Impact of our partnership: 22 appointments and 3 closed deals in 5 months
In five months, Virayo booked 22 appointments with SaaS marketing and executive leaders and closed 3 of them as deals. That’s a 14% appointment-to-deal rate within the campaign period, in a market where sales cycles usually run long.
- 22 appointments in 5 months
- 3 closed deals with an $8K average deal size
- 7,823 leads researched and checked against Virayo’s ICP
- 33.57% average open rate, peaking at 73% in the best-performing campaign
- 0.55% average reply rate, peaking at 3%
The reply rate reflects the market. SaaS marketing leaders receive a steady flow of agency pitches, and many prospects already had a vendor or an in-house team. The campaign’s results came from precision rather than reply volume: a list narrowed by funding stage and headcount, and appointments with people who had the budget to buy.
Challenges: Long sales cycles in a crowded agency market
Virayo sells to B2B SaaS companies, whose buying cycles tend to be long. That delayed project kickoffs and revenue and slowed the agency’s growth. Virayo also competed in a crowded SaaS SEO market, where prospects compared it with other vendors and with building SEO in-house. To get attention, the agency needed outreach that made its business-outcome approach clear from the first email.
Partnership objectives
Virayo wanted a steady flow of appointments with funded B2B SaaS companies and deals closed within the campaign period, despite long buying cycles.
Strategy and implementation
The campaign ran on cold email. It started with a detailed ICP, then split messaging by job title and by industry.
Defining the ICP
The team set four criteria:
- Industry: B2B SaaS, with a focus on marketing technology and HR software. Cybersecurity companies were deliberately left out.
- Company profile: startups with more than $10M raised in Series A or B funding and at least 20 employees. These companies were in a growth stage and had the budget for an outside SEO partner.
- Decision-makers: CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Directors of Marketing, and Marketing Managers.
- Geography: primarily North America, with additional outreach in Europe and Australia, matching Virayo’s market presence and growth plans.
Crafting personalized messaging by title
Executives and marketers buy SEO for different reasons, so each group got its own sequence:
- C-level executives received emails on common SEO challenges, framed around Virayo’s bottom-line approach. The emails included success stories from similar companies showing growth in trials, demos, and annual recurring revenue (ARR) from organic search.
- Marketing leaders received emails about tying SEO to pipeline development and getting more out of their agency spend.
Here is an example of the template:
Crafting personalized messaging by industry
A second layer of campaigns targeted industry segments: HealthTech, FinTech, MarTech, customer support software, and logistics. Each had its own subject lines and featured Virayo’s case studies from that sector, with an offer of a strategy session on the prospect’s growth opportunities. The team adjusted these campaigns throughout based on performance data and prospect feedback.
Challenges Belkins encountered
- Market saturation. SaaS marketers see a constant stream of SEO agency pitches. The team tracked how each message performed and kept refining it so that Virayo’s focus on demos, trials, and revenue stood apart from traffic-focused competitors.
- Email deliverability. In a saturated market, landing in spam would have ended the campaign. The team ran outreach through Folderly, Belkins’ deliverability platform, and wrote templates that avoided common spam triggers.
- Frequent objections. Prospects pushed back with three recurring objections: comparisons with other vendors, a preference for an in-house SEO team, and budget limits. The team prepared a tailored response for each objection, which kept many of these conversations open.
Lessons learned and fit
- Use funding as a budget signal. Limiting the list to companies with $10M+ in Series A or B funding meant outreach reached companies that could afford an outside agency.
- Split messaging by who signs and who runs the work. Executives responded to revenue impact; marketing leaders responded to pipeline and vendor efficiency.
- Lead with sector proof. Industry-specific subject lines and case studies gave each segment a reason to believe Virayo understood its market.
- Prepare objection responses before launch. Vendor comparisons, in-house teams, and budget came up repeatedly. Having answers ready kept conversations from ending at the first reply.
- To whom this approach fits best. This approach works for service firms whose buyers can be defined by public signals such as funding round and headcount. In a saturated category, reply rates stay low, so results depend on list precision and how well the team handles objections, not on reply volume.
