Revamping Outreach at Wonderful Machine
Wonderful Machine is a photo production company that offers marketing and consulting services to photographers. They also have a roster of between 600 and 700 photographers that they do passive marketing for on a regular basis. One of the biggest projects that we would work on was what we called, “Outreach”. Outreach consisted of having marketing associates and associate producers send cold emails to our contacts at brands, agencies, and publications to promote our shoot production capabilities and our roster of photographers. In these emails we would ask for a call or in person meeting if they were close enough for a day trip.
When I was initially tasked with running our outreach, we would average one round of in person meeting a month and maybe a 2 calls per week. By the time I was finished with outreach we had just come off of a 10-week meeting streak in which I had arranged nearly 40 meetings and we had begun to average about 4 calls a week. It had gotten to the point towards the end, where I couldn’t actually attend all of the meetings and calls myself and had to enlist the help of some of my coworkers.
So how did I do it?
When I took over outreach, Wonderful Machine already had a incredibly extensive list of contacts from agencies, brands, and publications in their CRM. They were also relatively well organized. The main thing that was holding them back was the method they used for sending emails, their copy, and the strategy they used for segmenting their contacts.
The first issue I tackled was the method for sending emails. WM had been using a 1 to 1 email sent from Gmail. When I first started, it felt like I was trying to dig my way to China with a spoon. To help get us moving, I convinced my boss to let us tryout a email software called Yesware. Yesware allowed us to send multiple custom emails at once and schedule follow-ups, which became incredibly important. In fact, once I had everything set up, I realized that about 60% of the outreach that converted into meetings or calls was a result of a follow-up email.
Now that we had a better email sending method, I began to tinker with our copy. I noticed that the simpler, shorter, and more straightforward the copy was, the more we converted. I also ran dozens of A/B tests on subject lines, call-to-actions, and introductions. Once I had run a decent amount of experiments, I noticed that publication clients converted more often than agency and brand clients. I asked around the office about this and was told that they simply had more time. Having sat down with all three different types of clients, I got the sense that that was true, but it couldn’t have been the whole picture, so I kept digging.
At first, we only segmented our contacts by “near” and “far” so that we could ask for meeting or calls. I knew that was too simple from the beginning, but I was still learning about who my clients were. Now that I had a good picture of what their concerns were, what their day was like, etc. I was able to begin targeting them more effectively. I started off small, by segmenting off agencies and brands from publications. Over time, I learned more about agencies and brands and was able to further adjust my language and email timing to segment that group into two as well. As I ran more experiments and met with more clients, I became better and better at targeting them and discovered nuances that would make my emails more effective for more targeted groups. By the end of my time in outreach, I had developed 12 different segments or really 6 segments for meeting outreach and 6 for calls. Some segments converted better than others, but they all converted more often than they did before and as a whole, the entire contact list converted far more often.
Below is a list of some of the organizations I was able to meet with using the email outreach system that I developed. On the left are publications, in the middle are agencies, and towards the right are brands. Below that are links to a few blog articles that I wrote about meetings that I went on as a result of my email marketing efforts.
