Helping Clean Watt, a Sustainability Tech Startup with their business expansion
The client, a Tech Startup is on a mission to drive the decarbonization of the built environment. They provide cost-effective solutions to monitor and optimize the energy consumption of buildings with scalable machine learning systems.
The startup team has built a robust and viable solution and demonstrated the market fit for their product.
As they received Series-A funding, they were looking to expand their customer base and scale their operations quickly.
Their challenges
Clean Watt faced with the prompt demand of the growth quota to keep up with the rapid development plans and encountered the following challenges:
The need for qualified appointments. To keep growing they needed more bookings than planned. To achieve this goal, the startup’s inbound and outbound sales channels had to be redesigned.
Niche expansion. The partner saw several niche markets suitable for their business.
The concept of B2B outreach as a viable marketing strategy was relatively new to the partner, however they knew the potential it held as a business acquisition strategy. They needed help getting things going, from creating materials and case studies to creating their B2B template to managing responses.
Limited workforce. In order to pay close attention to important tasks within their operations and keep things manageable, they decided not to hire in-house experts for market research & email outreach, and instead partner with an external agency that can successfully handle this part of their operation.
They reached out to us with their requirement, with a simple target: To connect with as many public and commercial building owners and partners in the selected states as possible.
What we did
Defining precise targeting and building a lead list
Understanding their target audience, we decided to first reach out to a small group of builders and real estate investors in the selected areas. The partner already had a detailed and meaningful ICP, which helped our team a lot with this stage before proceeding to the content planning phase.
Based on the partner’s ICP, our research team began working on a curated list of potential high-value leads.
In the first phase, in order to achieve the best results while providing personalized offers, we divided ICP into different segments based on their region. We searched for company leads in California, Colorado, Texas and Maryland finding up to 500-1000 potential customers per region.
Then, we dug deeper and split each part into separate segments to send customized messages. The list included positions such as company owners, partners and compliance officers.
It took a while to build a list, but it’s well worth spending time on this as it plays a crucial role in the process.
Content planning and copywriting
Things that affect the prospect’s business the most, remain in their mind 24/7. Agreeing with & showing your attention to their issues displays sympathy, and conjures up a desire to take the communication to the “appointment-placing” stage. It is now no longer sufficient to offer standard guidelines and answers — you have to supply your prospects facts with killer accuracy and at a well-calculated pace. Knowing the goal of your target market makes this easier.
Considering this, our copywriting team created customized email templates for each specific segment to address recipient relevance in the most natural way.
Testing and tailoring approach
To make certain we get the maximum out of our campaigns, first, we tested multiple copies. Then we monitored all the important metrics such as open and response rates.
Key takeaways
- Progress from August to December 2022 showed optimistic results, with an increasing number of positive responses and an acceptable level of negative responses.
- Note that negative reactions are almost inevitable and cannot be reduced below 50-60%. Your recipients may be busy with administrative or other operational challenges or may simply be in no need of your solutions at the moment. So no matter how good your campaigns are, you will see lots of negative reactions. Focusing on encouraging positive responses is the way to go.
- Recipients actively interacted with opening emails but Follow-up-2 emails resulted in significantly more responses overall.
- A total of 35 bookings were booked during the outreach period. Many of these dates were coordinated with representatives of large and well-known builders and property developers.