10 Steps to Influence the Influencer (With Hyper-Personalization, Cold Email and Remarketing)

We recently published a post about a cold email remarketing hack, based on the astounding results one of our beta customers, ChatWhale, was having using our hyper personalization toolkit.

As marketers, we know that once we’ve worked hard and finished an article, the works just beginning, because now you need to help momentum and gain interest to get readers.

We posted the article in a private facebook marketing group, and whilst the feedback on the  hack was positive, the assumption we’d made in the hack about everyone being OK on getting data was off the mark.   

We had a bunch of feedback asking where the data used in the hack came from, so the old adage of never AssUMe (it makes an Ass out of U and Me) came to bear.

We thought it would be fun to address this with our good friends at prospect.io, and kill two birds with one stone.

So off we set to create an article about how to get quality data, and then use that data to promote our original article. #inception #dogfooding

10 Steps to Influence the Influencer:

Spoiler Alert

We launched our initial article on the 24th March and had some initial moderate success, but after hyper personalizing the reachout funnel we 4X our traffic.

This 4X wasn’t just down to clever personalized images, or quality data, but also a few secret sauces that when used together, give amazing results.  But fear not, we’re going to break down each step, so you too can 4X your influencer reachout engagement.

Research

Step 1: Finding out where our audience was most active online

Hyperise as a service is both new and cutting edge in the possibilities it enables. We hypothesized this would make the perfect storm to reach out to digital marketing influencers and and demonstrate the strength, whilst dogfooding our own services.

Here we were looking to build a target list of influencers who’d be most interested in Hyperise.

Our initial list included LinkedIn, Quora, Facebook groups and Twitter accounts.

Using Prospect.io, were able to use a Chrome Extension to automatically collect prospect name, job title, email and company details.

The Extension works with LinkedIn, Quora, as well as many other websites and directories, allowing you to collect emails on mass, based on filters you create.

Step 2: Refining the lists

At this point after spending a few hours visiting the sites we’d identified as likely places our growth hacker influencers hang out, we’d collected over 1,400 contacts.

Another great feature of Prospect.io is the automatic email verification service, so as we collect emails, the service verifies and filters out the good emails.

With our list now verified and segmented by the different influencer types, we have enough data to plan our campaign.

Planning

As always, it's all about the preparation. With the prospect data ready, we set out to put together a compelling outreach.

Step 3: Creating a Personalized Image

Of course as we’re dogfooding, we wanted to use an attention grabbing personalized image in the email.  

With Hyperise.com there are over 80 image templates that can be used as an inspirational starting point, or you can start from scratch and upload your own images to be personalized.

In the end we decided to go with cutesy over serious, as we thought this would play better for the purpose of our outreach.

Step 4: Personalized Images at Scale

Image templates created with Hypersie can be linked to data sources.

This allows the dynamic elements of your image template to be automatically merged with your data source, on-the-fly as the image is displayed to the prospect.

In this case we connected our cutesy dog image template to our prospect.io data, personalizing with the prospect first name, company name and logo.

Step 5: Creating the Creative

We set about creating a simple email template, that set a level of intrigue enough for our influencers to want to take action and click to learn more.

Here is the example of email template we used:

Step 6: The Art of Subtle

In addition to the cutesy personalized image used in the email, we wanted to go further with our dogfooding, and personalize the article we link to from the email to the influencers.

The article’s hero image is an illustration of the hyper personalization funnel used by the hack. We personalize this image to each influencer, dynamically just from their email.

The image contains 8 points of personalization, guaranteed to cause a pattern interrupt and sustain the reader's attention for longer.

We could of course stop here, we’ve for sure got our readers attention at this point

However we saw an opportunity further down in our  article, which featured some further examples of personalization.  

These seemed the perfect reward to our readers that had made it that far through the article.

These three examples combined have 14 points of personalization, including.

If this wasn’t enough we linked out to a further 20 personalization examples, containing 100’s of personalizations to the visitor.

This sounds complex, but luckily this is simply to do by dropping in the Hyperise Javascript snippet onto your sales page and we take care of the rest.

Step 7: The Art of Not so Subtle

It would be nice if users in your funnel took the action you wanted them to, first time, every time, but in the real world of a million distractions a minute that just isn’t the case.

So sometimes (all the time your CAC can support it) you have to forgo being subtle, and do what you can to regain your users attention and back on-track in the funnel.

For this we’re using Facebook remarketing, which gives great reach, not just within the Facebook platform and Messenger, but Instagram as well.  Specifically we create Ads that target the audience who has visited or shown interest, but have not taken action, ie signed up and triws out the product.

Within our article and email we dropped in the Facebook Pixel, this then links each influencer prospect to our personalized images.

This means we can create Ad’s with dynamic Text and Images, personalized to each viewer.

We took one of our standard Facebook Ads and using Hyperise Remarketing toolkit and Facebook’s Dynamic Ads, we added a personalized element.

Using both the target’s first name and their companies logo.

Additionally with Facebooks Ads interest filter, we also created campaigns based on the tools they used, eg Intercom.

For us this is HYPER PERSONALIZATION, not so subtle in the end, but highly effective.  

To recap, so far we’ve:

1. target and filtered our audience based on our requirements for this campaign.
2. created a personalized cold email outreach, with both textual and image personalizations.
3. provided a website destination with multiple points of personalization throughout the page.
4. reengaged our prospects, filtered by use case (ie software) and personalized down to prospects first name and company logo.

Implementation

With our prospect data, personalized image template and email copy done, were ready for the big time and sending it out.

Step 8: Pulling it all together

As we’re using prospect.io for our data collection, it made sense to also use for the email sending, as they also have an email campaign function included in the standard package we used to collect data.

Within the campaign creation process we add the email copy and add the image template URL, that we copied from Hyperise in step 4.

As well as the simple way to pull data direct into the dynamic image, with Prospect.io it’s equally as simple to drop the dynamic image into the email template.

We went further and created a sequence of emails, spread two days apart, targeted at prospects yet to take action (reply or click a link).

To hedge our bets further, we leveraged the comedic genius that is Jon Buchan and his Charm Offensive cold outreach methods, to keep the emails from being repetitive, tedious or boring.

Step 9: Site and Pixel dust

Key to the implementation and fully personalizing the whole engagement funnel, is a healthy wedge of code, plumbing all the moving parts together.

This is the sort of details and complexities that can tie you up in knots, but hyperise has a special tool called Hyper-Campaigns, that does all the heavy lifting for you.

The Hyper-Campaign wizard guides you through a three step process, to enable personalization from your email campaign, to your website and beyond to remarketing ads.

Step 10: Dynamic Remarketing Ads

The Hyper-Campaign wizard not only takes a load of linking and integration hassle away, it also connects to your Facebook Ad account.  This automatically uploads the personalized images that have been served to your potential customers, ready to be used in dynamic ads.

In this final step we pull the remarketing all together by creating the ad, that uses the product catalogue we uploaded in step six, to create dynamic ads.

First off we need to create a new Facebook Ad.

Once in the Ad Manager creation process, select the campaigns objective as ‘Catalogue Sales’

Once you’ve selected Catalogue Sales, further options will be shown, to allow you to select the catalogue we uploaded in step nine.

Select your catalogue from the dropdown and click continue button.

Next we define the audience for the ads, we want to select the prospects that have viewed or visited, but not purchased.

In our example, we’re using one personalized image, but we do have the choice of using multiple images, and so the carousel could be a good choice, if that’s the case.

However for the sake of simplicity, we’ve used one image, and so we select the single image ad format:

Now the fun part, creating our personalized ad.

Your ad should be using what already works, such as customer pain points, or calls to action, that have been used in the emails and sales pages.

Now we can call out the prospect by person or company name in the ad, using dynamic variables from our product catalogue, where we’ve set the prospects company name as the product.name.

1. Enter a personalized call to action, using the + button to add variables
2. Enter a personalized ad headline, using the + button to add variables
3. Enter the link to the sales page as the call the action, using the + button to add the retailer ID as the utm_hyperef tag.

Finally click confirm, and your ads will go off for approval.

And that is it, we’re done, we have all the components in place to deliver a hyper personalized engagement funnel at scale; from cold emails, through to re-engagement ads, via Facebook and Instagram.

Results

Over a period of 30 days, focusing on traffic to the “6x cold email signups hyper personalization remarketing hack” article we used for outreach, we can see significant uplifts in traffic around our activities.

Prior to our outreach campaign, our “6X cold email article” on average received 28 views per day, not amazing, but for a new article, on a new blog, for a new product, what else can you really expect. 🙂

Once our campaign had started, not only did we get the spikes we can see above, our daily views average 122, giving us a 4X increase in traffic.

However website traffic in itself is a vanity metric, so let’s go beyond this and investigate the true impact our influencer outreach has had.

Website Visits and Trial Sign-ups

Our 30 day cohort covered in this breakdown, contains 1,396 new unique visitors.

• From the initial email we generated 34 trial sign-ups.
• The follow-up sequence generated a further 7 trial sign-ups.
  
• Remarketing to our created audience generated a further 41 trial sign-ups.

In total, with a little effort, we managed to generate 82 trial sign-ups, from an audience of 1,396, giving a 5.8% conversion rate, from a cold email starting point.

Affiliate Sign-ups and Partner ops

The power of OPN (Other People's Networks)... Not all opportunities are clear at inception, and affiliates and partner opportunities certainly fit into that.

In addition to the 82 trialists, we also generated 3 signups to our affiliate scheme.  Whilst these affiliates are yet to generate revenue, they have shown significant promise and capacity to eclipse the initial trials.

As well as the affiliates, we also created some significant partner interest, including a “unicorn marketing automation” giant.

Guest post ops and Backlinks

Do you remember 5 minutes ago, at the start of this article, we mentioned #inception ?

well here again we get a little inceptioney…

This article you’re reading now, originally destined for our own blog, has ended up guest posted on influencermarketinghub.com, a site of significant good standing, in terms of both traffic and quality of audience (yes that’s you I’m referring to 😉 )

We also generated a few other interesting backlink opportunities, focused around guest posts, that will be out in the coming months.

About the Author

Werner Geyser

Writer

With over 15 years in content marketing, Werner founded Influencer Marketing Hub in 2016. He successfully grew the platform to attract 5 million monthly visitors, making it a key site for brand marketers globally. His efforts led to the company's acquisition in 2020. Additionally, Werner's expertise has been recognized by major marketing and tech publications, including Forbes, TechCrunch, BBC and Wired.