How AlchemyLeads improved lead outreach with automation

Like any business, AlchemyLeads succeeds when we turn leads into satisfied clients. For us, that process starts with lead outreach. We recently revamped our process—adding automation and more personalization—and have seen 240% growth in total monthly leads in the most recent quarter. 

AlchemyLeads offers search engine optimization (SEO) services to our clients, plus social media management, content marketing, web design and development, link outreach, pay-per-click, and more. However, like any other reputable digital marketing company, we are always looking to help more clients attain more online authority and increase revenue. As such, outreach forms a critical part of our day-to-day activities. From finding prospects to sending emails to booking calls, we do a lot in our outreach process.

What's more, we're always finding ways to improve our outreach and sales processes to be more effective. That's why we started using Zapier to automate our sales outreach process. 

Our old lead outreach method

An email campaign is among the most popular ways of marketing communications. However, if you're only using a default template, it's getting in the way of your ability to connect and engage with leads. Our previous outreach method relied only on cold emails—sending information about your business to someone who hasn't connected with you already, to try and get their attention for your offer or service.

Ideally, our process involved sending a personalized email to a prospect and a follow-up email after three days. If the prospect did not respond, we sent another follow-up email after five days and a breakup email after another five days had passed.

We used Mailshake to automate our email outreach process. We personalized every email, used a persona, and researched our leads to find what's unique about them

While we saw some results with this method, there were challenges. For instance, we could not find email addresses for some leads, making it hard for us to reach them.

We also struggled to get prospects to book a meeting with us. And there's a good reason for this. Most high-level business owners get many emails asking for meetings every day, and as expected, they just can't make the time for all these people.

Our new lead outreach method

As a leading SEO agency, we are always looking to do better. That's why we decided to review our outreach process to make it better and more effective.

As with our old method, we start by making a list of leads. However, in our new process, we check whether our leads have a verified email before sending a personalized message. After we've sent the first email, we wait for a day, and if they have not responded, we send a LinkedIn request.

Once a prospect accepts a LinkedIn request, we tag them in HighLevel CRM and send a 100% personalized message or a voice note. After that, we offer them a video audit after one day (whether they reply to our LinkedIn message or not) instead of asking them to book a time.

We only send a follow-up email if the prospect doesn't accept our LinkedIn request in our new outreach method. This reduces the chances that the prospects will mark our email as spam. We also include the unsubscribe link for prospects that would not want to continue receiving our emails.

When we can't find a verified email for a prospect, we send them a LinkedIn campaign.

We're getting 10x more results with this new process than our previous method. Once we send a video audit, which includes an overview of their website's technical performance,  there's a high chance that they will book a call with us.

Once that happens, we tag the prospect on HighLevel CRM to keep track of everything before sending them a drip email campaign. 

The idea here is to presell them through video, content, case studies, etc., before the actual meeting. Then, if we don't close them after the first meeting, we send them a post-meeting drip campaign and offer a follow-up call before the second meeting.

The need for automation

As you grow your business, you realize that you are spending more time on repetitive work. This is especially the case with prospecting. But since prospecting is such a critical part of our sales process, we need to find ways to improve it rather than do away with it.

Sending out emails to prospects and then following up on them can take a toll on your team, reaching a point where they feel overwhelmed. That was our story, and we needed a way to automate our sales outreach. That's where we added Zapier.

Using Zapier to automate multiple sales touches in our outbound lead generation processes

Prospecting is time-consuming and monotonous. But for us, it is a reliable way to grow our business and increase sales and revenue. Luckily, Zapier allows you to automate the sales prospecting process and reach more leads without feeling overwhelmed.

Before Zapier, we only used Mailshake to automate email in our outreach process. Although we got some results, it's nothing compared to what we've achieved with Zapier. Zapier has helped us:

• Reduce the amount of work for our sales reps

• Boost motivation for our sales team

• Generate more leads and increase revenue

Specifically, here's how we've benefited from Integrating Zapier into our process:

Bringing the whole outreach process together

Marketing and outreach are core to our business. 

Zapier helps us streamline our sales outreach process across tools without people needing to complete time-consuming and tiring manual tasks. Whether it's keeping up with our email subscriber list or lead management, integrating Zapier with our CRM helps bring the whole thing together.

Generating new leads

At AlchemyLeads, we mainly source our leads via email and LinkedIn. Zapier helps handle the process for us, allowing our team to focus on other essential tasks. What's more, when we start getting leads, Zapier helps in tracking and distribution from getting the first discovery call on the calendar and integrating leads into our CRM, to setting up the initial project or campaign and responding to support tickets.

Here are some ways to do that:

Add new contacts to campaigns

Zapier makes it easier for us to add new contacts from different lead generation platforms, for instance, LinkedIn, to our email list. This way, we can easily reach out to our new leads with 100% personalized messages, increasing the chasing of closing them. We also send our Shopify customers handwritten notes after purchase.

Lead management

Reaching out to new leads is one thing, but it is something else entirely to manage them in your system. If you use the traditional outreach method, an influx of leads can easily translate into more manual work.

With Zapier, the whole process is automated, and the new leads are automatically routed to our CRM. As a result, we use less time to manage our leads, giving us time to do other important tasks. 

LinkedIn outreach automation with Expandi

LinkedIn is a critical part of our outreach process. However, going through the various profiles based on your target audience and shortlisting prospects is daunting and time-consuming. We've started saving time by using Expandi to automate outreach on LinkedIn.

With Expandi, we can find our target audience with ease and achieve a high engagement rate. Besides, Expandi offers more advanced personalization—we can go beyond personalizing the first and last name of the prospect to create a more targeted message with images and GIFs.

Get custom notifications so you can respond quickly

Our customers are the source of our revenue, and we want to respond as quickly as possible. In fact, most prospects will equate a fast response time with good customer service.

We strive to keep our prospects and customers happy by keeping our response time low. It's also an opportunity to stand out from the competition as other companies can take up to 12 hours or even days to respond to their prospects and customers.

Just as we added Zapier to help us capture leads in our CRM, we are also using Zapier to ensure we respond quickly. We use Zapier to send alerts to tools like Slack for important actions in Calendly, HighLevel, Expandi, and Mailshake. This way, when a prospect sends us an email or responds to our LinkedIn campaign, we'll get a notification so we can respond to them quickly.

Optimize your lead generation journey with Zapier

As your business grows, you realize that some of the things that worked before no longer work. If you feel that finding and following up with leads is taking up most of your time, the solution lies in automation.

Zapier has allowed us to automate and personalize our lead generation process without feeling overwhelmed. Ideally, Zapier is the glue that brings the whole thing together. As a result, we can respond to prospects on time, which leads to more conversions and revenue.

This was a guest post from Sean Chaudhary, founder and CEO at AlchemyLeads. AlchemyLeads brings a flexible approach to designing and executing complex digital marketing strategies. Want to see your work on the Zapier blog? Check out our guidelines and get in touch.