Email Marketing Case Study
How I Sent 130K Cold Emails Compliantly
Secret Email Marketing Strategy that Delivers Emails to your customers' Inbox… Guaranteed!
How I turned a Business Destroying Setback into the opportunity of a lifetime!
I built a data aggregation platform over six months that allows me to generate a list of everyone searching Google for literally any keyword you could think of. We toiled and toiled under the premise that our data providers would be providing the opt-in data that would allow us to contact these consumers using email, text, and phone calls.
After finally building out our data hub, our API and turning on our data feeds from over 20 aggregation platforms, we were ready to launch. When we started pulling Google search feed consumers, our lists didn’t include the opt-in data at all. We were lied to by our core data provider and we were pissed.
I don’t know who said it, but “Necessity is the mother of all invention”. We had amazing data, high intent consumers in any niche imaginable and we had no legal way to reach out to these people besides building a look-a-like audience and running ads to them.
So, I put my thinking cap on and came up with a crazy solution.
Transactional Application Invites
Sometimes, when you create an account on a platform, you’re able to invite friends or colleagues to join the platform. When the invitation email is sent to your friend, your friend has not opted in to receive emails from the application or website that sent you the invite. I asked myself… how is this possible? How are these platforms able to send these “Cold Emails” that aren’t opted-in and get them delivered to your inbox?
The answer is intriguing… “Transactional Application Invites” Transactional emails aren’t regulated the way regular email messages are. They aren’t regulated by the Can-Spam Act of 2003 like marketing messages are.
Transactional emails (and Transactional Text Messages) also aren’t delivered to your inbox the same way regular emails are. They literally get a free ride over the spam folder and land right in your targets inbox. They have zero chance of blacklisting your domain and send all your emails to Spam. They also have a near 100% delivery rate to the inbox as well.
What are Transactional Emails?
Think of Transactional emails as notifications that are initiated during triggered website events like when someone has invited a user to the platform, a purchase is made, a change is made to your Terms of Service agreement or they receive a message from another user.
Benefits of Transactional Email Messages
- 100% Delivery to the recipient's Inbox
- Zero Risk of Blacklisting Your Domain
- Doesn’t require you to vary your message to ensure deliverability like marketing emails do
- Can be automated to keep in touch with customers and bring them back to your site
How to use Transactional Application Invite Emails for Cold Outreach
The best way to explain this process is to give you my actual use case. You can adapt my strategy as you need to fit your market, audience, and how you interact with your clients. Let’s get into it!
Using my Data Aggregation platform to generate a list of everyone searching Google for Insurance quotes, I put together a lead gen platform for Insurance Brokers who are able to secure a zip code territory and then select the lines of Insurance they want to purchase. When they finish setting up their territory, they get instant access to their leads in our dashboard and can then reach out to them using some lead nurturing tools we created.
Our data aggregation platform also generates a list of B2B prospects that includes the business owners' email, cell phone numbers, and work emails. I used our platform to generate a list of 137k Insurance agents. That’s when our first problem appeared, our list was supposed to include their opt-in data so we could send them an email or text message inviting them to try our leads for free for a week.
Without the opt-in data, we were stuck before we even got started. Six months of development down the drain, until I created this process. I’ll outline the steps I took below to set up our platform to trigger Transactional email and text messages.
Step One — Configuring your email server
If you’re not an email administrator with some coding skills, I would recommend hiring someone who’s an expert. Setting up your email server is pretty straightforward and transactional emails aren’t a new thing, we’re just using them differently.
We set up an account on Customer.io and added their required DNS records to our domain name. We then set up transactional email templates for each situation where we would want to send our clients a notification. You can also use SendGrid which is a great option.
Step Two — Setting up Transactional Email Templates
When something happens on your website that your customers need to be aware of, you should build an email template for it. For instance, if someone gets a message from another user, your template should pass a snippet of the message along to the customer in an email. The idea is to get the user to log back into your site.
In our case, we wanted to use our list of Insurance Brokers to build our customer base, as such we built a transactional application invite template.
Step Three — Sending the Application Invite
Our Application Invite is automatically sent after adding our list of brokers to our platform using a metered API feed from our data hub powered by Xano. Our API feed would send a steady batch of new Brokers into our Broker platform at regular intervals and in batches of 15 at a time every second. This would then trigger Customer.io to send them an Application Invite from our platform using Zapier to trigger the email send.
Step Four — Start slowly and increase the invitation send rate
Once you work out the bugs and warm up your email server, you can scale your email delivery to work through your list and get the invites sent out. Once all your invites are sent it, it’s time to nurture the relationships with your customers who have signed up.
Step Five — Build additional transactional email templates to keep customers engaged
We love transactional emails because they have much higher open rates than traditional emails. Transactional emails should contain information that your customers are going to want to see, here are a few of the ones we created:
New Lead Notifications — We send out a general lead update after our platform automatically updates itself with a new batch of leads every morning. Most of our zip codes get about 30–60 leads a day so we use a template that pulls the number of leads generated in the customer's dashboard and adds it to the title of the email. So our lead notification would look like this “You have 57 new Life Insurance Leads today”.
Appointment Booked — We allow our Insurance consumers the ability to schedule a phone call with one of our brokers. When this happens we send a transactional email and text message letting the broker know they have a new appointment.
Quote Requested — When a client submits a quote request on our platform in the broker's territory, that quote request gets a 100% open rate because that’s money in the bank. Our brokers open that as soon as it comes in!
Quote Accepted — When a consumer accepts the quote provided by our Broker, the Broker is notified using this template.
Policy Signed — When our consumers sign their policies, the Broker is notified and comes rushing to our platform to download their signed policy.
Insurance Consumer Cold Outreach
One of the biggest advantages to come out of our problem with not having opt-in data was our ability to send Application Invite emails to our Insurance Consumers on behalf of our Insurance Brokers. Without this ability, our brokers would have to reach out to customers in their lead dashboard manually and non-compliantly. With Transactional Emails, we can help them nurture leads by sending them Application Invites.
Staying Compliant with Can Spam Laws
It’s vital that your transactional emails' main focus is on their stated purpose and not overtly marketing. Your first Application Invite Email can contain some marketing copy but you should keep it focused on features not benefits as describing benefits can push your message over the line and into the “Marketing” category which is not compliant for transactional emails.
As a rule of thumb, put your marketing copy at the bottom of the email after you have stated what the invite is and how you initiated it.
Include Opt-Out functionality
To stay compliant, all emails sent should include an opt-out feature that allows customers the ability to remove themselves from your list. This is more than likely going to be required by your email service provider and they should already have this functionality added to every email sent. If they don’t, make sure you include it anyway.
Important Reminders
It’s vital that you only send Application Invitations to non-opted-in consumers only. You cannot send other forms of transactional emails to people who have not opted into your list. You only have one shot at sending non-opted-in emails compliantly and that's using the Application Invite Template.
If your website does not have a customer dashboard or the ability to log into your platform on their own account, this strategy might not work. The Application Invite email is designed to invite someone to join your website, SaaS application, or membership site. You won’t be able to use this for sending messages to consumers about your product or marketing services unless they are offered through a signup process.
My Results
I’ve been able to build automated transactional triggers that allow me to invite new Brokers to our platform, send customer invites on behalf of our brokers, and do so at scale. We sent over 130k email and text messages to our Brokers and had over 6,300 of them sign up within the first three weeks.
When we had enough brokers in our platform, we started taking our list of 400k new Insurance consumer leads a day and inviting them to join our platform and get a quote from our brokers.
With the entire process automated and using transactional emails, our business is able to generate a tremendous amount of value for our Insurance brokers and generate more converted leads.
Conclusion
I hope this article has opened up your mind to the possibilities of using Transactional Email templates for marketing and cold customer outreach. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me or ask questions in the comments!
