipulate since senders can increase their email volume to reduce the total percentage of complaints. Monitoring Your Outlook Reputation Microsoft provides several tools to help you manage your reputation. Microsoft's Smart Network Data Service (SNDS) - For those using a dedicated IP address, senders can use SNDS to see data about subscriber complaints, email volume, spam trap hits, etc. https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/ Junk Email Reporting Program (JMPR) - Microsoft's feedback loop service sends you a copy of the messages people marked as SPAM. If you are abiding by all best practices and still encountering issues, you can directly submit support tickets to Microsoft. https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/pm/services.aspx How Yahoo's SPAM Filter Works Yahoo still commands 5% of the hosted email market share and Yahoo Business Email is leading in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Poland, and several other eastern European countries. Yahoo utilizes many of the same best practices as Google and Microsoft and specifically calls out the following factors to ensure deliverability: IP address reputation URL reputation Domain reputation Sender reputation Autonomous System Number (ASN) reputation DomainKeys Identification Mail (DKIM) signatures Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) authentication Keeping Email Volume Constant Yahoo provides many standard recommendations to ensure email deliverability, but they recommend keeping email volume constant. "If you send emails at a certain rate and suddenly have a spike of activity, you could get flagged as a compromised sender and marked as spam. Instead, plan your campaign and spread it out over a period of time." Yahoo also recommends publishing a reverse DNR record if you have a dedicated sending IP. "Not having a reverse DNS entry can cause your mailing IP to look like a dynamically assigned IP instead of a static mail server." SPAM Traps Identifying Spammers Spam traps, also called honeypots, are used to identify and monitor spam emails proactively. Anti-spam organizations, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and corporations create spam traps to lure spammers. Once spammers are identified through these traps, their IP address or even domain can be denied, affecting your reputation and email deliverability. You may not be a spammer, but it is essential to know what is a spam trap is and what may cause you to fall into these traps. The last thing you need is to get added to a SPAM trap list and get blocked. Types of SPAM Traps Pristine SPAM Trap - This is the most dangerous type of SPAM trap. Other spam traps can negatively affect your reputation, but Pristine traps will most likely get you banned if you get caught, and if you get caught, your IP and Domain will most likely get denied. ISPs and other organizations set up Pristine spam traps. These organizations create email addresses that have never been previously used by a sender and insert them into websites. Once spammers scrape websites to grow their contact list, the spam traps end up in their email lists. You can also find Pristine SPAM traps in purchased or rented lists. If an ISP sees someone sending an email on the Pristine spam trap list, you will surely count on your email delivery rate taking a significant dive, or emails will cease to be accepted. Recycled SPAM Trap - Recycled spam traps are domain registrations or email addresses that were once valid but have been reassigned to be a trap. Examples of this common are sales@, info@, support@, or email addresses of employees who are no longer with the company. Getting caught sending a recycled SPAM trap email address is not as harmful as a Pristine trap, but it will still affect your reputation. Email With Typos Trap - The third type of trap is to have domain typos such as "gnail" instead of "gmail" and "yaho" instead of "yahoo" added as spam traps to email lists that people purchase. At times this trap could be an unintentional mistake of a person signing up, but it can still lead to a spam trap. Domain Spam Traps - Th fourth and lesser-known spam trap is the Domain spam trap. In this case, all email addresses for a particular domain will be a spam trap. Blacklist providers request owners of a dormant domain to point their MX records to the blacklist provider. Then all the emails to that domain become spam traps. The consequence of getting caught with email typos shows how the sender is negligent and is not regularly cleaning up their contact list and therefore harming their reputation. How To Protect Yourself From SPAM Traps There are several things you can do to protect yourself from falling into SPAM traps. Usually, you can prevent them by maintaining a healthy contact list and following email best practices. Here are some other things you can do: Avoid Purchasing Lists - Using a purchased list almost guarantees that you will run into spam traps. You are playing Russian roulette with every purchased list you use. People on these lists are also likely to mark you as SPAM or delete your emails since they do not know you. All of these actions will negatively affect your reputation and can get you blocked. List Contamination - Email list contamination occurs when email typos happen in your email list. Email typos could occur accidentally through a data entry mistake or if a prospect entered a correct email address into a form. The best way to protect yourself from list contamination is to double-check your list's emails, verify that they are legit before sending, and enforce a double opt-in for all of your subscribers. Also, note that even if your recipient double opts-in, they can still become inactive later, and their email may be converted to a spam trap. Therefore, continually stay on top of cleaning up your list and not think that double opt-in comprehensively prevent spam traps. Outdated Emails - Each year, between 15% and 20% of employees turn-over, so your email lists quickly become obsolete. If you are not carefully validating and cleaning your lists, you will fall prey to spam traps. Make sure to always clean-up your email lists and keep those contacts who engage with your emails and remove subscribers that do not respond; this will help you weed out any contacts that could be spam traps. Pay Attention To Open Rates - Open rates are one of the most critical email metrics. Open rates tell us how the content is doing and what we need to adjust. Also, open rates are a good indication of the potential presence of spam traps in your database. If your subscriber has not engaged with your email in more than six months, then try a re-engagement campaign first. This way, you can find out if they want to remain on your email list. If the email bounces, you should remove the email right away - some may be spam traps. If the email does not bounce and it is not opened, then remove the email. Keeping people on your email list that are not engaged will affect your reputation, so remove them. Pay Attention To Your Sender Reputation - Your sender reputation can tell you if your emails are hitting any spam traps. Email providers take a lot of metrics into consideration to determine your sender's reputation. Those metrics include spam complaints, sending to unknown users, potential presence in industry blacklists, and more. Although your sender's reputation is critical, they do not paint the complete picture. How To Know If There Is A SPAM Trap In Your List? Several indicators can let you know if you have a spam trap in your email list: Make sure to monitor your delivery rates, and if you see a steady or rapid decline pattern, you may have a spam trap in your email list. Check to see if your IP address or domain has been listed denied; you likely have a spam trap email in your list. To check if your IP or domain is in any of these popular lists, you can check the following websites: Barracuda Reputation Block List: BRBL is a DNS blacklist (DNSBL) of IP addresses known to send spam. You can check for free and without signing in to see if your domain is on a blacklist monitored by BRBL. https://www.barracudacentral.org/lookups Invaluement: The Invaluement anti-spam DNSBL blocks elusive types of spam where the sender is sending unsolicited bulk email and escaping traditional detection methods. Several companies use Invaluement to help identify SPAM. They provide a free service to check if your domain has been delisted. https://www.invaluement.com/research MXToolBox: MXToolbox shows you whether your domain or IP address is blacklisted and can perform checks on your DNS to see how configured. MXToolbox provides a free service but also has more advanced paid features. https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx MultiRBL: This free multiple DNS blacklist service cross-references other blacklists by IPV4, IPV6, or by domain. They provide a very easy to use interface that gives you a comprehensive view of whether your domain is listed in any blacklists. http://multirbl.valli.org/ Spamcop: The SpamCop Blocking List (SCBL) lists IP addresses that had mail reported as spam by SpamCop users. https://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml Spamhaus: The Spamhaus Project maintains a number of DNSBLs as part of its effort to identify and track spam sources and provide anti-spam protection. You can enter your IP address and domain, and they will check your status for free. https://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/ SURBL: Unlike most lists, SURBLs are not lists of message senders. SURBLs are lists of websites that have appeared in unsolicited messages. http://www.surbl.org/surbl-analysis Purchase Email Monitoring Tools - You can purchase email monitoring tools that help you stay up-to-date on your campaign performance and if you are running into any issues. Everest is in development and is a good example of such a tool. How Do I Remove A Spam Trap The best way to remove space traps on your list is to go through a thorough cleaning of your list. Remove contacts who have not engaged with your list for six months. If this still does not work, then remove those that have not engaged within the last three months. If you are still having troubles, start to segment your list into segments that you know for sure are not spam traps and those that may be. Continue to narrow your segments until you can locate the spam trap. You can also hire a consultant to help remove spam traps. They will perform a detailed list segmentation, email validation, and manual curation to identify spam trap emails. Staying Safe From Filters And Traps Today there are many innovative technologies and strategies companies are deploying to detect SPAM. SPAM is a billion-dollar problem for companies, and we will for sure encounter more Artificial Intelligence being used to prevent SPAM. As a sender, you need to remember to not act like a spammer and act like a human. This means: Maintain an outstanding domain and IP reputation. Make sure your domain and IP are authenticated and certified. Create great personalized content for your recipients. Do not purchase email lists. Regularly scrub your lists of typos and outdated emails. Use double opt-in to confirm that your recipients are legitimate senders. Monitor your email delivery rates and your domain and IP reputation. If you can maintain a healthy contact list and following email sending best practices, you will stay safe from spam filters and traps. In the following chapters, we will deep dive into the best ways you can apply to maximize email deliverability. Notes Davey Winder, This Surprisingly Simple Email Trick Will Stop Spam With One Click, May 3, 2020, Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/05/03/this-surprisingly-simple-email-trick-will-stop-spam-with-one-click/?sh=6de02c353791 Emily Bauer, 15 Outrageous Email Spam Statistics that Still Ring True in 2018, February 1, 2018, Propeller https://www.propellercrm.com/blog/email-spam-statistics Zion Market Research, Global Enterprise Spam Filter Market Will Reach USD 2,675 Million By 2026: Zion Market Research, February 18, 2019, Zion Market Research https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/02/18/1733713/0/en/Global-Enterprise-Spam-Filter-Market-Will-Reach-USD-2-675-Million-By-2026-Zion-Market-Research.html Kristen Onsgard, Email Reputation: What It's All About, March 5, 2018, Tower Data https://www.towerdata.com/blog/bid/116384/email-reputation-what-it-s-all-about SPARK POST, Email authentication basics for SAAS teams https://www.sparkpost.com/academy/email-technical/introduction-email-authentication/ Ivan LaBianca, How Spam Filters Work (And How To Stop Emails Going To Spam), January 20, 2020, Seventh Sense https://www.theseventhsense.com/blog/how-spam-filters-work-and-how-to-stop-emails-going-to-spam Samantha Schwartz, Microsoft Created The Office Suite Status Quo. Can Google Grow?, February 11,2020, CIO Dive https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Microsoft-Office-collaboration/571740/ Litmus Email Analytics, Email Client Market Share, January 2021, Litmus Labs https://emailclientmarketshare.com/ SendGrid Team, Spam Traps: What They Are And How to Avoid Them, September 26, 2019, SendGrid https://sendgrid.com/blog/spam-traps-what-they-are-and-why-you-should-pay-attention-to-them/ Zero Bounce, Spam Traps -Guide For Email Senders https://www.zerobounce.net/spam-traps.html Maciej Ossowski, How to Avoid the SPAM Folder in 10 Easy Steps, Neil Patel https://www.zerobounce.net/spam-traps.html Adestra Blog, A Simple Explanation of DNS and it's Role for Email, Upload Software https://uplandsoftware.com/adestra/resources/blog/simple-explanation-dns-role-email/ Namecheap, What is DNS? https://www.namecheap.com/dns/what-is-dns-domain-name-system-definition/ Kajabi, An insider's tour of Kajabi email from draft to final destination. https://help.kajabi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360047211074-Demystifying-Email-Deliverability Sendgrid, Your Guide To Email Infrastructure - Build It or Buy It? https://sendgrid.com/resource/the-email-infrastructure-guide-build-it-or-buy-it/

Over half of the world's population, 3.9 billion people, use email daily. These users send and receive over 293.6 billion messages every day, and 71% of them favor email as their first online "check" of the day. When interacting with businesses, 49% of consumers said they would like to receive weekly promotional emails from their favorite brand. When consumers were asked where they would want to be contacted by a new product or service: 46.4% responded via email, 38.5% social media, 32.1% direct mail, 11% in-person, 8.5% phone, and 6.4% live chat. For business professionals, 86% prefer email as their leading communication medium. Email continues to be the best and most effective marketing channel to catch a customer's attention. Businesses rely upon email as their primary marketing channel. 81% of SMB businesses rely on email as their leading customer acquisition channel, and 80% of companies rely on email as their primary customer retention channel. In general, 9 out of 10 marketers use email to distribute their content. Email has been proven to have a high ROI. For every $1 invested in email marketing, companies see an average return of $42. Email is a very effective channel for marketing and sales outreach. According to a recent study, 75% of executives are willing to make an appointment or attend an event based on a cold call or email alone. Salespeople spend 21% of their day writing emails, send on average 36.2 emails per day, and spend 13 hours per week on email. Salespeople find that sending emails for cold Outreach is twice as effective as cold calling and 40% more effective than Facebook and Twitter. 59% of B2B marketers say email is their most effective channel in revenue generation and return on investment. Email remains the key driver for customer acquisition and retention for small to mid-sized businesses and B2B businesses. How Can Email Help You Drive More Sales The types of emails businesses send can be broken down into two main categories: Transactional Email: Emails that contain information that completes a transaction or process that a person has started with a business. A typical transaction email is an eCommerce type email sent to a customer once he completes a purchase. The email generally includes a receipt, item, price, and shipment details. Transactional emails are sent to individuals instead of a large list of recipients. Marketing Emails: Any email that contains a commercial message or content intended for a commercial purpose (i.e., nurturing leads through your sales funnel) is considered a marketing email and must follow local laws. Marketing emails are generally sent to groups of contacts that are prospects or customers. We will be focusing on marketing emails and how they can help companies drive more revenue. Here are some of the use cases companies have found to be most effective for email marketing. Cultivate Early Interest - Companies can use email to reach out to prospects who signaled potential interest but have not requested contact. These prospects could be ABM targets, cold Outreach, social media followers, or consumers of content. Email is the leading channel used by companies to cultivate early interest. 46% use email for Outreach, 18% personal relationships, 9% content marketing, 5% paid social, 6% organic social, 8% word of mouth, 5% direct mail. Engage Interested Prospects - Since 86% of business professionals prefer email as their leading communication medium, email is a perfect channel to engage interested prospects. Companies can immediately send emails once a prospect engages. On average, studies show us that if companies can follow-up within an hour of first engagement, the chances of success increase by 7x. Companies can also save salespeople's time by choosing to send emails to engage with prospects that usually have low-scoring leads and a low conversion rate, such as certain advertisement types, social media campaigns, and partner referrals. Pre-Event Outreach - 78% percent of event presenters believe email marketing is the most commanding marketing tactic companies can use pre and post-event. Eventbrite recently published that 45% of tickets are sold using emails. On average, pre-event emails will get better engagement: 26% open rate and 4.95% click-through rate. Companies can also use pre-event emails to reach out to drive attendance and schedule meetings ahead of events such as customer conferences, trade shows, webinars, podcast downloads, and demos. Post-Event Engagement - Research shows that 20-40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads. By creating an email sequence with post-event, companies can nurture event attendees and triple their reply rate. Attendees may not be available the first time a salesperson reaches out but are more likely to reply on the fourth engagement. Using email, companies can effectively and readily follow-up after an event, such as a customer conference, trade show, booth visit, webinar, or demo. Activate Prospects That Have Shown Interest - Reaching a prospect can be challenging. 80% of prospects say it takes five follow-ups after the first engagement for prospects to show interest. Emails are perfect for helping people follow-up with prospects after showing interest but are hard to engage. 44% of salespeople give up after the first time, so companies that create follow-up email campaigns can have significantly more success. Accelerate Open Opportunities - Companies can use emails to contact existing opportunities late in the funnel and advance prospects through the sales process by providing them more information, reminding them to decide to complete forms, and offering help. Companies will be 60x more likely to convert than companies waiting more than 24 hours if companies can follow-up with a prospect immediately after they take action. Reactivate Dormant Prospects - On average, 25% of email addresses in a company's databases are classified as inactive. Research shows that 80% of discarded prospects will eventually make a purchase from you or a competitor, and only a small portion of companies prioritize some form of lead nurturing for these prospects. Sending emails to these contacts that have gone untouched, unresponsive, or marked closed/lost by sales is an excellent way to re-engage and find golden opportunities. Win Back, Former Customers - Companies can use email to proactively reach out to recently lost customers who left or to long lost customers to win them back. Win back campaigns have shown to have a 6x ROI for companies. Prior customers could still have loyalty to the brand but may have left for different reasons that a win-back campaign will give them a reason to re-engage. There are more email use cases that marketing and sales deploy to drive sales. The benefit of and return of investment in email marketing is significant. Moving from Social Media to Email Lists to Get More Leads and Conversions I remember being in a meeting with an early Facebook investor who said that email would be dead soon because people would be using Facebook for communication. This argument has become more prevalent since then. However, email is still the leading marketing and sales channel. There are some significant advantages to move your social media community to an email list to help you get more leads and conversions. Here are some of those reasons: More Attention - It is tough to get your target audience's attention on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn without paying for advertisement. Constant algorithm changes make it harder to have your target audience see your posts through organic posting. Having your audience subscribe to your email list will command significantly more attention since people will need to do something with your email, even if it means press delete. On social media, your audience gets bombarded with real-time updates on their feed from all their friends, and your business posts are more likely to go unnoticed. More Control - Social media sites are particular regarding the format and type of content they will accept. Unless you pay for an advertisement, you cannot add a call to action. Making your content stand out becomes very difficult since everyone has the same design restrictions. Email, on the other hand, gives you full control over your design and content. You can create the best techniques to capture attention, make your case, and drive clicks without paying for advertisement. Better Results Through Personalization - On social media, you are broadcasting to the world, and you cannot control who will see your post. Your message has to be more generic and basic, versus with email, you can highly personalize your message and speak to individuals at scale. Personalized messages are 26% more effective than general messages, which will make your email perform a lot better than your social post. Better Segmentation - When paying for advertising, social media will allow you to segment your message, but you have no control when organically posting. Also, you have minimal data regarding who clicked on your post, and you will not be able to segment your audience by user engagement. Additionally, you will not have email addresses from your organic posts. On the other hand, email will allow you to segment your subscribers into various campaigns and target each segment with a different personalized message that will drive better results. Email will give you much more data on user engagement, such as opens, clicks, views, and clicks on CTA, that you can use to segment your prospects and customers further. A/B and Multivariate Testing - Mail lists are an exception channel for marketers to use for testing. Email allows you to send various messages to different segments and test content variation, segmentation, personalization, content length, call to action, images, etc. On the other hand, social media limits your ability to test various messages without paying for advertisements. Even though you pay for advertising, your options using social media posting is limited due to format restrictions. Less Legal Restrictions - Although email may have significant legal restrictions from CAN-SPAM Act, CCPA, GDPR, and other local laws, social media has additional legal limits that may get you banned for life. Each social network site imposes its own rules that, if disobeyed, will get banned from the system. Also, since social media platforms are open to a public audience, the law may prevent you from posting certain information that may be appropriate to your target audience. Finally, you will be susceptible to the public's option and based on what the public thinks of your content may affect your client base and how people want to associate with your business. People Are Familiar And Prefer Commercial Email For Promotional Messages - 77% agree to have emails sent to their email box. They are familiar with this channel for business information and special offers (60% prefer email for promos). On the other hand, social media channels frown on sales for specific networks (20% prefer social for promos), and overwhelming sales messages have kept people distant from other social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Email Is Still The Most Used Channel - 86% prefer email as their leading communication medium for business professionals. 58% of consumers favor email as their first online "check" of the day versus 14% check social media first. There are 3.8 billion email accounts and 3.4 billion social media accounts. When taking into account non-transactional email accounts, there are 8 billion email accounts. Email leads in usage across all age groups (15-24: 91% email vs 88% social, 25-44: 93.4% email vs 78% social, 45-64: 90.5% email vs 64% social, 65+: 85.5% email vs 37% social). You Own Your Email List - You own the list and have permission to email your list whenever you want. Your email list is a company asset. On the other hand, social platforms own all their users and give you permission to post and engage, but you cannot access user information, and if you want to target users, you need to pay. Even then, targeting is not personalized. If the social media company wants to have all of your fans unfollow you, they automatically do it on behalf of your fans overnight without your permission. You are entirely at their mercy and do not have any control. Email Gets More Engagement - Social media followers engage at a much lower level than email subscribers. When it comes to open, click-through, and engagement rates, email receives 22.86% open rates and 3.71% CTR. Social media gets a .58% engagement rate. Conversion rates on email are significantly greater: 6.05% email conversion rate vs. 1.9% social media conversion rate. Although we have been comparing both channels and recommending to urge your social media followers to sign-up for your opt-in list, we believe that social media is a vital marketing channel that you should leverage as much as possible. Still, you need to understand its weaknesses and how email can complement your social efforts. Challenges With Email Even though email is a leading marketing channel, it has its own set of challenges. Every day 14.5 billion emails are marked as spam. This equates to almost half (45%) of all emails do not reach the inbox. Out of those not reaching the inbox, advertising related emails account for 35% of all spam emails, the top category of spam. Getting blocked by spam technology can significantly deter salespeople and marketing with their outreach efforts. When email is the leading sales and marketing channel for many businesses, getting blocked can dramatically impact revenue. All it takes is for a company to misconfigure their email, get too many low open and deliverability rates, or not warm up their email. The sender's reputation can get damaged, and emails do not get through. I have seen some campaigns get blocked as soon as a campaign begins. Just think of the scenario where your marketing team has invested a significant amount of time creating content to help customers learn more about the new product you are about to launch. They invested countless hours and resources in making it the best launch. Landing pages are set-up, your email system and copy are all ready to go, you have segmented your list and identified the right accounts for your new product, you purchased ads, and your team presses send emails, and your emails start going into spam. Your executives ask you to do something, but whatever you try, things keep getting worse. You talk to a consultant, and he tells you your domain's reputation is not very good because of some previous campaigns, and getting it back on track will take four to twelve plus weeks. Unfortunately, this is a reality that can happen to anyone. With Google's new spam updates, it has become a lot harder to reach the inbox as most emails are marked as spam. Getting blocked is not a dead-end, and you can fix your reputation, but you will need to start your ramp up over, and it will take you at least four to twelve weeks to slowly ramp back up. Four plus weeks in spam jail is a significant amount of time when you are trying to reach your sales goals. Playing The SPAM Trap Game Knowing how to configure your email system properly and stay out of spam traps is the required game you will need to play if you want to be successful with email. You need to make sure your email account actions look normal to anti-spam robots, and to do this; you need to: Improve deliverability of your emails Make sure that your open rates are good Protect your online reputation There are serious revenue consequences if you cannot play the game correctly. Google and other anti-spam technologies are improving each day. To be successful with your sales outreach strategy, you need to understand the underworld of email deliverability and learn how to fix it. In the next sections, we will educate you on the types of spam technology you are up against and the techniques you need to take to optimize your email deliverability. At the end of this book, you will no longer focus on the size of your email subscriber list, but you will rejoice in more opens, better click-through rates, higher engagement, and more conversions. You will see a significant boost in your email marketing ROI and on your bottom line results. Notes Michael Phillips, 6 Cold Outreach Sales Statistics, February 16, 2018, Michael Phillips Blog https://medium.com/@mvphillips18/6-cold-outreach-sales-statistics-infographic-6a30a0fd10a3 Jayson DeMers, 37 Email Statistics That Matter To Sales Professionals, Email Analytics https://emailanalytics.com/37-email-statistics-that-matter-to-sales-professionals/ Brooke B. Sellas, Social Media Sales Outreach Closing In On Email Marketing, September 20, 2017, B Squared https://bsquared.media/social-media-sales-outreach/ Priit Kallas, 11 Reasons Why Your Email List Beats Social Media, May 14, 2019, Dream Grow https://www.dreamgrow.com/11-reasons-why-newsletter-beats-social-media/#:~:text=Email%20is%20a%20more%20effective,channels%20are%20great%20for%20outreach. Maryam Mohsin, 10 Email Marketing Statistics, June 1, 2020, Oberlo https://www.oberlo.com/blog/email-marketing-statistics Allen Finn, 35 Face-Melting Email Marketing Stats, November 1, 2020, Wordstream https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/06/29/email-marketing-statistics James Anthony, 169 Compelling Email Marketing Statics: 2020/2021 Market Share Analysis & Data, Finances Online Review For Business https://financesonline.com/email-marketing-statistics/ Warren Duff, Marketing Email vs. Transactional Email: What's the Difference? November 20, 2018, Send Grid https://sendgrid.com/blog/marketing-email-vs-transactional-email-whats-difference/ Nick Hladush, What Cold Outreach Email Stats Are Most Important To Track, May 6, 2019, Newoldstamps https://newoldstamp.com/blog/what-cold-outreach-email-stats-are-the-most-important-to-track/ Emily Johnson, 6 Must-Know Email Marketing Strategies for Succesful Event Promotion, Wishpond https://blog.wishpond.com/post/115675437981/email-marketing-for-event Sabra Mwaura, Why Turning Your In-Person Event Into A Virtual Event Can Help Your Conversion Rate, May 13, 2020, Disqus https://blog.disqus.com/why-turning-your-in-person-event-into-a-virtual-event-can-help-your-conversion-rate Brian Williams, PHD; 21 Mind-Blowing Sales Stats, Brevet https://blog.thebrevetgroup.com/21-mind-blowing-sales-stats Dave Kurlan, The Connection Between Gas Prices and Sales Lead Follow Up, September 26, 2013, Understanding the Sales Force http://www.omghub.com/salesdevelopmentblog/tabid/5809/bid/102097/The-Connection-Between-Gas-Prices-and-Sales-Lead-Follow-Up.aspx Marketo, Awaken Sleepy Email Subscribers with Reactivation Campaigns https://www.virtualroi.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Awaken-Sleepy-Email-Subscribers-with-Reactivation-Campaigns-Marketo.pdf Selledge, How To Calculate The ROI of Lead Nurturing, September 19, 2019, Lead Generation Institute https://leadgenerationinstitute.com/how-to-calculate-the-roi-of-lead-nurturing/ Jacinda Santora, Email Marketing vs. Social Media: Is There a Clear Winner?, December 19, 2019, Optinmonster https://optinmonster.com/email-marketing-vs-social-media-performance-2016-2019-statistics/ Sujan Patel, How to Warm Up an Email for Cold Outreach, October 4, 2019, Mail Share Blog https://mailshake.com/blog/warm-up-email/ SandX, The Definitive Guide To Email Deliverability, B2B Marketing Expo https://www.b2bmarketingexpo.us/news/blog.asp?blog_id=16143 Emily Bauer, 15 Outrageous Email Spam Statistics that Still Ring True in 2018, February 1, 2018, Propeller https://www.propellercrm.com/blog/email-spam-statistics

“Artificial Intelligence, deep learning, machine learning — whatever you’re doing if you don’t understand it — learn it. Because otherwise you’re going to be a dinosaur within 3 years.” ~Mark Cuban Sales Innovator created sales robots to take on the time-consuming and tedious task of outreaching to prospects and waiting for prospects to engage and show interest. With sales development representatives spending more than 60% of their time researching, sending, and replying to emails, we at Sales Innovator built a robot that could be more effective and less expensive at sending sales outreach emails and qualifying leads. In this chapter, we will introduce you to: 1. The challenges with the existing sales process 2. How sales robots can help you solve many of those challenges 3. Technologies used by sales robots 4. The future of sales robots Challenges with The Existing Sales Process Before inventing the idea of having a sales robot replace significant sales outreach efforts, we saw several sales process problems preventing companies from accelerating their sales that we wanted to solve and that sales robots helped us solve. High Financial Hurdle to Hire A Salesperson For companies that want to grow but have not quite achieved product-market fit or just reached product-market fit but needed a boost in market awareness, the cost of hiring a salesperson is a significant investment with lots of risks. Executives are skeptical if they could hire the right salesperson. Would that salesperson be able to deliver an ROI? Was it the right time to employ the salesperson? Would they be able to afford a salesperson? Was the company sure of what target markets to pursue, and was there enough marketing material created to help the salesperson sell? All these questions are valid, and the $107k-$147k investment companies have to make to test out their need was a significant gamble for a resource-strapped company. Could there be a solution that would prove the market first, and once we had more certainty, could we then hire a salesperson? Is there a lower-cost alternative that could help a company bootstrap its growth instead of having to raise capital to hire a sales team? Limited Sales Staffing Alternatives There are some alternatives to hiring a salesperson, such as having the founder spend more time selling or outsourcing sales, but these alternatives have their challenges. Although a founder is and should be the companies first salesperson, the founder has many responsibilities that limit him or her from focusing on sales, and this option is not scalable. Outsourcing sales is an option that can range from $36k for an offshore salesperson in the Philippines to a top contractor in the United States that can cost $120,000. The challenges with going for an offshore alternative, although less expensive, can be many. Language barriers, communication barriers, cultural issues, quality, trust, time difference issues, high turnover are among a few problems with offshoring sales. Could there be another alternative that would be affordable as an offshore salesperson, but with onshore contractor benefits? Salespeople Limited Bandwidth to Reach Many Prospects Even if a company hires one or many salespeople, there are human limitations to the number of people each salesperson can contact. Due to training, meetings, sick days, vacation days, preparation, breaks, lunchtime, the typical salesperson spends 13 hours per week sending emails and typically sends 36.2 emails per day. They also spend 21% of their day talking to prospects. Although we try to optimize their efficiency and maximize every second of their time, salespeople are humans, and engaging in outbound sales day after day is challenging. No wonder sales jobs have such a high turnover. If you invest $36k or $200k on a salesperson, they both have the same amount of time in the day to send emails and make calls, and on average, you will get similar performance. Could there be a way for us to get more output from a salesperson to reach more contacts via email and phone calls without burning out the salesperson? Technology Limiting Salespeople Salespeople are time-constrained, but they are also technology constrained. Spam filters have become smarter, and they monitor the number of emails sent by a domain, and if they see spikes in email traffic that are not consistent over the week or month, they will start sending your emails to spam folders. Spam fighting technology and legislation have become more advanced, making it hard for salespeople to stay on top of the changes and best practices. Consequently, even if the salesperson tries harder and sends more than 36.2 emails per day, that spike, if significant, may jeopardize your whole domain and your sales team's emails. Could there be a fail-safe way to help salespeople send more successful emails, stay on top of technology and legal policy, and lower the risk of jeopardizing our domain credibility? Limited Insights Helping Prioritize A Salespersons Time Salespeople have limited insights into what they know about a prospect. Using email software, they can understand if a person opened or viewed their email. If using specific software, you can also see a prospect landing on a webpage what they saw. With more software and with the use of a data scientist and potentially a developer, you can take all the prospects that received your email and landed on your webpages and rank them in order of most interested. If you reach out to hundreds of prospects and many of them click on your emails and land on your pages, it becomes challenging for a single salesperson to correlate the data and prioritize the prospects. The more data you provide a salesperson and the more leads he or she is asked to focus on, the more likely people will get dropped, and follow-up will not happen effectively. Human salespeople can only scale to focus on so many leads. Could artificial intelligence and technology help salespeople quickly prioritize prospects and manage more leads for salespeople so they could be more effective at scale? Marketing and Sales Collaboration It is a proven fact that when marketing and sales collaborate, the team is more effective, and better outreach and more sales can happen. The challenge is that salespeople are busy, and they have their approach set and new training and marketing materials take time to incorporate. The same thing happens with marketing; for them to deliver the best marketing materials, they need to test and optimize, but when sales are slow to adopt, marketing does not have enough data to optimize. Consequently, the gains from working together that we expect do not happen. Could we find a way to help marketing and sales best work together to deliver better results? Could the sales team have confidence in marketing and know that what they deploy will provide a higher ROI in their efforts? After years of experimenting and understanding the problem, we saw a business need for an alternative sales staffing method that was as effective as a local salesperson but less expensive than an offshore salesperson, and the ROI and cost per lead for this alternative staffing model needed to be very apparent. Additionally, the new staffing model required to: · Scale quickly and have the trust of the company that it would deliver effective results at-high quality. · Effectively navigate the spam technology gauntlet and stay away from getting flagged. · Have integrated technology that would allow salespeople to know who was interested based on their engagement without doing a lot of integration and data science work. · Allow marketing to launch and test campaigns on the fly to see what approach gives the best ROI. Then present sales with the best method that showed a proven success. Problems Solved by Sales Robots After trying various marketing automation software systems with multiple types of creative sales sourcing options and watching many movies about robots, we realized that the solution companies were seeking was not a human solution but was an artificial intelligence solution. Similar to how robots dominated the calling space, we thought artificial intelligent robots could also help provide an alternative sales sourcing option for companies. Very Cost-Effective Sales robots are much less expensive to deploy than humans. Companies would never have to worry about turnover, bonuses, office space, benefits, vacation days, insurance, attitude, incentives, and office hours. Sales robots can work 24x7 and never run out of energy. A sales robot costs about $79.99 a month compared to hiring a sales development representative ($8,916.67 - $12,250) or outsourcing sales to a contract ($3,000 - $10,000). Companies deploying sales robots see an ROI of 1,323% vs. hiring salesperson and sales robots have a significantly low cost per lead. High Degree of Trust Sales robots follow the command from a marketer, salesperson, or administrator that defines the landing page, email templates, and interaction that a sales robot can perform. Sales robots do not currently reply to prospects but notify salespeople when prospects are ready to talk. Sales robots cannot commit errors unless defined by a human. Once a human defines how a sales robot should engage, a sales robot team can reach out to thousands of people. Intelligence Spam Engine and Compliance Features Behind a team of sales robots are the Sales Innovator compliance and the spam-fighting team that is continually building Intelligence into each sales robot and creating processes to make sure that emails arrive and do not land on spam folders. Sales Innovator acceleration clients get added consultation to make sure their emails and landing pages are optimized. Also, consultants will help companies adopt strategies to warm-up IP addresses, ensure companies have redundant domains and embrace the best practices to make each sales robot highly effective. Advanced Sales Technology Integration Out of The Box The Sales Innovator platform has integrated the best email marketing automation features, dynamic landing pages, artificial Intelligence, big data, content marketing, personalization, and collaboration into each robot. In this way, companies can launch sales robot campaigns without requiring developers, data scientists, or other third-party products that alone charge $99+ per user per month. Companies can also easily integrate sales robots with any domain and email provider, CRM company, and lead database. Giving Marketers the Freedom to Innovator and Optimize Sales Robots give marketing the freedom to launch their own sales team to support new accounts or markets they are trying to enter or grow. Marketers no longer have to ask for a salesperson’s attention to test, they can test themselves, and when marketers see results, they can show sales and quickly get them on board. Sales will love the qualified leads and best practices they can use to optimize their own sales efforts. Having the added way to test and optimize will perfect marketing's output and accelerate sales capacity. Technology Used to Solve Sales Problems Sales Robots are powered by artificial intelligence technology that allows them to: (1) look and feel, (2) send emails, (3) share content, (4) qualify leads, and (4) communicate like humans. At Sales Innovator, we built several vital technologies and applied Artificial Intelligence to the technology to simulate the best salespeople to find leads and qualify prospects. Here are key technologies used by our sales robots: Advanced Personalization- Each sales robot can personalize content, emails, and landing pages for each prospect they are targeting. If a prospect clicks on any piece of content, the sales robot knows not to send the content to the prospect. The sale robot also knows when to stop sending content to a prospect based on the administrator's rules. Email Automation- Sales robots can send individual emails and email sequences to prospects. Based on administrator rules, sales robots can send emails when prospects are most receptive. Artificial Intelligence helps send warm-up emails, coordinates emails sent by sales robots, and manages emails sent by the domain, so the emails do not get detected by spam technologies. Shared Inboxes -Shared inboxes centralize all the replies received from prospects into one inbox and give the administrator full control in replying and using pre-built templates to schedule appointments and send emails. Over time, shared inboxes will grow in Intelligence and respond on behalf of the administrator automatically. Content Marketing- Sales Innovator has a built-in content management system that centrally stores all the content and manages all the custom links. Artificial Intelligence recommends content, analyzes the content's effectiveness, and ensures prospects are not included in multiple email campaigns or sent the same content. Actionable Analytics -Robots are excellent at analyzing all the data generated from prospect engagement, scoring each prospect and company based on their engagement, and then sending leads to salespeople. Robots can also recommend the best content, emails, call-to-action, and campaigns based on past performance. Enterprise Readiness Features- As your team grows, the Sales Innovator platform is set-up for managing various sales robots and departments. Invite team members, centralized billing, add custom domains, and manage email connections. Compliance - Sales Innovator, is designed for providing transparency and compliance; our team of experts is always adding features and processes to stay up-to-date with the latest laws and regulations. Integrations -Sales robots integrate with your existing marketing and sales systems. We support all major email providers, customer resource management systems, and prospect databases. Every day we are adding more features and intelligence to our robots. We are at the beginning of seeing how Artificial Intelligence will improve the sales process. The Future of Sales Robots The sales industry is in its infancy of adopting artificial intelligence technologies, and over time we believe every company will deploy its team of sales robots. Today sales robots can chat, make phone calls, send text messages, and send emails. Interaction today is defined and controlled by humans. As more data accumulated and analyzed, robots will become smarter and be able to make suggestions and interact independently. Additionally, as companies integrate various data sets with their sales robots, the robots will personalize experiences significantly and provide cross channel sales experiences. One robot will email, text, call and manage ads targeting a prospect or segment. A robot will fulfill more and more of the responsibility of a salesperson. Salespeople will evolve to use more technology to become more effective and better at educating and closing deals. Robots and humans will work together to accelerate sales as a cohesive team. The whole sales process will improve, and prospects will be more informed. Over time, the whole sales process may change as prospects also have their robot assistance analyzing the market and making their recommendations of what salespeople to engage and what solutions to buy. Less selling and more transparency and data generated recommendations will be utilized in the decision-making process. Robots will tell you what you need, from whom, and how, before you know, you need it. For this to happen, robots will become extremely intelligent and access many essential data sources to help prospects make decisions. Our prediction is in the future; we will see more intelligent robots that can do more and have access to more data. Robots will be a part of our everyday life. Notes James Meincke, How to Set SDR Compensation Plans, December 4, 2018, Closer IQ https://www.closeriq.com/blog/2018/12/sdr-compensation-plan/ Forget CRM, say hello to the Sales Robot!, Avaus https://www.avaus.com/blog/say-hello-to-the-sales-robot/ Sales Robots: How AI is Taking Over Sales, June 18, 2020, Tech Native https://www.technative.io/sales-robots-how-ai-is-taking-over-sales/ Michael Ashley, The Future Of Sales: What If The Best Salesperson Is A Robot?, March 11, 2019, Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/03/11/the-future-of-sales-what-if-the-best-salesperson-is-a-robot/?sh=69c75a912862 Will Robots Replace Salespeople?, BMS Performance https://bmsperformance.com/blog/sales/will-robots-replace-salespeople/ Could “robots” assist your sales A-Team?, Killian Branding https://killianbranding.com/sales-robots/ Debra Kamin, Robots Join the Sales Team, November 13, 2020, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/13/realestate/real-estate-robots-ai.html

“Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billion-fold.” ~Ray Kurzweil Sales robots can help you take your personalization experience to a whole new level. Where salespeople are limited by their time, numbers, and tools to create personalized outreach experiences and brands are limited in their non-personal branded approach towards marketing, sales robots can personalize email outreach experiences at scale. Sales Innovator incorporated the most effective personalization strategies into each sales robot's outreach techniques making each robot significantly more effective than an individual salesperson. With the sales techniques, Sales Innovator robots apply, marketers have noticed a 760% boost in their revenue and a 25% boost in open rates. This article will go into detail about the types of personalization techniques used by sales robots. Personalize the Sender's Name One of the most significant advantages of using sales robots is your personalized sender's name. Over 68% of Americans say that the "From" name plays a substantial role in their decision to open an email. 42% say it is the most significant factor next to a subject line (32%) and email preview (24%). When it comes to mobile, 70% of email recipients agree the sender's name is the most important factor they consider when opening an email. Hub spot tested using a sender's name instead of their brand, and they found that their click-through-rates went from .73% to .96%. This may not seem like a big jump, but the change resulted in 292 more clicks, which was worth it. When prospects take less than a second to decide on opening an email, it is critical to consider what the prospect finds the most crucial factor in making their first decision. Each sales robot has a personalized senders name that improves trustworthiness with the receiver, and over several email sequences, the sales robot will be remembered and expected. Additionally, you can add the brand name following the robot's name and add additional credibility to your email. Unlike an email from the company or an individual salesperson, sales robots can infinitely scale in providing a personalized sender's name to emails sent by a company. When contacts are ready to engage, a sales robot can transition the warmed-up relationship to a salesperson. Personalize the Emails Subject Line Email subject lines are the second most essential factor prospects look at when deciding to open an email. According to data by Yes Lifecycle Marketing, companies who personalize their subject line can increase open rates by 50% and lead to 58% higher click-to-open rates. Compared to non-personalized subject lines (14.1%), personalized subject lines had open rates of 21.2% for emails personalized with names and 22% for emails with another type of personalization. Sales robots automatically personalize email subject lines with the prospect's name and additional variables that boost open rates and click-through rates with minimal effort. Personalize Email Content Companies that go above and beyond personalizing the sender and the subject line have seen significant results. Personalized and relevant emails drive 18x more revenue than a broadcast email. Emails with personalized messages have an 18.8% open rate compared to a 13.1% open rate for emails without personalization. Also, emails with relevant content are 56% less likely to be unsubscribed to by prospects. Sales robots can personalize each email for the individual and a target segment. Robots can personalize email content, images, and attachments for each email. Here are a few ways sales robots can personalize content to achieve better results: · Mutual Connections: Can help you bridge the gap between you and a prospect. Ex. a person, town, high school, social media group, conference, seminar, etc. · Visual Presentation: Include a relevant graphic representation such as an image or a short video. · Existing Technology: Personalize emails based on the technology the prospect owns. · Prospects Interest: Look for frequent mentions, comments, and social posts that can help you identify what they are fond of this could be anything like a sports team, movie, favorite places, etc. · Compliment: Giving a compliment is a sure way to build a good relationship with your prospects. Ex: winning an award, blogs seminar, etc., and a leader in their field. · Trigger Events: Reach out to the prospects when they most likely require your business/service. Ex: new hires, move from the competitors, and a new round of funding. · Buyer Personas: Personalize based on a type of customer, products they buy, problems they are trying to solve, etc... · Demographic: Use gender, age, income, education, and ethnicity to personalize content. · Firmographic: Use company field, location, services/products, and the number of employees to personalize content. · Behavior: Use links clicked, products searched, products purchased, and conversion rate to personalize content. · Psychographics: Use lifestyle, interests, and attitudes to personalize. · Location: Personalize based on language, dialects, seasonal needs, weather, and needs. · Lifecycle: Personalized content based on where your customers are in their journey. Personalize Landing Pages Companies that personalize their emails and their landing pages can see a significant increase in conversion rates and responses. Emails without a personalized landing page typically see a 5% or lower conversion rate, while those with a personalized landing page see more than 20% conversion rates. Companies with personalized landing pages have seen up to a 45% greater response rate. Sales robots personalize not only emails but also each landing page the prospect receives. Here are a few ways sales robots can personalize landing pages: · Visitor's name: Visitors will see their name when opening the page. · Company name: Prospects will see their company name when opening the page. · Personalized message: Each visitor will receive a personalized message when opening the page. · Company size: Customize your landing page to a specific target segment. · Job title or position: Use the visitor's title to personalize the page and flatter your visitor. · Messaging based on channel, they clicked on: Personalize the landing page to a specific channel that drove the traffic. · Demographic: Use gender, age, income, education, and ethnicity to personalize your landing page. · The industry of visitor's organization: Personalize the landing page to their specific industry or organization. · Onsite history of visitor: Recommend content that interests the visitor based on previous content they read. Campaigns Are Easy to Create and More Effective Salespeople would require significant time to create personalized email and landing page experiences for each prospect. Not only would they need to invest time creating the content, but they would most likely require significant involvement from developers. Sales Innovator has built-in rich personalization into each sales robot, and companies can launch personalized email and landing page campaigns quickly without any help from a developer. Consequently, making sales robots a lot more effective and affordable in their sales outreach efforts than a salesperson. Additionally, sales robots can infinitely scale to help companies reach their prospects and accelerate their sales pipeline. They are assisting companies in achieving success that is beyond humanly possible. Notes How to Personalize Landing Pages for Increased Conversions, Ad Stage https://blog.adstage.io/2017/08/21/personalize-landing-pages Website Personalization, VWO https://vwo.com/website-personalization/ Erika Giles, The 50 Best Landing Page Statistics (2021 Edition) That Help Drive Conversions, October 8, 2020, BluLeadz https://www.bluleadz.com/blog/35-landing-page-statistics-every-marketer-needs-to-see Data: Personalized email subject lines boost open rates by 50%, September 11, 2017, Data Axle https://www.data-axle.com/resources/news-media-coverage/data-personalized-email-subject-lines-boost-open-rates-by-50-percent/ Writing a High-Performing Email, April 2019, Campaign Monitor https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/high-performing-email/ Rachel Rockwell, Optimizing Your Email Sender Name To Boost Open Rates In 2020, December 23, 2019, Mirabel’s Marketing Manager https://www.mirabelsmarketingmanager.com/blog/optimizing-your-email-sender-name-to-boost-open-rates 3 Tactics You Can Implement Today for Higher Email Open Rates, June 5, 2014, The Daily Egg https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/high-email-open-rates/

"Machine learning allows us to build software solutions that exceed human understanding and shows us how AI can innervate every industry." -Steve Jurvetson, Board Member of SpaceX and Tesla Setting up a sales robot team is very similar to setting up a sales development representative team, but overall, it is more straightforward, less expensive, and faster. The differences between both are that instead of investing time and resources to hiring a sales team, you can click a few buttons and create one. Instead of hosting a kick-off training event and ongoing training sessions for salespeople, you will create content that sales robots can use. Most importantly, instead of chasing down your sales team and trying to get alignment on launching a sales campaign, you can create as many as you want at a click of a button and pass on leads to sales when you are ready. There are significant benefits to having a team of sales robots, and in this article, we will review how to set one up to accelerate your sales pipeline. Creating Your Sales Robots Give Your Robot A Name, Title, and Profile Image When you onboard a sales robot team, you will first decide what your sales robot will look like, their title, and what you will call your sales robot. A good-looking salesperson can impact your success rate by 17% to 24%, so choose the robot that will best fit your audience's interest. If you are focused on a specific country or geography, you may want to select the appearance, title, and name welcoming to your target market. You can use various photo stock sites to choose a profile picture for your sales robots. Shutterstock, shutterstock.com Fotolia, fotolia.com Dreamstime, dreamstime.com Getty Images, gettyimages.com iStock, istock.com Crestock, crestock.com Here are some examples of sales robots we have created at Sales Innovator: Determine the Number OF Sales Robots You Need Tip: We recommend setting-up several domains to use for your sales robots; this way, if one of your domains is affected by spam filters, you can give it a rest while using other domains you have set-up. You may want to sub-divide your sales robot team into groups and assign a different domain to each group. Connecting Your Sales Robots After creating your robot and assigning them an email account, you can connect your email accounts to Sales innovator. Connecting an SMTP account is simple. All you need to do is upload a list of sales robots with their name, a link to an image of your robot, and the SMTP credentials. The sales innovator automatically connects your robots. Also, you can manually connect each robot. Educating Your Sales Robots Create Dynamic Landing Pages Once your sales robots are connected and ready to send emails, you need to educate your robots to engage with each prospect. To inform your sales robots, you will be creating a landing page with content that will help each prospect learn more about your product and service and accelerate their buying decision. Plan content that will educate prospects during the buying journey stage you are targeting with your robots. Robots will take the page you create and send it to prospects and personalize each page. Create Email Sequences You will also need to create an email sequence for your robots that they will personalize and send. The email sequence should point to content on the landing page so robots can best engage and qualify prospects. Based on how each prospect responds to each email and interact with the landing page and the robot, the robots will score the prospect and notify the salesperson when the prospect is interested. Define How Sales Robots Interact Sales robots will not reply to prospects, but they can interact in several ways. When you create a landing page, you can define what message the sales robot will deliver once a prospect lands on the landing page. The sales robot will personalize each message for the prospect. You can also define what call to action the sales reps will present on the landing page to entice the prospect to interact with the sales robot. Once you have educated your sales robots by setting up a landing page, email sequences, and ways your robot will interact, then you are ready to kick-off your email campaign. Launching Your Outreach Campaign Launching a campaign is simple. All you need to do is select the sales robots that will participate in the campaign, the contacts you are targeting, the landing page you will be using, and the email sequence. Once you have defined these components, then you are ready to preview and kick-off your campaign. Selecting Your Contacts Uploading a list of contacts is easy. All you need to do is create a list in google spreadsheet or excel and add the contact details, and the sales robot's email to each contact. Contacts will automatically get assigned to the specified sales robot once the list is uploaded. You can upload a single list for all senders, a list of each sender, manually enter a contact, or select contacts uploaded previously. We recommend following all the CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and other government regulations when selecting a list. You can use sales robots to warm-up contacts in your CRM, follow-up with leads from ads, events, and organic traffic, and for cold outreach. Adding contacts from CRM, leads database, or an ad campaign is very easy. Sending Emails Sales Innovator uses artificial intelligence to help robots replicate how humans would send emails. You can define when the emails are sent, how often, and when they are paused based on a prospect's interaction. Our algorithms are always improving to ensure that emails are continually optimized for deliverability and not getting stuck in a prospect's spam folder. Once you approve a campaign, you can press send, and the sales robots will automatically send emails. Once prospects show interest, the sales robot will notify the salesperson, and the salesperson can follow-up. Actionable Insights Besides identifying which prospects are most interested, sales robots give you insights into what emails are working, most compelling content, best calls-to-action, best sales reps, most interested companies. Using the data sales robots generate, you will be able to optimize your campaigns to get better results over time and perfect your marketing and sales approach. Simple to Manage Managing a team of sales robots can be something one SDR or admin can do. This admin sees all the prospects' progress across all campaigns and coordinates sales efforts between robots and salespeople. By setting up a shared inbox, the admin can keep track of any prospect replies and quickly reply on-behalf of sales robots. The admin can also find opportunities to launch new campaigns and scale robots once a successful niche is found, and you want to dominate a market. Sales Robots Are Easy to Scale Once you have a team of sales robots and an admin who can easily manage the robots, you can easily scale your robot team. Robots are great for paving the way to hiring a salesperson and keeping your existing team very busy selling and closing deals. Sales robots are incredibly affordable, and as time progresses, they will just become more intelligent and will be able to help answer questions and close deals. As you implement your sales robots team, you will find that they will help you optimize your whole sales and marketing process and help you accelerate your pipeline beyond what was humanly possible. If you are interested in seeing a sales robot in action, then you contact a Sales Innovator growth consultant for a free demo by clicking this link: https://www.salesinnovator.com/schedule-a-demo Notes Stefanie K. Johnson, The effects of good looks on professional success: I’ts Complicated, April 13, 2017, LSE Business Review https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/04/13/the-effects-of-good-looks-on-professional-success-its-complicated/ Dario Maestripieri, The Truth About Why Beautiful People Are More Successful, March 8, 2012, Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/games-primates-play/201203/the-truth-about-why-beautiful-people-are-more-successful

“Our research says that 50% of the activities that we pay people to do can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. We think it’ll take decades, but it will happen. So there is a role for business leaders to try to understand how to redeploy talent. It’s important to think about mass redeployment instead of mass unemployment. That’s the right problem to solve.” — Michael Chiu, Partner, McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) This article will compare the costs of hiring an SDR team versus a sales robot team. The goal is to help you evaluate alternatives to staffing your sales outreach team to accelerate your pipeline. Sales robots are a new alternative to building an inside sales team that artificial intelligence and technology have provided companies. We will seek to answer the following questions in this article: · Are sale robots worth the price? · What is the ROI? · What is the average cost per lead? · How do they compare to other marketing channels? · Are sales robots good for my industry? · Should I hire a real person or a robot? Case Study for Comparing Sales Outreach Campaign Options We must first consider a base case study to compare all options for an accurate cost and benefit comparison between selecting a sales robot outbound strategy versus an insides sales team. In this base case study, a company is trying to achieve a $10,000,000 yearly revenue goal from cold outreach. The average sales price for this company’s product is $40,000, and the sales team needs to make 21 monthly sales ($833,333) to achieve their objective. To forecast the pipeline required to achieve 21 monthly sales, I will be using average industry numbers. Here is my initial logic on forecasting the pipeline needed to accomplish the goal of 21 monthly sales: · 160 Qualified Opportunities Required: On average, the opportunity to win rate is between 10% and 20%, so let's say to close 21 deals, you will need to get 160 qualified opportunities that your sales team will have to close. We are using a 13% win rate for our calculation. · 1,068 Leads Required: To get those 160 opportunities, you will need to get 1,068 leads based on a 15% lead to opportunity rate. The average lead to opportunity rate is between 10% and 20%. · 10,684 Prospects Required: To get 1,068 leads, you will need to acquire 10,684 prospects if we assume, we can convert 10% to leads. The industry average is 5% to 10%) · 53,419 Emails Required: On average, it takes seven interactions before a prospect purchases from your brand. So, if we schedule an initial email sequence of 5 emails sent to each prospect, we will have room for some direct follow-up outside the sequence for additional inquiry. With five emails sent per prospect, we will need to send 53,419 emails to get to our goal. On average, sales reps send 36.2 emails per day. Email spam algorithms start sending emails to spam if any one individual starts sending more than 50, without a solid record of consistent email sends and interactions at a higher number each day. Consequently, we will assume that sales can reach out to 148 prospects each month and send out 740 emails. That would be a total of 15 leads generated per salesperson per month based on their email outreach. You will need 72 Sales Development Reps and 3 Sales Reps - Based on our forecast. We suggest you scale your sales development team to 72 salespeople and focus their efforts on sending 53,419 emails to 10,684 prospects qualifying your prospects to get to 1,068 leads. Then with three sales reps who, on average, can reach out to 320 leads per month, you will be well-staffed to execute on your sales goal. Sales Outreach Campaign Options There are several options to staff a team of 72 sales development reps to achieve your forecast goal. You can hire your own sales development reps, which will be the more costly option. Otherwise, you can outsource your SDR efforts to contractors located onshore or offshore. The offshore option will be less expensive, and the onshore option will be comparable to hiring your SDR but will give you the freedom to scale. The third alternative would be to hire a sales robot team, which would be significantly less expensive. · Hiring your own SDR costs between $107k - $147k a year - Base SDR salary is between $40k-60k with a variable bonus of $20k to $40k and average overhead costs of $47k per year. · Hiring a contractor SDR costs between $36k - $120k a year -A contractor SDR in the Philippines will cost you at least $36k, and a high-end contractor in the United States could cost you upwards of $120k per year. · Hiring a sales robot will cost you between $959 - $1,541 a year - You can buy sales robots in packages of 7 robots for $899 per month, 15 robots for $1,499 per month, and 30 for $2,499 per month. After thirty robots, each robot will cost you $79.99 per month. To accomplish your goal, you will also need to hire account executives to close the sale ($177k - $247k per year), email software ($1.50 per month per rep), and prospects to outreach ($3 per contact). These costs will remain consistent across all three options. Total Cost Comparison Hiring 72 sales development reps, email software, and prospect contacts will cost you a total of $37,918 per month for sales robots, between $674,159 - $914,159 per month to hire your own sales team and between $248,159- $752,159 per month to outsource. For this case study, the only viable solutions are using sales robots, outsourcing, or hiring entry-level SDRs. Sales robots are the most affordable, have the highest ROI and the lowest cost per lead. · Total cost for sales robots $37,918 per month, ROI 2,097%, and average cost per lead $35.5- Monthly sales robot costs $5,759, Email Software $108, and contacts to outreach $32,051. · Total cost outsourcing SDR $248,159 - $752,159 per month, ROI 235% - 10%, and average cost per lead $232 - $704- Monthly SDR costs $216k - $720k, Email Software $108, and contacts to outreach $32,051. · Total cost hiring a SDR team $674,159 - $914,159 per month, ROI 23% - (-8%), and average cost per lead $631 - $855- Monthly SDR costs $642k - $882k, Email Software $108, and contacts to outreach $32,051. Industry Benchmark Comparisons When comparing against the cost per lead across different industries, sales robots are a very competitive go to market strategy for all sectors; with an average cost per lead of $35.5, sales robots can do well in all industries, with a specific advantage in B2B sales. As a marketing channel, sales robots perform very well compared to other marketing channels used for generating leads. Hiring or contracting an SDR team is an expensive channel. Benefit Comparisons Hiring or outsourcing an SDR team gives you more benefits when comparing to sales robots. An SDR can make phone calls, engage with prospects, and solve challenges. Hiring humans have many benefits, but also humans take longer to hire and train. Additionally, SDRs are known for high-turnover, are more costly, and are an expensive marketing channel. Sales Robots cannot fully replace an SDR, but sales robots can automate tedious tasks of outreaching to prospects and waiting for prospects to engage and show interest. Robots can help accelerate the sales pipeline at significantly lower costs and higher ROI by automating these tasks. Robots can work hand-in-hand with SDRs and account executives to close more sales and help a company reach a larger number of prospects than previously possible with a human sales team. Create Your Business Case and Sales Playbook This article has shown how Sales Robots are a desirable go-to-market alternative for companies wanting to ramp up their sales pipeline with sales outreach efforts. The ROI and average cost per lead make sales robots a desirable channel to try. If you are interested, the Sales Innovator sales growth team can help you create a playbook and business case to hire a sales robot team. We will customize the playbook to your goals and historic performance. Also, we will give you the spreadsheets you need to customize your own version. Visit us at https://www.salesinnovator.com/sales-playbook to schedule your free consultation. Notes Sun Wu, AI-Powered Sales Outreach, May 15, 2020, Strategy for Executives LLC DBA Innovatar LeadGen (May 15, 2020 https://www.amazon.com/AI-Powered-Sales-Outreach-Intelligence-Exponential-ebook/dp/B088PXCB8T Shawn Elledge, Average Cost Per Lead by Industry and Marketing Channel: Are You Overpaying? June 27, 2018, Integrated Marketing Association https://www.integratedmarketingassociation.org/blog/average-cost-per-lead-by-industry-and-marketing-channel-are-you-overpaying/

Artificial intelligence is about replacing human decision making with more sophisticated technologies. ~ Falguni Desai Scaling a sales team to dominate a market is a solution for companies who already have achieved a product-market fit and consistently measure and optimize their conversion rates. When you know your product is right and all you need to do is reach out to more prospects and close deals, this is when you are ready to scale your sales team as much as possible to gain market share. For those companies still struggling to achieve product-market fit, the decision to pre-maturely grow their sales team can be expensive and with limited success. With the invention of sales robots, companies that are still experimenting have a lower cost option to grow a sales team that can help them identify niche markets and get feedback while still generating an ROI. This article will show you the economics behind when you should scale your sales team and use sales robots to help you progress while still trying to find your product-market fit. We will focus on answering the following questions: 1. When do I have product-market fit? 2. When should I scale my sales team? 3. What can I do if I do not have a product-market fit, but I need to make more sales? 4. How can I get product feedback to help me achieve product-market fit? Evolving Towards Product Market Fit To begin, we will analyze a company in various phases of their development. We will look at a company before achieving product-market fit. This company can add more salespeople and not see a significant increase in sales, but see a considerable expense that can potentially bankrupt a company. Next, we will look at a company that is on the verge of achieving product-market-fit and can afford to grow its sales team to expand incrementally. Finally, we will look at a company that has achieved product-market fit and can scale their sales team, and gets a high return for their investment. By analyzing and understanding these three types of companies, you can identify where you are as a company and what you can do to take your company to the next level. · Seeking Product-Market Fit: Companies that have yet to find the right features and solutions for a target market to make them a compelling purchase. These companies struggle to attract prospects, turn leads into opportunities, and close deals. The effort required to achieve their sales goal is so significant that scaling a sales force does not make financial sense. · On the Verge Of Product-Market Fit: Companies that have the features and solution for their target market and are ready to scale their sales team but have yet to show that they have the conversion numbers necessary to grow their sales team significantly. · Achieved Product-Market Fit: These are companies with a solid product and solution, and if given the opportunity, they can close the deal. They know they can covert, so they are ready to meet as many prospects as possible to turn them into leads and paying customers. Investing in more sales reps is an excellent investment. Conversion Rate Is A Leading Key Indicator When a company is not ready to scale, it will have a significantly lower conversion rate than ones that have achieved product-market fit. The considerably lower conversion rate will make it more costly and nearly impossible for a company to scale. To illustrate this principle, let's look at a company targeting a yearly revenue goal of $5 million and has an average sales price of $20,000. This company will need to make 21 sales each month, totaling $416,667. The instance of this company seeking product-market fit will find it harder to convert prospects into leads. They will need to invest a lot more money to reach more prospects to get the same results as a company that has achieved product-market fit and is ready to scale. This company will also have a more challenging time converting leads into opportunities and opportunities into wins. We estimate this company will need 282 sales development representatives to send 208,333 monthly emails to get 208 qualified opportunities. For companies seeking product-market fit, achieving their goal is a herculean task. We used the lowest industry average conversion rates for the company seeking product-market fit and the upper bounds of conversion rates for those who have achieved product-market fit for our analysis. Those who have achieved product-market fit and are leading an industry can have a lot higher conversion rates. In our model, a company that has achieved product-market fit has to send significantly fewer emails and require only 19 sales development reps and one account executive to achieve their goal. Conversion rate is the leading indicator to see who has achieved product-market fit. The higher the conversion rate, the more effective a salesperson becomes and the easier it is to justify adding more salespeople. Feasibility of Ramping Up A Sales Team When analyzing the total cost of ramping up a sales team to achieve 21 sales per month, the company seeking product-market fit will find that hiring a salesperson or outsourcing sales will be too costly and will have a negative ROI. The cost of a sales development representative ($8,916.67 - $12,250 per month) or outsourcing sales ($3,000 - $10,000 per month) will be too great for the results a salesperson could deliver. A salesperson for a company seeking product-market fit will not be as effective and will not reach enough prospects to get enough buyers to test the product and bring feedback. On the other hand, sales robots are a worthwhile alternative for these companies and are inexpensive to scale. They can reach hundreds of thousands of prospects to sell the product and provide feedback to founders to help them understand what pivots may be necessary. Companies on the verge of product-market fit will still find the cost of a sales development representative too expensive and contracting a top salesperson to be costly. Yet, they will start to see an ROI for offshoring sales or hiring entry-level contract salespeople. When considering salespeople, outsourcing is a good alternative for this type of company to scale. Another even better alternative for this type of company is hiring a team of sales robots that can scale to help this type of company ramp up and deliver an ROI of 1,166% with a very inexpensive cost per lead of $16. $16 cost per lead makes sales robots one of the best sales channels for companies who are on the verge of achieving product-market fit. Sales robots can pave the way for companies to hire more salespeople by testing markets and conversion rates and creating the demand to hire more salespeople to close deals. Companies that have achieved product-market fit and are ready to scale will find that all salespeople alternatives will deliver a positive ROI. These companies are trying to run as fast as possible to grab market share. They will invest in several sales staffing strategies since the average cost per lead to hiring a salesperson is very competitive with other marketing channels. The goal for these companies is market dominance. Benchmarking Various Sales Staffing Strategies Another leading indicator to observe when trying to achieve product-market fit is the average cost per lead. Companies should continuously compare their average cost per lead to their industry and marketing channels to determine where they should invest their limited sales and marketing resources. In our case study, a company seeking product-market fit will find that hiring a salesperson or outsourcing will put their average cost per lead way above any company in their industry. The average cost per lead should be an indicator that the company is not ready to scale. On the other hand, depending on the industry, sales robots can be a good alternative for B2B and service companies. Companies on the verge of achieving product-market fit will find that offshoring sales are a viable alternative for B2B and service companies and that the average cost per lead could work. These companies will also see that sales robots are one of the best marketing channels to drive sales and become an excellent alternative to all industries. Companies who achieved product-market fit will find that their average cost per lead will be industry-leading. They will perform well across most categories and industries, but justifying a more expensive salesperson is still for b2b and service industries. Sales robots for these companies become a table stakes marketing and sales channel since the average cost per lead is one of the lowest. Sales Robots Are A Great Sales Staffing Alternative for Companies Seeking Product Market Fit Companies should look at conversion rate and the average cost per lead as leading indicators to know when to scale. As the conversion rate increases and the cost per lead decreases, companies should accelerate sales to dominate their market. Sales robots are an excellent alternative for all three types of companies and give companies a cost-effective way to ramp up sales and test the market while pivoting their way to product-market fit. Notes Sun Wu, AI-Powered Sales Outreach, May 15, 2020, Strategy for Executives LLC DBA Innovatar LeadGen (May 15, 2020 https://www.amazon.com/AI-Powered-Sales-Outreach-Intelligence-Exponential-ebook/dp/B088PXCB8T Shawn Elledge, Average Cost Per Lead by Industry and Marketing Channel: Are You Overpaying? June 27, 2018, Integrated Marketing Association https://www.integratedmarketingassociation.org/blog/average-cost-per-lead-by-industry-and-marketing-channel-are-you-overpaying/

“No company is going to survive in the future without implementing, or at least gaining an understanding of, artificial intelligence and how it can be used to better grasp data they collect.” – David Gasparyan, President of Phonexa Sales robots help the sales team reach prospects that usually fall through the cracks and do not get attention because salespeople are focused on interested buyers who are ready to close deals. There are various holes in a sales funnel where prospects fall through the cracks because of a lack of resources. Robots can augment a sales team by reaching out to prospects, helping them stay engaged, providing them more information to accelerate their buying decision and qualifying prospects. Here are some ways sales robots can help: Cultivate Early Interest - Salespeople can only reach out to so many prospects a day. Sales robots can help reach out to more prospects who signaled potential interest but have not requested contact. These prospects could be ABM targets, cold outreach, social media followers, or consumers of content. Engage Interested Prospects - Instead of having a salesperson focus on everyone who requests information, robots can be the first point of contact to engage prospects. Robots can always be available, immediately reply, share relevant information, and qualify the contact. Robots are perfect for channels where prospects are usually low-scoring leads and have a low conversion rate, such as certain types of advertisement, social media campaigns, and partner referrals. Pre-Event Outreach - Robots can reach out to drive attendance and schedule meetings ahead of events such as customer conferences, trade shows, webinars, podcast downloads, and demos. Have robots help early in the funnel with logistical matters while qualifying leads for the sales team. Post-Event Engagement - Robots can help connect with leads as the first point of contact following an event such as a customer conference, trade show, booth visit, webinar, or demo. Instead of spending a salesperson, valuable time qualifying event leads, companies can let a robot do all the qualifying and educating for salespeople. Activate Prospects That Have Shown Interest - For instances where prospects have shown high-interest levels, but salespeople could not get in contact with the prospect, sales robots can be the second point of contact. Sales robots can be more persistent by consistently engaging until a prospect responds. Accelerate Open Opportunities - Robots can contact existing opportunities late in the funnel and advance prospects through the sales process by providing them more information, reminding them to decide to complete forms, and offering help. Reactivate Dormant Prospects - Robots can proactively initiate contact with prospects who previously expressed interest but have gone untouched, unresponsive for more than 90 days, or have been marked closed/lost by sales. Robots are excellent at giving these types of contacts another opportunity to re-engage. Win Back, Former Customers - Companies can use robots to proactively reach out to recently lost customers who left more than 90 days ago or to long lost customers who parted ways more than a year ago. Companies who use sales robots to augment their sales team will find that sales robots can provide the human-like personalized touch and scale to reach more prospects at a fraction of a real salesperson's cost. Also, sales robots can engage in a personal way with better results than a branded mass emailer. In this chapter, we will further illustrate how to implement each of the sales outreach efforts with sales robots: Cultivate Early Interest with Sales Robots Companies can dedicate a team of sales robots to focus on outreach efforts to ensure a steady stream of qualified leads coming to salespeople each quarter. For example, companies can expand their account-based marketing target list and plan to reach out to an incremental 30,000 target companies and 120,000 prospects. For a typical sales team, this may be too many prospects to provide individual attention. Yet, with a team of sales robots, all you need to do is: 1. Upload your list of contacts to Sales Innovator 2. Assign contacts to various sales robots 3. Create an email sequence 4. Add a dynamic landing page 5. Start your personalized outreach campaign Each account will get a personalized email from a digital sales assistant, a personalized landing page, and a personalized note. Prospects will also have the opportunity to read additional content that will help accelerate their purchasing decision. Each engagement a robot has with a prospect is tracked, and robots qualify prospects based on their attention and notify sales once an opportunity is attractive. Sales can then engage on high-quality leads and focus on accounts that are most likely to close. Your team of outbound sales robots can be used for cold outreach, ABM targets, contacting social media followers, and your content consumers. An outbound sales robot team can generate a steady stream of leads for your sales team that they would not have without their extra robot team members. How Robots Can Engage Interested Prospects A company can dedicate another set of sales robots to follow-up with leads coming from your website, ad campaigns, partner referrals, or any other channel generating many leads that are not high quality. You can download the leads from your form, ad campaign, or CRM and upload those into Sales Innovator in each of these cases. Then you can assign the leads to your robots, create an email sequence and assign a dynamic landing page and you can kick-off your sales robot campaign. The sales robots will email each prospect and provide them content that will help accelerate their decision. Once a contact is ready to engage, they can reach out, or after they click on several content items, the robot can notify a salesperson that they should engage with the prospect. Suppose you have an ongoing marketing channel that needs follow-up. In that case, Sales Innovator can help you integrate that marketing channel, and leads can be automatically assigned to a sales robot and added to a Sales Innovator campaign. Sales Robots will provide contacts with a more personalized approach and be more likely to build a relationship with prospects that may take time to decide. Sales robots give your contact a face they can depend on and can engage with at any time. Use Robots for Pre-Event Outreach Similar to how a salesperson would engage with pre-event outreach, a sales robot would do the same. For a pre-event outreach campaign, you can provide sales robots with a list of attendees, an email sequence, and an event-specific dynamic landing page. Then sales robots can reach out to each attendee and give them VIP treatment. Sales robots can provide them with additional information, offer to schedule appointments, and remind attendees to attend. Attendees will appreciate the individual attention and the additional information and will be more likely to reach out when they are ready. Sales robots allow personalizing your follow-up in a way that would have been too costly to do with a real salesperson and, in many cases, is not being done. By using sales robots, marketing can have full control of the pre-event outreach and get it done. Suppose a prospect is interested to learn more before the event. In that case, a sales robot can qualify prospects based on their activity and notify a salesperson who can reach out to that prospect. Robots Can Help with Post-Event Engagement Like pre-event outreach, companies can create a new campaign for prospects who have attended the event and send personalized messages to each prospect with more information to help that prospect in their customer journey. Post-event content can provide additional content to help prospects learn more about a product or service and can be more direct in giving prospects information that will help them decide. Post-event engagement helps further pre-qualify candidates and gives attendees a salesperson they can contact at any time with questions. When having the same sales robot reach out pre and post-event, that sales robot can build a relationship with that attendee and give that attendee more confidence in engaging with the sales robot. Sales robots are always ready to help, and if your existing robots are busy with outbound sales efforts and you need help with a large event, you can scale a whole new team of sales robots to help you, content event attendees. Unlike human salespeople who will need to stop their sales efforts to help with an event or hiring more salespeople to work an event, which hiring takes time, you can scale sales robots at a click of a button. Robots Can Activate Prospects That Have Shown Interest Every day salespeople need to decide what prospects to focus on so they can hit their sales quotas. Therefore, when a contact is not interested right away but could be in a few months, salespeople move on and leave it up to marketing to send periodic email messages to the prospect. The salesperson hopes to follow-up in a few months with the prospect to see if they are interested. This approach leaves the potential opportunity open to learning from a competitor who may better educate the prospect and show more interest. Instead of letting marketing send non-personalized email messages, sales robots can take on the second point of contact and send personalized weekly email messages to the prospect educating them and building a relationship. The prospect may not be interested immediately, but the constant assistance and emails will put the sales robot at the forefront of the prospect's mind when ready to make a decision. The prospect will only have to search their email box for the sales robot's last email and reach out to the sales robot. The sales robot will notify the salesperson who has been following the prospect's engagement by messages sent from the sales robot. The process is simple to get sales robots to be the second point of contact. All you need to do is download the contacts from your CRM and upload them into Sales Innovator. Once they are upload, you can select the dynamic landing page and the email sequence and start your sales robot campaign. Each week you can kick-off a new campaign with leads that sales are not prioritizing but have shown interest in the companies offering. Use Robots to Reactive Dormant Prospects Sales robots are perfect for engaging with your CRM contacts that have not been contacted in the last 90 days or marked as closed. Unlike salespeople who may see this exercise as non-fruitful and not a high priority, sales robots are eager to take on the challenge. These types of contacts will also respond to a human face more than to a branded email blast. Sales robots can start sending emails to these contacts and re-engaging them with content to gauge their interest. Overtime contacts who are interested will engage, and sales robots can notify salespeople who can then take action. All you need to do to create a reactivation campaign is download these contacts from your CRM and upload them into Sales Innovator. To be more successful, you may want to segment your list and create different campaigns that are more personalized. You may also want to reference their prior engagement with a member of the sales team to give more continuity. The more personalized you can make your approach, the more likely you will get a better response. Sales robots can also help you AB test multiple approaches to a target audience to see what approach delivers the best results. Sales robots give you feedback on how emails are performing, content items, call-to-actions, and dynamic landing pages. How Robots Accelerate Open Opportunities Another way sales robots can help you with your sales is to contact prospects who are in the funnel's late phases and are slow at progressing. For example, say you have hundreds of prospects who have signed up for your free demo and have used your product during the 14-day trial but have stopped using it after the trial. Instead of having salespeople follow-up with these prospects, you can have sales robots follow-up to remind the prospect to sign-up, offer content that will help the prospect accelerate their decision, or offer help. Sales robots can follow-up at a fraction of a salesperson's cost and can continually send emails to prospects each day. Suppose you can have a sales robot engage immediately as the prospect sign-ups for a free trial and follow-up with the prospect during the trial. In that case, the ongoing relationship will lead to better results and a better qualification of the prospect. All you need to do to start an acceleration campaign is to upload a list of contacts to Sales Innovator as soon as prospects sign-up for a free trial and select an email sequence and dynamic landing page you want to send them. You can create a dynamic landing page to help prospects through their initial trial and then one to convince a prospect to purchase once their trial has ended. You may choose to dedicate one or more sales robots to follow-up with prospects based on different use cases where prospects are getting stuck during the sales process. Robots Help Win Back Former Customers Another use case that sales teams overlook is those customers who have left for more than 90 days. Sales robots can follow-up with these prospects and give them a personalized message instead of an un-personalized company email blast. As you are trying to win back these customers, you want to do all within your power to give them a VIP experience in your re-engagement efforts. Sales robots can provide them with the VIP experience, and sales robots can have the patients to wait until the prospects are ready to re-engage. Very similar to reactivating dormant prospects, you will want to segment your list of former customers and create content and dynamic landing pages that will inform them of the changes you have made and the new value you are providing. The more targeted your content can be to the reason they left, the more likely you will convince them to give you a second try. To get started with a win-back campaign, you only need to download a list of contacts from your CRM and upload them into Sales Innovator. You can assign a small team of sales robots to help you with your campaign. You can A/B test by using different sales robots and see what emails, content, dynamic pages, and messages work best. Sales Robots Can Help Accelerate Sales Across the Sales Funnel Sales robots can help you sell in various ways to prospects at different stages of the sales funnel. You may want to divide your sales robot team into smaller groups that focus on specific use cases. This way, you can compare how sales robots perform and what emails, content, messages, and dynamic pages perform best for a given use case and segment. The number of leads Sales robots can contact is infinite, and you only have to spin up a new sales robot at a click of a button. Sales robots are more economical than assigning a salesperson to the same task and are more effective than sending a branded email blast. Companies that adopt sales robots and deploy them across various use cases will accelerate their sales by finding prospects they could not have reached without robots' help. Notes Sales AI Assistant Packaging, January 28, 2021, Conversica https://www.conversica.com/ai-assistants/sales-marketing/packaging/