B2B marketing sucks, so I built a bot to do it for me

[lightnow23]

I started a small consulting firm a while ago, I have one big client, 0 cash to spare and looking to grow our project pipeline. My problem is that B2B sales take a long time and it has been difficult for me to focus on both offering our services and finding new clients.

So since I know my way around R and Python a little, I decided to build a bot to help me with marketing.

In principle, it works as follows: I tell the bot which clients and job titles I'm interested in and the bot then identifies the right people, finds their email address and sends them an email about one of our products with a link to our blog.

It's still a little rough and ready and I'm hoping to use some cleverer techniques to predict the likelihood of a product being relevant to that person or predict the probability of someone opening an email, based on info that the bot gathers on them.

There might be solutions out there that do this out of the box, but I have 0 cash to spare for extra tools, hence I went the DIY route.

I've started sending emails this week, so it's too early to tell how effective my bot is but here are some initial results:

• 809 Recipients
• 65% of emails delivered (some details are wrong or out of date)
• 20% opening rate
• 2% click on the link to the blog

I'm cautious not to go mad with the emails, to avoid reputational damages or being blocked by clients spam filters so I spend a good amount on targeting and personalising messages (also to be automated in the future).

 

[snowmonster2023]

@lightnow23 Crafty pants

 

[curiouscedric]

@lightnow23 Theres so much room for improvement here. Clean the emails with an API. Enrich the emails with something like dropcontact. I could honestly go on forever. I built something like this that reaches out across 6-7 platforms which in teh end seems creepy but scrarily effective if it is done softly.

 

[lightnow23]

@curiouscedric What kind of platforms do you use to reach out? Bare in mind this is for businesses so i can't really market to the CEO of a FTSE 100 on Instagram.

I agree that it can be improved though. So far I've only spent 2 days on the bot.

I've played around with some LDA topic models to match people to relevant news stories and job listings to target relevant content but that needs more work before I can use it.