Virtuance Unleashes the Power of Mailshake to Achieve an 83% Open Rate
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What happens when you combine a great product with an amazing email outreach campaign?
In the case of Virtuance, a real estate technology company that provides photography and 3D tours for thousands of realtors nationwide, you get an amazing 83% open rate and lots of new leads.
We spoke to Michael Yates, VP of Marketing at Virtuance, to find out how he uses Mailshake to achieve such incredible numbers. Here’s something that won’t surprise anyone who has read any of our other case studies — a high level of personalization plays a big part!
Surgical Precision Leads to 627/756 Opens
Achieving success through cold emails isn’t just about the emails themselves; it’s also about the quality of your list (here are some tips to help you build yours). If you’re not getting the right prospects into your pipeline, then you’re not going to achieve your goals — even if you’ve crafted the greatest email of all time.
This is where Virtuance set its campaign on course for success — through an extremely targeted list. As they say, “Our list was created with surgical precision,” focusing on the prospects that stood to receive the greatest value from their product.
With an array of native and 3rd party integrations, Mailshake makes the process of building and qualifying prospects list much simpler. Through our LinkedIn plugin (and others), it’s much easier to qualify your leads and make sure you’re focusing your resources on the right people.
Personalization vs “Spray and Pray”
Obviously, a good email list is only part of the equation. You’ve also got to use your creativity and knowledge of your audience to get people to open your emails and take action.
If you’re building an email campaign and you’re deciding between volume, and quality content, then it always pays to choose the latter.
Michael believes that one of the most important factors in the success of this campaign has been the level of personalization. Although it takes more effort to personalize your emails, it greatly increases the value of your content, and this can be the defining factor when it comes to opens and responses.
Virtuance moved away from the “spray and pray” approach and has seen amazing results.
A key factor in this success was Michael’s understanding that the perfect email campaign is about experimenting and optimizing, and he continues to tweak his campaigns.
As he says, “Do your homework and never stop optimizing. Know what your clients need to be the best version of themselves and focus on messaging that helps them get there.”
The Killer Subject Line
Subject lines are so important in a cold email campaign.
People get so many emails in their inbox — a few of those will be high priority, but the majority won’t. This means they’re constantly skimming through their inbox to decide what requires attention and what doesn’t.
You’ve got limited time to grab people’s attention, so the subject line needs to be completely on-point.
This is where Virtuance made the most of Mailshake’s extensive testing. They tested different subject lines until they found the right formula and eventually reached their 83% open rate.
Let’s be honest, we’d pretty much all take an 83% open rate for a cold email campaign, so, what was the killer subject line? Unfortunately, in such a competitive industry we can’t spill the beans on that, but we can give you some great pointers to help you craft amazing subject lines.
Brief But Valuable
One of the things we see over and over again when we showcase successful outreach campaigns is the ability to combine brevity with value. It’s about respecting people’s time, while still offering something that benefits them.
It’s easy to get carried away with the idea that more is better (and it’s natural to want to try and mention all the benefits of your product or service), but when it comes to cold email, the opposite is often true.
As Michael says, they kept things simple, “The email was short and sweet. Using the PAS framework (Pain – Agitate – Solution), we offered a free trial of our services to help the recipient sell slow-moving real estate listings.”
PAS is a template that’s commonly used in sales, and it’s one that can be extremely successful as Virtuance’s results show.
One of the first things to remember when crafting your email is not to ask what your prospects can do for you — ask yourself what you can do for them, and then convey that in a simple email.
Mailshake Helps Keep It Simple
Like many things in marketing and sales, cold email shouldn’t be complicated. It’s a step-by-step process that relies on constant optimization:
- Build a targeted list
- Personalize your approach
- Write killer subject lines
- Keep it brief
- Offer value
- Keep testing
Mailshake gives you all the tools you need to do this, and it lays things out in a way that encourages you to follow best practices. When done well, cold email can offer you an excellent ROI, and we want to make it as simple as possible for you to achieve this.
That’s why we’re always investing in new informative content, running cold email master classes, and offering virtual office hours to help you get the most out of your campaigns. Optimizing is key, but there’s nothing stopping you from getting a headstart by piggybacking off our experiences.
Like Virtuance, you too can achieve great results for your business, so give it a try.
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