How to 9x your Outbound Conversion Rate with Email Click Tracking

Every email click reveals something about where your prospects are at in the buyer’s journey.

And your chances of breaking into it.

Did a snippet of copy peak your prospect’s interest? Did an image or link grab their attention?

Or did your email speak to a hyper-relevant problem they are actively looking to invest in—right now?

Davit Svanidze, CEO at LeadRebel, and his team now know.

Here’s how LeadRebel built a data-driven email tracking machine with Apollo’s Open API to increase their email conversion rate by 9x.

Effective email campaigns start with precision

People’s attention and patience for sales emails are razor thin at best. The average worker receives over 120 emails in their inbox every single day.

It’s a big reason why Davit, whose software helps users identify website visitors and generate leads, rejects the idea of mass emailing thousands of random contacts and instead keeping your prospect list narrow and specific.

Doing so results in fewer bounced emails and unsubscribes, which goes a long way toward preventing your domain from being penalized for spamming. 

“Those deliverability issues are what really hang people up from the start,” Davit says.

When it comes time for follow-up emails, Davit advises judiciousness: Limit how many you send out, and make sure there’s ample time between them.

Above all, he warns, “never, never, ever” email from your main domain. Always use a secondary domain — and have additional domains on standby in case that one is banned.

Before you jump start any email campaign, you need to make sending provisions that set you up for success.

Learn how to add additional safeguards to perfect email sendability and protect domain directly Apollo:

All clicks are not created equal

With a refined lead list and data they trust, Davit and the LeadRebel team used Apollo Sequences to build customizable outreach campaigns with sequential, automatic email touchpoints.

“We sent these campaigns to our broad audience but conversation rates were sitting at about 0.5%,” says Davit.

Which, if you know anything about the competitiveness of B2B sales, isn’t that bad. But they knew they could do better by honing in on their timing and targeting.

To better suss out and nail down prospect behavior, Davit and his team decided to build an integration with Apollo’s Open API to unlock the data they needed to run stronger campaigns.

First, with triggered emails.

Using Apollo Buying Intent, technologies used filters, job change alerts, and custom prospecting Signals, LeadRebel narrowed down their target lists. This allowed them to send targeted emails to company who either:

1. Directly expressed interest in their offerings
2. Or has qualities that make them an ideal user of their product

“It’s important to have some trigger,” Davit says, “A signal that shows you that a company is in your market right now.”

After a more targeted and precise email send, it was time for the next layer of data.

Click-tracking—one of the most important data signals you can receive from any email campaign.

How many emails were opened? What did they click on? Where did they go? How many prompted people to unsubscribe or grouse about spam?

Answers to these questions can lead a company directly to more ROI.

The Apollo x LeadRebel integration started by adding UTM parameters to email links.

“When someone clicks on our link, we are able to find out exactly which company it was,” he explains. “Normally we work on the company rather than on a personal level, so 100 percent of the clicks are anonymized.”

Besides knowing the clicker’s company, Davit can see the entire history of that person’s site activity, including which pages they visited and the duration of those visits. 

But email clicks can be very different.

For example, I might click on a link in some email, come to your website, check it out for a couple of seconds and leave. That’s a sign that I’m not interested in your website offerings,” says Davit.

“But if I go to your website, check your product pages and prices, it’s a sign that there’s serious interest there.”

Note: Many “clicks'' are made by bots and wrongly signal a buying intent or interest. The LeadRebel software can help sellers filter away bot-related clicks and leave only relevant ones!

Based on this information, if the click is determined to be “low-intent” and likely won’t pan out, they stop there; no need to waste more time.

If it’s “high-intent”, LeadRebel Marketing sends the lead to Sales because, odds are, it’s a purchase-ready lead.

From there, they’re able to act accordingly, adding additional steps to sequences and following up with leads based on exactly what the behavior data says.

Determining intent and converting prospects

How does LeadRebel determine the nature of a prospect’s intent? It’s a process.

After learning which company clicked on their site, where, and for how long, Davit filters that data by page. If someone clicked the signup page or checked out pricing, it’s a good bet they’re high-intent. If they merely scrolled through legal verbiage and scrammed, they’re almost certainly low-intent. 

He also uses session recording software to capture video of site activity so he and his team can, in effect, study the tape.

The result of all this parsing and sorting is much higher conversion rates.

In the year since they integrated with Apollo’s API and began data-driven campaigns, LeadRebel’s email conversion rate went from .5% to 4.5% — a 9-fold increase.

Its German campaign alone is pushing 5%.

“The most important thing is to just get started,” Davit says. “Maybe people don’t know what the possibilities are because there’s lots of white noise — so many tools offering different things or the same things and different pricing. For someone who’s not in the software industry, it can be difficult to decide which tool or mix of tools is best. 

“But it’s better to just start somewhere. At some point you’ll find the right combination.”

Adding the human touch

There’s more to data-driven click-tracking than uncovering buying intent.

It’s also about the timing of the follow-up.

“The optimal time between the action of a potential customer and a follow-up is one hour,” Svanidze says. “More time than that lowers the probability of a good conversion.” 

That follow-up to the intent trigger doesn’t need to be an email either. Davit and his team utilize LinkedIn touchpoints as well as phone calls.

He refers to this outreach as “the human touch,” and it’s an essential element of trust-building that no amount of technological wizardry can emulate. 

Without it, he says, conversions would be much lower.

“People may have doubts: What kind of tool is this? Why should I use it? It’s always helpful to talk with people about those things and get questions answered right away. Afterwards, lots of people are converted to customers.”