Our client, a 3D visualization and animation studio, provides a wide scope of digital services from 3D Interior visualizations to virtual reality. They do interior and exterior visualizations, floor plans, and even animation – all in 3D. Among their clients are builders, developers, real estate and marketing agencies, interior designers, and architectural bureaus from different countries.

The client had only 1 profile for outreach, but he wanted to squeeze the maximum out of this already successful campaign, so we suggested another level of follow-up (email) as we understand that there will be always a part of the audience who might ignore LinkedIn but respond to a more traditional channel.

The reality is that lots of people prefer to do business communication via email. So there’s a good chance that those who didn’t respond to lead generation messages on LinkedIn, will answer an email message. So we started collecting the email addresses of the prospects whom we previously contacted on LinkedIn to reach out and remind them about our client.

What was the real challenge of what seemed to be a simple task? The client wanted to promote their service amongst senior-level positions like CEOs and Founders of various 3D visualization studios. You may have a real hard time discerning a good time and way to approach a busy CEO. Here’s how we did it.

First of all, we had to make sure that we’ve got the technical part right. This is often an overlooked part of an email campaign, after all, we’re just sending emails, right? Wrong. Without the proper technical preparation, your emails will never reach an inbox.

The first thing to start from was the database of recipients. The key here is to have a clean email database; meaning that you are sure that all the emails on the list are real and are still active.

You will need to make sure that the right messages reach the right people. If we’d fail to reach their inbox, we risk ruining your domain credibility–that’s how email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft can tell if you’re a real person, a bot, or just spam. So, if your messages are bad and your list is bad, they can result in low open rates and reply rates, making it even more difficult to succeed later.Our email database is always based on the client’s Target Audience. That’s our secret weapon for a successful campaign. There are two things we never do:

purchase email databases

send cold emails to contacts we don’t know or are connected to

We’re not against those methods, but they can cause a lot of problems so that’s just not how we do it at Respect.Studio.

And now, how do we make sure that the database is clean and people will actually receive our emails? When we are preparing the email database for a client, we first validated all the email addresses via an email checker service. We need to know which addresses are still valid, written correctly, and will not send our messages directly to the Spam folder. You can use various platforms for this. Read more about which are the most suitable tools for successful email marketing campaigns here.

We use Neverbounce and we used it for this specific campaign.

After running emails through the verification process, we saw which emails were valid and safe to send emails to. 

We imported almost 400 validated email addresses to the email tool we use for email campaigns. There are various tools out there that work great, but to ensure our success, we use a combination of tools that allows us to do a perfect balance between sales engagement automation and safe email sending. 

We use both Apollo & SendGrid to run this email campaign. This provides us with the biggest number of features, allowing the email campaign to run smoothly and effectively. Check out which features we get access to from this combination in this table:

We understand very well that in the case of this specific client an email campaign could not just build awareness about the client’s services but was also good for nurturing their leads. Not that many people buy a house right after they see an advertisement on some unknown website. Right? So we can’t assume that a client will buy from receiving just one email. 

So we created informative yet easy-to-read email scripts.

The 4-level scripts included:

A simple and polite first email message with information about the company’s services and a soft call to action: to talk about a possible project. 

An informative second message with additional valuable information for the prospect: educational content that could help the prospect to learn more about the service. 

The third message with a direct call to action, where we point out the benefits of collaboration with the client

And a follow-up message to those who replied that they were not interested thanking them for a valuable connection. Actually, thanks to this follow-up we were able to convert one negative answer into a positive one!

For our client, we A/B tested two types of subject lines to see which one performs better and make sure that more people open our emails: 

A subject line with an emphasis on the offer/information for the prospect, to arouse their interest and make them want to know more. 

A subject line asking a question to engage people and start a dialogue with them.

The results we got showed that subject lines that asked a question usually perform better. Such emails got a higher open rate (25% more) and engaged the audience more. 

The results we’ve got were more than the client expected: 

We sent emails to 580 people.  The delivery rate of the campaign was 98.4%. Open rate – 25.7% (146). Replies  – 11 (10 + 1 from negative). The results we’ve got were better than the average per industry if you keep in mind that the average open rate for Creative Services/Agencies is 21% (Mailchimp industry benchmarks).

This email marketing campaign is a great example of how getting the technical part right is critical for success. But let’s not forget that an email campaign would not be an effective one without sending great content. Together, they can increase your number of leads and start valuable new conversations with potential clients.

Thanks to this campaign we were able to:

Grow client’s network with 11 new business partners, plus reach average Open Rate higher than 25%. 

Considering that our prospects are senior-level professionals that receive dozens of emails daily, this campaign is a huge success;