The SDR's Toolset: Mail Merge

Sometimes, when working as a sales development rep, the job might look truly tedious. One of the most challenging parts is undoubtedly cold prospecting.

From blast emails to personal phone calls, there is a wide range of techniques to be considered here.

Let’s start with the most wide-reaching method, the one you’ll definitely get to employ to qualify your leads.

You do your thorough research, you compile a list of prospects and populate a contact list for your first campaign.

This is going to be a particularly long generic list. It’s the first touch email and will allow you to introduce yourself and your company. It does not need to be tailored to the T, but personalization is a game changer here if you want to get responses. Don’t neglect to customize at least the necessary information of your prospects, e.g., lead’s name, email, company, job title, etc.

As a sales rep, you need to generate and maintain a detailed contact list. Keep all information you gather on your prospects at bay (your inbox is the safest place), don’t dismiss anything.

When about to launch your outreach campaign, all you need to do is to export your contacts in a CSV file and upload it to your mail merge platform.

When importing the CSV file to your mail merge platform, each column is assigned as a merge field. Each cell will match to its corresponding field in the email template. Within seconds, hundreds of contacts populate in your mail merge platform without mistakes.

You can proceed with selecting a date and a time for your campaign to go live.

The penultimate step in the process is to create your message.

Here you need to be savvy. Don’t start from scratch as you’ll need to test messages and incentives, do some simple A/B testing. This will need to happen almost on a whim.

Most sales reps and teams have perfected their outreach process. Every sentence, every word has been carefully selected to match your both their business and audience tone of voice; messages have been tested and perfected over the years. There is no sales person out there who doesn’t have at least 10 best-performing email templates for every stage of the customer journey.

You need to, consequently, be able to use said templates in your bulk mailing — and unless, your outreach has a very particular goal and message, it is highly advisable to use a customizable tested template on your first touch outreach.

Gmelius Campaigns (Mail Merge) give you the possibility to import a template and further automate your process in just two clicks.

Going back again to the concept of a generic email that is sent cold from before, there would be likely only a couple places within these email templates that any personalized information needs to be generated, such as the name of a prospect, their position, or their company.

Your mail merge tool will automatically detect this information from your uploaded list, and all you need to do is to assign it to the template variable.

Once the message crafted and the variables assigned, emails for each contact in the list will be automatically generated.

Each email can be further previewed individually to ensure that the format is correct, and the merge fields have been appropriately assigned (for more information on the process click here).

Now, it is time to press send, idly sit back in your desk chair and watch you sent folder slowly fill with hundreds of automatically generated, individualized cold emails. In just a few steps you go from having nothing but prospect search criteria to a couple hundred sent emails in my outbox!

If you choose to track your campaigns, you will be able to know which recipients opened the email and hence return to your contact list to qualify the lead and think of other touchpoints that can be further leveraged, e.g., if you have a phone number, you have an incentive to give them a call.

This way the prospect already has some idea of who you are and what this is about, as he has somehow engaged with your email.

As said the prospecting qualification stage is always an arduous one. In order to get enough engaged leads you have to go big — you’ll need to be able to scale up your efforts at will. By using a mail merge feature, it allows you to send highly personalized emails to your prospects with high levels of potential engagement!

In this competitive environment, small companies, in particular, need to do whatever they can to differentiate themselves from their competition.

Gmelius mail merge functionality is tailored to the needs of small to mid-size sales teams and will help you stand out from the crowd, automate your outreach and most importantly maintain engaged prospects and satisfied customers.