108: 7 High-Converting Outbound Campaigns You Can Steal
Repeatable outbound campaigns that anyone can run for free or cheap.
Read on jed.substack.com
Read time: 3min
Welcome back to The Practical Prospecting Newsletter!
Today, I’m sharing 7 outbound campaigns that I run all the time for clients. These campaigns are easily repeatable regardless of your industry or ICP — and they have consistently worked well for me.
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#1 Social Signals
Campaign Overview:
Reaching out to leads who are engaging with content in the same niche as your product/service.
How To Do It:
Free: On LinkedIn, search for keywords in your niche. Filter for “Posts”. Then scrape the ICP leads who engaged with those posts. To find their emails, try Lemlist’s free plan — you’ll receive 100 free email credits.
Paid: Trigify is the best tool I’ve found for this (not sponsored). You can set up saved searches for several keywords, and Trigify will alert you whenever a post is made on that topic. Then, you can directly scrape the ICP leads from Trigify.
Max Mitcham explains why this play works so well on a recent webinar (I’m paraphrasing): “Most people use account-based signals (open jobs, job changes, product launch, expansion, etc.). But person-based signals are far more relevant - they’re just harder to find. This is because when someone engages with content, they’re choosing to do that. It’s 100% within their control. You know that that person has some level of interest in that topic. For that reason, it’s the trust form of intent”.
#2 Website Visitors
Campaign Overview:
Reaching out to leads who visited specific pages on your website.
How To Do It:
Use tools like RB2B, Warmly, or Common Room (I use RB2B because of the free option). Just add a snippet of code to your website, then it will send a notification to your Slack with the LinkedIn profile and email of qualified prospects who visited your site.
Tools like RB2B, Warmly, and Common Room are becoming increasingly popular for tracking the specific person who was on your website. It sounds like this tech may not be around forever (due to privacy reasons) but I recommend getting the most out of this awesome signal while you can!
My #1 tip for this play is to NOT say “I saw you were on our website” in the email. Instead, lead with another piece of research.
#3 Customer Look-Alikes
Campaign Overview:
Reaching out to companies that share very close similarities to one or more of your current customers.
How To Do It:
Free: If your customers are tech companies, look up “[customer name] competitors” on G2 Crowd then reach out to those companies. If not, list out all the specifications of that customer, then build a hyper-targeted list that matches those criteria using Sales Nav.
Paid: Use Ocean.io (not sponsored). They’re the #1 tool for this and have a free plan if you want to test it first.
I use this campaign a lot for early-stage companies I work with who don’t have a ton of customers or a clear understanding of their ICP. In other words, if you only have a couple of customers, keep digging where you struck gold.
#4 Common Investors
Campaign Overview:
Reaching out to companies who share the same investor as one or more of your customers.
How To Do It:
Look at your current customers and figure out who their investor is (Google it, ChatGPT it, or use Crunchbase). Then, go to the website of that VC/Private Equity firm and you’ll see all the other companies in their portfolio.
This play works especially well when cold-calling. I recommend opening with “We’re working with other {{investor name}} portfolio companies like {{customer name}}…”
#5 First Degree Connections
Campaign Overview:
Reaching out to first-degree connections (on LinkedIn) of yourself, your Exec team, or your customers.
How To Do It:
In Sales Navigator, find the “Connections of” filter. Then, input the names of people on your Exec team, colleagues, close friends, or current customers— then, add your ICP criteria. Now you should have a list of ICP leads who are connected to people you know well. Reach out to those people and ask if you can use their names in an email. Or, even better, ask if you can write them an email template for them to make an intro.
Just like with the Customer Look-Alikes campaign, this campaign is especially good for early-stage companies when you need to find “easy wins” to build momentum.
#6 Competitor Take Away
Campaign Overview:
Reaching out to companies who use your competitors.
How To Do It:
Lots of data tools give you info on what tech companies are using — Lemlist is great option for this (again, using their free plan, you can scrape up to 100 leads). Then, create very direct messaging about how you fill in those competitor’s feature gaps.
This play is great if you have a competitor that you know (a) you can “plug in alongside” with — instead of rip & replace — or (b) you have tangible feature differences that they don’t have.
#7 Attending Relevant Events / Communities
Campaign Overview:
Reaching out to leads who are attending events in your niche or are a part of communities in your niche.
How To Do It:
To find relevant events, search for relevant keywords on LinkedIn. Then filter for “Events”. Then register for that event and you’ll get access to the entire attendee list.
To find relevant communities, search “[niche you’re in] communities” on Google. Then join several of them. Now reach out to people in that community whenever you see a post or comment related to the problems you solve.
Thanks for reading!
Jed