Customer Case Study: A Peek Inside Imaginaire Digital Agency’s Cold Email Strategy

Two weeks ago I was approached by one of our customers, offering to share their experience using Woodpecker. I knew I wanted to hear their story, so Seb and I collaborated on this customer interview you’re about to read. Here it is. Learn how one of our customers – Imaginaire Digital uses email automation to send multi-touch campaigns, how they went about it, and what kind of results they usually get.

About Imaginaire Digital

Imaginaire Digital is a UK-based web design and digital marketing agency. It was established to help their customers developing a kind of websites that would support their marketing strategy and increase sales.

They have been particularly successful in helping furniture and interiors companies to build ecommerce websites and then get new customers to them via search.

I talked with Seb, who shared their backstory, their target groups, and how they use Woodpecker to make the most of their email outreach. Let’s start.

How did you start your company?

I started Imaginaire Digital when I was working at another agency. I felt like a lot of the work they were doing was very basic and the staff was bored a lot of the time, so I wanted to start something myself where we could do more interesting work.

Initially, I just started Imaginaire Digital as a web design and SEO agency, but it soon became clear that there was a huge demand for other ongoing marketing services, such as PPC and social media marketing, so we expanded into those areas too.

How has your company developed since then?

Although it was very tiring at the time, I still look back fondly at the early days of Imaginaire, when I used to do absolutely everything — accounts, sales, the fulfillment and ongoing client contact.

Since that, luckily for my hairline, we’ve grown and we now have a really solid team of 5 people. I’ve never wanted the agency to be a ‘vanity agency’ that has hundreds of staff. I’ve wanted to hire people that are experts in their fields and do good quality work. We’re growing significantly every year and I think this strategy is working nicely.

Who are your ideal customers?

We do a lot of work in the interiors and furniture industries and those clients tend to be a good fit for us, they usually have an established business with a good cash flow and they’re enthusiastic and ambitious about their products, which gives us a good atmosphere to work within.

Our criteria for a client being a good fit tends to just be that they’re enthusiastic, easy to work with and want to be the best in their niche.

What do we use Woodpecker for?

A lot of our SEO work is carrying out outreach for clients to get content placed on different blogs, in news outlets and high authority websites. We use Woodpecker to speed this process up. It really does that when compared with doing the outreach manually.

From time to time, we also use Woodpecker for cold email campaigns to generate business. We’ve found it to be an effective solution for both uses.

Why did you choose Woodpecker?

We chose Woodpecker because it allows us to personalize campaigns and schedule follow-up emails. We find that the bulk of the content we place is done on the 2nd and 3rd emails, it’s nice to have this as an automated process.

About the cold emails to generate business side of things, we like the ability to send in specific time frames (we’ve found that first thing in the morning and last thing in the working day are great times for getting responses, as people are more active then).

What does your average cold email campaign look like?

Outreach

An outreach campaign for us will be heavily personalized but make use of very short emails. We’ve found short, to-the-point emails massively outperform the typical ‘send-them-a-novel’ type of advice that is given on SEO blogs. We’ve written about that at length in our article about simple email hacks to improve your results, and in our post for Agency Analytics about making link building transparent.

Campaign structure

Typically we’ll have a campaign structured in a similar way to this:

Email 1

That’s a short email to introduce the idea/content piece and ask them for their thoughts on it.

Email 2 (sent after 3 days)

As a second message, we send a follow-up email asking them if they saw the initial email. We set all follow up emails as replies, so that they form a chain to make it easier for them to refer back to earlier emails.

Read on the Woodpecker Blog: Follow Up Sales Email: 5 Important Rules to Follow >>

Email 3 (sent after 7 days)

We use humor in the third follow up – we tend to say something like, “Ok, we’re going now, we’ll miss you.”

Sales Emails

Again, we stick to the principle of keeping emails short and sweet. We contact business owners that fit into the niches we specialize in. We introduce our company and explain some of the unique ways we add value to their industry.

Email 1

That’s a short email introducing the company and how we add value to their industry. We’ll also have a link to our website, encouraging them to take a look at our case studies.

Email 2 (sent after 3 days)

The following email is a very short one. We just ask them if they’d like us to call them for a quick chat about their website.

Email 3 (sent after 7 days)

In the third email, we show them a relevant case study and then asking for an appointment.

What are your results?

General outreach

We’re very lucky to see some really strong results thanks to our qualification of websites to reach out to and the level of personalization we use. Generally, we get an open rate of 60-70%, and a positive reply rate of 15-20%.

This has led to us gaining some excellent placements both for ourselves and for our clients and it provides us with an efficient and effective process for client work.

Sales outreach

We tend to get slightly weaker results on the sales side of things, generally because we’re dealing with owners of companies who are rather very busy. On the sales outreach side, we usually see open rates of 40-50%, and positive reply rates of 5-10%.

Although this may sound small, our customers are of a high lifetime value, and this form of marketing is low cost. We acquire new customers for around $90, which is much cheaper than something like Google Adwords.

What do you think is the greatest power of Woodpecker?

Without a doubt, it’s the quick execution of campaigns. We can have a campaign on either side of our use for Woodpecker within around 5 minutes, this allows us to launch and test campaigns quickly. We’re much more effective for clients than we were when handling outreach manually.

What’s in it for you?

Overall, we’ve found Woodpecker to serve two purposes for our digital agency:

1. It helps us find new customers in a cost-effective manner;
2. It helps us be more effective for our clients.

The way that the UI works is great. The same goes for the core functionality of Woodpecker which is excellent and makes it easy for me, as a business owner, to train new staff on. For this reason, it’s one of our ‘must-have’ tools.

That’s all from Seb. If you’re interested in trying out Woodpecker to see if you can get as efficient as Imaginaire Digital, try Woodpecker for 7 days for free.