Outbound marketing techniques like print advertising, billboards and cold calling/emailing have received a bad reputation over the last decade or so. Old school. Expensive. Interruptive. Pushy. You get the idea.

What if I told you outbound marketing is still an effective way to drive leads, win business and build your brand? Even Hubspot, which popularized inbound marketing, leverages both outbound and inbound to improve its bottom line.

Inbound marketing – based on the idea of attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers – is undoubtedly a great marketing technique. However, to up your game and hit that pipeline and revenue number, you need to consider outbound marketing too. A mix of outbound and inbound is what can deliver you a healthy lead volume.

Again, by saying that you consider outbound marketing I don’t mean to imply that you abandon inbound marketing. Both methods are important and they will prove highly effective for your campaign if you are able to find an ideal mean between the two.

Here are some of the things that make marketers skeptical about outbound marketing:

It’s costlier than inbound marketing

Inbound marketing techniques like content marketing and SEO are indeed cost-effective, but your outbound strategy doesn’t have to include those pricey TV commercials and trade shows. Email services and online tools that you will need to drive leads and sales and keep a tab on the progress of lead generation are also very affordable.

It’s not worth it

Let’s be honest: acquiring customers through inbound marketing takes time. Outbound marketing is a great way to help you get through the wait in an efficient manner. You will be able to get immediate traction, gain insights about your prospects and get a clearer idea about what your approach should be regarding lead generation.

Cold emailing doesn’t work anymore

Cold emailing still works (hyperlink “How to make your cold emails work?”) – old ways to do it don’t. A mix of cold and opt-in email marketing can significantly improve your ROI.

It’s not easy to scale outbound marketing stats

It would definitely be hard to measure outbound marketing efforts if it was the only strategy you would be going with. But by pairing it with inbound marketing the work becomes easy. And surely there is new software now that will allow you to keep proper track of your efforts regarding outbound marketing.

Sure, urging people to pay attention to your business or brand, as outbound marketing did before, will not work today. But just as all things evolve, outbound marketing has also evolved and turned into something relevant even today.

Here’s, in a nutshell, what makes for an effective outbound marketing strategy:

• Build a team for lead generation.
• Keep on testing and changing your messages until you get a perfectly outlined one which increases the responses.
• Back up your inbound strategy with your outbound strategy
  Inbound marketing takes up to three to six months before you start getting any responses. So, it would be wise to use that time. Bring in your outbound strategies in and see positive results right away.
• You can start by building a team, people who are efficient and know the ballpark stats for everyday work they would be doing. They should be able to bring in leads and relevant information about them.

The next step will be contacting the leads through emails. Keep in mind that content is of utmost importance whether it’s outbound or inbound marketing. Pay attention to the content that is being sent to the leads through emails. After content comes the personalization of emails, which is equally important. Surely, you don’t want people to dismiss your email thinking it’s spam. Personalization will help you get the attention of your potential customers.

Obviously, the first email you send will not be perfect and most probably won’t get replied to. You’ll need to keep creating new content. Experiment with the content of your emails, try different approaches, till you get to the most precise one that will compel your leads to reply and take notice. It would be a nice idea to create a set of emails that can help establish a connection between you and your leads.

Most of all, outbound marketing will help you double-check your customer personas. While you are waiting for inbound marketing to show some results, your outbound campaign will help you understand better what people would be a right fit for your business. Nobody wants poor-quality leads. Sending out emails and being in contact with leads will help you get a better picture of what kind of people can you actually help through your business. And it is possible that personas may turn out to be quite different from what you earlier perceived.

This will ensure that you don’t face this problem in the later stage of your campaign. Building the right kind of personas is of great importance and therefore, it’s necessary that you be thorough with that process.

The key to successful marketing is to incorporate both inbound and outbound tactics. A holistic marketing strategy will help you get the best value for your marketing spending.