Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Made in the UK for HR consultants worldwide. You're listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast.
[00:00:13] Hello, James here and welcome to this week's podcast. Can HR consultants buy cold data and turn it into clients? In this week's main event, I'm going to answer this question and give you a very top level crash course in B2B cold email marketing. And in today's thought of the week, I'm going to talk to you about what I love most about my life here in Bali and what every business owner could take away from it. So let's jump straight. In this week's main event, can HR consultants buy cold data and turn it into clients? So, so many consultants ask me this question and the short answer is yes. Even though email marketing has become a little bit more tricky these days, it is still a really great way to get new clients and grow your consultancy. There's just a lot to think about and get right. And that's why in this week's main event, I'm going to give you a very top level crash course on cold email marketing to help you get started. Okay, so the first thing that we need to talk about are the legalities of B2B cold email marketing, which luckily for us, is a little more flexible than B2C cold email marketing. In the UK we have GDPR to think about, and in the US you have the Can Spam Act. Now, based on my experience, it is my understanding, and I'm choosing those words very carefully, that you can legally send cold emails to other businesses without permission as long as you comply with the legal requirements. And both laws stress that the nature of your emails need to be highly relevant to who you're targeting and you need to follow cold email best practices, like always offering an opt out. So in short, you're legally allowed to send cold emails to other businesses without permission as long as you follow the rules and cover myself. Please ensure you seek your own legal advice before getting started. Right now that's out of the way, we need to talk about the actual infrastructure you need to start sending cold emails. And there's one rule that you need to follow. You should never use your main domain name and email address for cold email marketing. So I have two main domain names, marketingphrconsultants.com and the hrmarketingguide.com and I use these domain names for my website and emails. In the world of the Internet, each domain has its own authority and reputation, which can affect things like SEO and email deliverability. So if I started using my main domain names for cold email marketing, it's very likely that the reputation of those domains would be negatively affected due to potential spam complaints, blacklisting and low deliverability rates, which is inevitable when you start cold email marketing. So to avoid this and to protect your main domain name, you should buy a new domain name for the purposes of cold email marketing. And this should be a business email, not a personal one. So years ago I bought a bunch of domain names like hrgrowth.com and I set up an email account called hellorgrowth.com however, you can't just buy a domain name, set up mailchimp and start cold emailing hundreds of people the next day. There's a warm up process that you need to go through, so I would advise buying a few domain names and using a warm up service for a few months before getting started. This will give your cold emails in the future the best chance to be received by who you're sending them to. Once you've done this, you can then decide what email sender or CRM you're going to use to send the cold emails. The likes of mailerlite and sendinblue are quite hot on people using cold data and it's likely that your account will get blocked. Mailchimp is an obvious one to go for because you have up to 2,000 free contacts and they're a little bit more flexible with who you contact. I actually use a workplace Gmail account and use a plugin called Mailking to send my cold emails because the reputation of Gmail is arguably higher than mailchimp, which has a big shared server and potentially comprised email reputation and deliverability as a result. Okay, so what I've discussed is usually the bit that blows people's head off, so let me summarize those points quickly. So in the world of the Internet, domain names have their own authority and reputation. For that reason, you should never use the main domain names you're using for your website or emails. Instead, you should buy some new business emails and use a warm up service for a few months to improve the reputation of your domain before sending. And then you can decide what email sender you're going to use like mailchimp or Gmail. Okay, so now we've whiz through the legal requirements of B2B called email marketing and the infrastructure you'll need. You'll need to think about who you're going to be emailing. Now you've probably heard me bang on about creating target markets before and I'm going to do it again. Yay, so if I said to you, who do you want to target or work with? You'll probably say, SMEs in insert area here with 20 to 50 employees. Now, from a cold email marketing point of view, this isn't focused enough because the words you'll use to speak to a manufacturing firm, to a dentist will be wildly different. And when it comes to any sort of marketing, the best advice I could ever give you is that relevance increases results. That is literally the key to successful marketing. Just be super relevant to who you're targeting and it will work. And this also aligns with the legal requirements of B2B marketing too. So when it comes to cold email marketing, you need to be very specific with who you're targeting and you'll need to focus on one industry at a time. Right, moving on then. So once you've picked an industry you want to target, you'll need to figure out the best way to get cold data. And there are two main ways you can do it. You can either scrape sites like Google or industry directories, and yes, that is the official term, I'm sorry. Or you can buy data from the millions of websites that are out there that do it. So I've done both in the past and it kind of depends on what industry you're targeting and what data you need and how you need it qualifying. But typically I prefer scraping from a directory just because the data is a little bit more trusted and then getting a data miner or cleaner to go through and enrich that data for me with the data points I need in order to qualify it.
[00:06:09] So buying, sourcing, scraping and cleaning data isn't always cheap, I just need to warn you. But it's definitely a long term investment well spent if you follow B2B Cold Email Best practice.
[00:06:21] So now imagine you've got your list of dentists that you're wanting to target. As an example, what are you going to say in your emails? And what actions do you want your lovely dentist friends to make? Right? So this is where most people I know go wrong. So they send a bunch of salesy type emails out with the hopes that someone on that list is ready to speak to a HR consultant and buy today. I call this one time marketing. That's when you try to grab someone's attention and sell to them straight away. But this isn't how people work. It's very rare for someone to receive a cold email from a business they've never heard of and take the very engaged action of booking in a call or even buying you need to have a relationship with someone before they're ready to do this. And that's why you need to remember my three step lead generation process. So step one is to grow multiple audiences like your LinkedIn connections or your opted in email marketing list. So when I say opted in, this is different to your cold list because your your opted in list of those people who have given you permission to contact them. There is a level of intent, interest and engagement there. Step two is to build a relationship with your list over time and step three is to convert the relationship. Now for me, the purposes of your cold email marketing and any other direct marketing for that matter is to feed this system or funnel whatever you want to call it. So instead of asking people to book in a call with you or buy now, I would rather you offered them some sort of lead magnet to get them to opt into your main email marketing list. So what I've done recently is created a free quick guide to my flagship video program, how to Package up and Sell HR to make More money. And I've been cold emailing HR consultants in the US offering them a free copy using the following message. So hi name, I know how difficult it is for you to package up and sell hr and that's why I've created a free quick guide called how to Package up and Sell HR to make More Money. It will talk you through the brand new framework I've created called the HR Service Pyramid. This framework will help you organize HR in a way that's easier to package up into recurring revenue. It's taken from my flagship video program where all of the strategies have been created, field tested and approved by successful HR consultants. Would you like me to email you a free copy? And instead of sending them off to a website or lead page, I've asked them to directly reply to the email which is very good for your email deliverability. Double whammy there. And also if you don't have a copy of the Quick Guide and you would like one, then just email me at james the HRMarketingGuy.com and I'll send you a free copy across. So yeah, when it comes to your own target market, you need to think about what your lead magnet is going to be. Most likely it will be compliance related and within the HR marketing box we have loads of compliance related guides that you can copy and personalize to make this job easier too. So that concludes my quick crash course in cold email marketing today. As I said at the start of the podcast, even though cold email marketing is a little trickier than what it used to be. And there's a lot to think about. I still think it's worth the investment and time if you follow best practice and get all of the different variables right. And if this is something that you would like to focus on and need a holding hand, please feel welcome to book in a consulting call with me. James is Thought of the Week One of the things that I really love about my life here in Bali is that I'm learning from people again and I found it so motivating and rewarding. I've always been into the gym and staying fit and on the whole I found it easy to motivate myself in the past, but then with whatever you do, you kind of hit your own glass ceiling and find yourself coasting along because you don't really know how to push yourself or improve, then you don't see the results you want, become frustrated and your motivation dwindles. And when I first got to Bali, I kind of got myself stuck in a bit of a rut. So I found a lovely Italian PT called Luigi and decided to start having in person PT sessions with him. And I've been loving it. I'm learning new techniques, my form is so much better, I can see improvements already, and most importantly, my spark for the gym is back, which I'm so happy about because it is a really good, healthy outlet for me. And the app we use to track my workouts and progress told me that I had lifted the equivalent to three drafts today, which I thought was really cool. Anyway, I've also been having paddle lessons. Paddle is basically tennis, kind of just with a bat thing instead of a racket. I must have played some sort of tennis as a child, but really can't remember and I wasn't expecting to be any good at it. But then when I went to play with a friend, I actually surprised myself. I could hit the ball in the direction it was meant to go in and it was really fun. I really enjoyed myself and it's great cardio. So I was like, why not have lessons too? And then I've been learning more about yoga. So rather than just going to a yoga class and struggling my way through like a beached whale on the mat, I've been going to workshops to learn more about the practice itself, the philosophy behind it, and how to perform each pose and flow correctly. And by learning about it and understanding it at a deeper level, I've been able to get so much more enjoyment from it too. So throughout my podcast episodes I always talk about the importance of working with experts. As a consultancy owner, you're expected to be a finance expert, a marketing expert, and all of these other hats you have to wear in addition to being a HR expert. And it can be really difficult. So if you are a bit stuck, then find an expert to work in. Soak up their knowledge, soak up their enthusiasm, and get your spark back. If growing your consultancy is something you're struggling with right now, I'm here to help. Just get in touch and let's have a chat. You've been listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast, helping you to get new clients and create a life you love.
