Mass mailshots are on the way out. So how can businesses respond?

2023 was a year of growth - for better and for worse. There was an unprecedented rise in spam emails, growing by 1,265% since December 2022 according to a SlashNext report. This increase has driven Google and Yahoo to write new rules limiting how many bulk emails can reach individual consumers on their servers from February this year.

While the limits on bulk emails are intended to protect consumers, not B2B addresses, it’s possible that similar measures will arise for businesses as well. This would force businesses to fundamentally change how they market to prospective customers to avoid being lost in the email universe.

That’s why to continue their growth in 2024, businesses must embrace new tactics.

Make the shift to targeted outreach

Even if businesses seem safe from bulk emailing limits at the moment, it’s in their interest to get ahead of these measures - not just as a means to futureproof their operations but also to improve the success of their sales teams. This means shifting away from mass emailing and giving sales teams the tools to help them create more targeted outreach.

First, most tools rely on “spray and pray” tactics for reaching out to potential buyers. They focus on volume instead of quality and personalisation. Creating generic emails is easy and fast, yet 96% of them are never opened. So how can businesses navigate the shift away from traditional methods while preserving a healthy bottom line for their organisation?

We know personalisation is important - research from Gong shows that buyers only respond to 4% of cold emails they receive. The findings also reveal that personalisation has the highest impact on a salesperson’s response rates. In fact, the most successful sales reps spend an average of 12 hours every week customising templates or writing emails from scratch to try to achieve this high level of personalisation. 

Individual-based personalisation is inevitably time-consuming as it requires crafting messages for each individual. However, research from Gong shows that individual-based personalisation is way more impactful with lower-level personas than it is with executives. On the other hand, company-based personalisation resonates better with the executive audience, tripling the reply rate for director roles and above (from 3% to 9%). Yet, most engagement solutions are focused just on prospecting to individuals and use disconnected data and workflows which can make company-based personalisation more difficult.

Deepen account understanding for smarter personalisation

AI is the certified sales team copilot for 2024. In fact, this technology is already being used by 89% of companies in the UK, and as of June 2023, 28% of companies were already using it to boost sales. Admittedly, AI tools can’t build relationships between buyer and seller with the human touch and interpersonal skills of a salesperson. However, an AI tool trained on sales-specific data can use its data processing capabilities, and an understanding of context, to pull insights and valuable information on prospective customers. As a result, this can help sales reps close more deals and strike that balance between precision and scale.

I recommend that businesses take on 2024 with a new approach and allow personalisation to guide their email outreach. Businesses should select a sales engagement solution that provides a holistic view of all engagement across the history of an account to allow for better account-based personalisation. Best-in-class generative AI can now provide a simple summary of who a rep has engaged with in the past in a particular account, and can generate a prospecting email in seconds. In addition, by understanding the context behind each sales interaction, it can recommend who to contact based on historical win/loss data to further maximise the chances of a successful deal close. In turn, this helps to build a high-quality business pipeline for an organisation. This is also the thinking behind Gong’s Engage platform. 

2024 is likely to be another challenging year with an unstable economic landscape for businesses, meaning sustaining healthy growth will continue to prove challenging without the right tools in place. That’s why adopting AI will be crucial. It will help businesses navigate this uncertainty by empowering them to evolve the way they reach new customers and future-proof themselves. Precision, not sheer volume alone, will be the key to successfully securing and maintaining customer engagement in the year ahead and achieving a healthy bottom line.