How to Use Cold Data Effectively

Buying cold data. It’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea at first, then later down the line you realise that it’s going to take a lot more work than just shoving them into your CRM and pinging out some marketing emails.

Although, buying these lists is not the only way your company is amalgamating cold data. If you have a database full of contacts you haven’t engaged with you for a long time, then they themselves are going cold too.

In both scenarios, over time you will see an increasing number of contacts opting out of communications or showing disinterest, thus increasing churn and bounce rates, decreasing the quality of your database, and damaging the reputation of your business.

So, how can you effectively sell to these cold contacts? Here is a 3-step process to make use of your contact database, warm up cold leads, and convert them into paying customers:

1. Target you social media ads

LinkedIn and Facebook provide great options for targeted ads for specific audiences. If you have a database of emails, then you can target your social media ads to those specific contacts to increase awareness of your brand. A one or two week campaign focused towards generating engagement can help you define your brand to these specific contacts before moving further down the funnel to other communications. 

How HubSpot helps

In HubSpot, with the Facebook and LinkedIn Ads integration, create audiences to allow you to be more specific about who sees your social media ads. Create audiences based on dozens of factors such as website visitors, HubSpot contacts, or your existing audiences.

2. Use email marketing

Email marketing is the most powerful tool to warm cold business leads. Unfortunately, blasting out emails focused on selling your product or service don’t work anymore. Here are three steps to create an effective email campaign to convert your cold leads into hot prospects:

Segment and personalise

An unpersonalised email is only going to set them off leading to a very high unsubscribe rate and diminishing open and click rates. To solve this you need to personalise your communication to a granular level and that starts with segmentation.

How HubSpot helps

With HubSpot, build personas around your contact attributes, and create specific lists depending on them. From there, nurture these contacts with the workflow automation builder and set enrollment triggers to get them involved. Add personalisation tokens to your email to automatically tailor your emails to the specific contact.

Send qualifying emails

Qualifying emails are used to gage contact engagement during communication. These should be sent for educational purposes and shouldn’t necessarily communicate details about your services. It is good practice to send a sequence of emails at regular intervals that educate the leads and then communicate your service. An example of this would be identifying a problem and offering them a solution in the form of a blog post or eBook.

Now identify the list of contacts who showed maximum engagement and reach out to them with personalised emails.

How HubSpot helps

With the sequencing tool, queue up a series of emails and follow-up tasks to automatically send to your prospects over time. Use the readily available data derived from these emails to identify the best contacts to target.

Introduce and prospect

Now you can introduce your product or service as the best solution to their problems. This set of emails explain your product, showcase testimonials and case studies and offer a free trial or demo. 

How HubSpot helps

With in-email CTAs and meetings in the email builder, enable your leads to easily set up a meeting with you by filling in a form and selecting a time slot from your calendar - all from their inbox.

3. Get on the phone

Once you’ve identified the key people who might be interested in your services out of your cold data, start calling them. This is the best way to build an interpersonal rapport with contacts. If the person is interested, further calls should be made based on the interaction history. If they are not interested at the time, simply end on a positive note saying that you will remain in touch.

How HubSpot helps

The HubSpot calling tool allows you to call contacts from your browser or phone and log and record calls on your contacts' timelines in HubSpot.

As you can see, cold data doesn’t have to be a pain in the backside. With the right strategy in mind and a little patience, you can turn these bought lists or dry databases into closed sales. If you still need convincing and want an example of how BBD Boom has done this for a global business, check out our recent webinar with CMO of Lumi Global, Kerry Leighton-Bailey, where we discussed how transforming cold data into leads was just one contributing factor in turning a redundant HubSpot account into a seven-figure revenue machine.