Toll Free: 1-877-695-7388

GTA: (647) 699-2838

Search Engine People
  • SEO
  • SEM
  • CRO
  • Display
  • Blog
  • Why Us
  • Contact
  • Join Our Team
  • Get A Quote

Toll Free: 1-877-695-7388

GTA: (647) 699-2838

How To Track Your Outreach Campaign

David Schneider | October 27th, 2015
Tweet
Share17
Share
Pin2
19 Shares

outreach-management

If you're running a marketing campaign you need to start tracking your metrics.

I know - it's annoying.

The thing about tracking metrics is, at first glance, it doesn't seem like it's going to improve the campaign.

Afterall, the emails are already sent - so why does tracking matter?

Three reasons:

Reason #1: Tracking your metrics will help you know when and with whom to follow up, which has been shown to increase your success rate substantially (more on this later).

Reason #2: If you plan on running future marketing campaigns (most people do), then in order to improve you will want to know what worked and what didn't.

Reason #3: In order to judge the ROI on your time, you're going to want to start tracking the results.

So now that you understand the "why", let's get into the "how"!

What Am I Tracking & Testing?

Before you get started you should think about what tests you want to implement in your outreach campaign.

To keep it simple, in this campaign we're focused purely on email, so we're only testing templates, but I'll talk about additional tests you can do later.

What Templates Got The Highest Open Rate?

Half the battle of outreach is just getting someone to open your email.

Often, that starts with the subject. Testing different subject lines is key, which is why we want to know the open rate.

The open rate is defined as:

Number Of Opens / Number Of Sent Emails

When you find the highest open rate hold on to that subject line and use it in your next campaign, then try completely different subjects than before.

Although you should know that "the best subject line" always depends, here's some best practices to get you started.

What Templates Got The Most (Positive) Replies

Opens are great, but they don't guarantee an end of the funnel conversion. In this case it's a reply, but not just any reply, a positive reply.

Therefore we want to see which templates produced the highest reply rate.

The reply rate is defined as:

The Number Of Replies / Number Of Sent Emails

If you find out that one email got a higher reply rate, but not the highest open rate, you have a great test for the next outreach campaign in which you can combine the message body of the reply rate winner with the subject line of the open rate winner.

However, know that the open rate and the reply rate are not mutually exclusive, so don't just assume combining them will always result in the best template.

Like subject lines, message body is very unique to the campaign, but here are some templates to jog your creative juices.

What Metrics Should Your Track?

It's possible to go way overboard on metrics. When I run outreach campaigns I try to stick to the basics. Here's what I'm looking at:

  • Who You Contacted
  • When You Contacted Them
  • Which Template You Used
  • Did They Open The Email?
  • Did They Reply To The Email
  • Did They Click A Link In The Email
  • When Did They Reply

As you can see I'm including the basic metrics necessary for the tests I want to run.

Now, you want to to track whether or not certain actions were taken, and importantly, when were they taken.

Why - when?

The when is going to inform the follow up, which is critical to improving your response rate.

How Many People Do I Need In Each Test?

Statistics is not something to be taken lightly.

There are legitimate formulas that you can use to tell if there is a statistically significant difference between two tests.

As a general rule of thumb I like to include at least 100 people in each test cell.

What Tools Should You Use To Track?

Alright, so you have some neat metrics to track and tests to run. How should you go about it?

It really depends on your preference. There are of course free tools that you can use to manage the campaign, but they are not going to help you get things like Open Rate or Click Rate, and they aren't meant to be full on CRMs.

For those you will need more robust tools which have that kind of tracking built in.

I've included several well known ones below.

Free Tools

  • Excel
  • Google Docs

Freemium Tools

  • Yesware
  • Sidekick

Premium Outreach CRMs

  • NinjaOutreach
  • BuzzStream
  • PitchBox

How Do You Know If You Should Follow Up?

Ah the follow up.

I've read numerous case studies in which following up played a critical role in improving the response rate, such as this one about a 333% improvement in a cold outreach campaign.

According to that same article you should be following up 6 times.

That decision is entirely up to you (and perhaps something you should test).

Regardless, I like to follow up at least twice with anyone who doesn't respond.

  • One after 3 days
  • One after 7 days

After that, I've been known to throw in the towel.

Other Ideas For Tests

We only discussed a few basic tests to get started, and that's because if you're only dealing with email templates it's relatively limited as to what you can test.

However if you're willing to introduce some other actions, the sky's the limit.

Engagement

For example, you can combine your outreach with different attempts at engaging with the prospect, such as:

  • Commenting on their blog
  • Tweeting at them
  • Following them on social media

You can divide the population into cells and see if these engagement tactics increase your success rate to justify the extra time it takes.

Personalization

Another frequently talked about test is to add more personalization to the outreach email. Sure, you can start with basic custom fields, but you can also spend more time referencing a recent article you read by them or leverage whatever else you know about them to see if this helps improve your response rate.

Follow Ups

Naturally you can test different follow up sequences as well. Not just what is sent but when it's sent, or also based on what action was taken (for example, send one follow up series for a click and one for an open). This type of logic based testing is relatively complex, but doable.

Different Populations

If you have different populations as part of your outreach, you can split them into different cells and feed them the exact same outreach sequence to see how they respond.

This is very useful if you are getting your prospects from different sources, and you want to understand if they're different.

Conclusion

With everything I've done in business and in life, I always see the most improvements when I implement tracking.

I've brought it offline into things like fitness and nutrition and seen it work wonders. The same is true for marketing.

How are you going to track your next outreach campaign?

Now Read:

  • What is Outreach and how can a Common Business Owner do it
  • How To Do Blogger Outreach: The Strategy, Knowledge, and Tools
  • How To Execute A Killer Outreach and Link Building Campaign

Next Steps:

  • What is Outreach and how can a Common Business Owner do it
  • How To Do Blogger Outreach: The Strategy, Knowledge, and Tools
  • How To Execute A Killer Outreach and Link Building Campaign

Hand-Picked Related Articles:

  • What is Outreach and how can a Common Business Owner do it
  • How To Do Blogger Outreach: The Strategy, Knowledge, and Tools
  • How To Execute A Killer Outreach and Link Building Campaign

* Lead image adapted from European Parliament

Tweet
Share17
Share
Pin2
19 Shares
Posted in Inbound Marketing, Marketing

About the Author: David Schneider

David Schneider is the cofounder of NinjaOutreach, an innovative new Blogger Outreach software for marketers. You can also find him on twitter @ninjaoutreach and at SelfMadeBusinessman.

NinjaOutreach

Recent Posts

  • Maximizing Your E-Commerce Sales:
    A CRO Audit Guide
  • Movin’ On Up! Why Migrating to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Should be a Priority
  • A Year in Review: The Digital Marketing Trends That Defined 2021
  • The Basics of Video Marketing
  • Just How Much Do Google Reviews Impact Your SEO Ranking?

Categories

  • Analytics & ROI Analysis
  • Company News
  • Content
  • Conversion Optimization
  • CRO
  • Display Advertising/RTB
  • Email Marketing
  • En Español
  • En Français
  • Inbound Marketing
  • Lead Nurture & Marketing Automation
  • Local Search
  • Marketing
  • Mobile
  • Partnership Marketing
  • PPC
  • PR
  • SEO
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Web Design

Additional Posts

Personalization As Emotional Trigger In Brand Marketing

October 26th, 2015 | by Joydeep Bhattacharya

How To Auto-Post To Social Networks From WordPress

October 23rd, 2015 | by Danny Hall

4 Simple Ways To Apply Storytelling To Marketing

October 22nd, 2015 | by Mansi Dhorda

LET'S TALK

Need more information or want to get in touch?

Get in touch!
  • SEO
  • SEM
  • Display
  • Blog
  • Why Us
  • Join Our Team
  • Contact Us
  • Local SEO
  • Small Business SEO
  • Enterprise SEO
  • International SEO

LOCATION

1305 Pickering Parkway,
5th Floor Pickering, L1V 3P2

PHONE

Toll Free: 1-877-695-7388
Greater Toronto Area: (647) 699-2838

Social

© Search Engine People Inc. 2023 – Canada’s Top Digital Agency
© SEP 2023 – A Search Engine People Company | Privacy Policy

Search Engine People