Client's Challenges
Café Zupas, a B2B catering business selling homemade food off their kitchen to B2C clients as well, knew it had to take measures to stand out in the market. To increase the number of catering orders, the company enlisted Belkins to prospect for new business and focus on generating leads in areas where SMBs were most prevalent. The company focuses on targeting small businesses around Utah and paying special attention to these two factors.
- Market awareness. The client never considered cold emailing a go-to prospecting method for selling B2B catering services. Café Zupas agreed to use cold email outreach as an effective and powerful prospecting tool when they realized it could increase their community’s market awareness. Outsourcing their emailing services to a lead generation agency was a wise move as their sales team is trained to close deals, not prospect new clients.
- Target audience. The client realized they couldn’t market their product to everyone, even if it were something as casual as business lunches. They had made some steps to define their target audience but needed to define it further so they could cater to their needs in various ways. Belkins saw a need to identify the audience of Café Zupas because it would show the client how to run the campaigns more effectively.
What We Did
Belkins has worked with Café Zupas for three months, using its best email practices and sales tactics.
Targeting the right audience
When Belkins team takes on an assignment, we always ensure the client has developed an ideal customer profile (ICP) and parsed it into buyer personas. To reach the broadest possible audience, you should consider what your target market has in common. Are they all health-conscious? How often do they host events, and what kind of events? Are they all interested in specific diet options? These and other factors should be considered when drafting the ICP for B2B catering services.
Café Zupas has already made the buying process easy, providing the clients with high-quality lunches and service. Belkins just needed to figure out the right audience. Using the client’s database, Belkins examined the data collected and looked for patterns. We then used them to develop buyer personas and create appealing cold email templates that prospects would respond to.
Attempting cold email prospecting
Belkins relies on cold email as its primary lead generation channel. For this case, the Belkins team used a combination of the best email practices and promotional offers for prospects. We offered a coupon in each email and encouraged them to use it when ordering from Café Zupas.
Main Challenges We Faced
While the overall campaign was a success, the Belkins team had a few hitches along the way.
Encouraging prospects to use a referral link
Belkins ran into an issue when using promotional offers, making prospects use a link to order. Many would go straight to the website and order without clicking on it.
While this marketing tactic drove the number of orders up, the Belkins team still needed Café Zupas to use tools to track all the charges. So to determine who ordered and didn’t, Belkins had to run another re-engagement campaign.
Tracking software
When prospects failed to use a promotional code we offer in the email, Belkins couldn’t track the orders. We couldn’t follow up by asking if they ordered because we were reaching out from the Café Zupas employee account – it would look strange to the prospects. A tracking tool would have helped immensely to avoid that issue.
Delivering high deliverability rates
Cold email outreach is a tricky business. Sending out many promotional offers that include links is even more challenging. It can harm your domain reputation because the presence of links in emails may trigger spam filters, so your messages can never land in the Inbox.
The Belkins deliverability team applied their knowledge and supported SDRs throughout the collaboration to ensure excellent deliverability for the Café Zupas outreach campaigns.