Guide

Select the right outreach channel

Most of these communities state in their guidelines that marketing and sales activities are not welcomed on their channels. On top of that, some community members strongly oppose sales approaches and will report unsolicited outreach.

Community guidelines from various online communities restrict promotional outreach

So how can we, as marketers and sales professionals, utilize these channels to connect with and educate our target audience throughout their buying journey? How do we avoid conflicts with community administrators or worse getting banned from the community?

“Spray and pray” outreach stopped working years ago

Imagine you come across a relevant discussion in a Slack community or receive a notification about it from Pypeline.io, sparking your interest in engaging with a user for potential business.

In the past, we might have impulsively sent a standardized email from our sequence, hoping for a response. (Un)fortunately, that approach doesn't work here.

Now, there is still no magic formula to reach out to prospects from communities. But once you master a few helpful key tips and techniques, it can be an incredibly effective way of engaging prospects.

By no means do we endorse breaking the community guidelines, but we encourage you to genuinely interact with your target community. That’s why in this guide, I will introduce strategies to transform community activities into organic opportunities - all without annoying community members and managers. In particular, we focus on the most crucial hints and tricks on where you reach out. In the next guide, we'll dive into what you say to prospects.

Where should I reach out to the user?

There are so many channels where we can reach our target audience and of course the most effective one will depend on you, your company and audience. For us, Slack and LinkedIn have proven most successful in engaging prospects, and this guide will focus on these platforms.

Outreach via Slack

If done right, this is by far the most effective channel because of trust between community members and very high response rates. But you need to do it right - we’ll get to that once we talk about the messaging in the next guide. First, let's discuss the different ways of reaching out through Slack:

Pro tip: Don’t create a Slack account for your brand. Instead create a personal account and engage in the community as your authentic self.
  • Responding to a message within the thread: This approach yields impressive response rates, as your contributions appear organic, prompting further inbound interactions from other members. Community managers appreciate this engagement too, as it is public value added to their community.
  • Direct Messaging via Slack: This method results in swift responses and high conversion rates, unparalleled by channels like email. However, some community members and admins won’t appreciate this - especially if you’re sending a salesy message (more on this later).

Outreach via LinkedIn

If you find a prospect's LinkedIn profile based on their Slack account, you can reach out to them on this channel too. We see that a two step outreach process tends to work best:

  • Send them a connect request with a reference to the community: Start by referencing the context from Slack. This establishes a common ground and increases the likelihood of acceptance. We’ve seen that for our partners this drives up connect rates to >80%, which is far above industry averages of <30%.
  • Start the actual conversation after they accepted your request: Once they have accepted your request, start the intended conversation. Make sure you’re adding value and keep it conversational - but more on the messages shortly! 😉

Outreach via other channels

You can also resort to the traditional outreach methods, such as email and the phone. This makes sense when you can’t reach your target account on a Slack community or when they ask for help urgently to resort to those channels. We do this too sometimes, but it makes a conversation with community members a lot less organic and more intrusive.

For such cases, we recommend tools like Apollo.io - a great tool, with a very good freemium plan - for locating contact details and initiating outreach.

Start reaching out

This guide should give you a better understanding of the channels that we can use for our outreach, but you'll need the right messaging too. So please check out our next guide on conversational messaging here.

Get started now

Don't miss another customer that is looking for your product or service. They are asking for you. You just need to find them.