Most outbound runs on one rule: work the list from the top, and send everyone the same first email.
Which means your warmest prospects get your coldest email.
A company on that list might have spent Tuesday on your pricing page, comparing you with a competitor. Your list doesn’t know that, so the company gets “quick intro, we help B2B teams…” like everybody else, whenever your rep reaches its row. Visitor identification (software that names the company behind a website visit) tells you which companies those are before the sequence goes out.
Can you really know if a company on your list has visited?
Yes, for a lot of them, and in more detail than you’d expect.
Every visit to your website arrives from a network, and an office network usually traces back to the company that pays for it. Visitor identification reads that and puts the company’s name on the visit.
So where your analytics says “1 visitor, 4 pageviews”, you’d see which company on your list it was. It read your pricing page and your HubSpot integration page on Tuesday, stayed six minutes and came back on Thursday.
You get the company, the pages and the dates. You don’t usually get the person’s name, but you’re rarely stuck, because what a company reads usually tells you whose job it is. (Someone who spends six minutes on your integration pages is rarely the CEO.)
There’s one limit worth knowing, because it changes how you read the list. Someone reading on mobile data usually can’t be matched, so a company with no visits on record may still have been on your site. Treat a visit as a reason to move a company up, and never treat silence as a reason to move it down.
How do you check your list against your visitors?
Three ways. Most teams start with the first and end up relying on the third.
| The way | How it works | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| 🔎 Look up one account | Search for the company before you write, and read what it did on your site | Before a call, or for the ten accounts you’d hate to get wrong |
| 📋 Match the whole list | Upload your target list or connect your CRM, then filter your visitors down to the companies on it | Monday morning, before the week’s emails go out |
| 🔔 Get told | An alert the moment a company on the list turns up | Any list you’ll be working for months |
The lookup is where everyone starts, and you can try it today. Take ten companies your reps emailed last month and look each one up. Any that had been on your site before the email went out got a stranger’s introduction they didn’t need.
It doesn’t survive a list of 500, though, because nobody searches 500 company names before sending a sequence. (If someone on your team does, promote them or stop them.)
Matching the whole list is the one that changes your week. You end up with a short list inside the long one.
That list is made up of the companies you were going to contact anyway that have been on your site in the last fortnight. Those go first, because they’re the ones most likely to write back.
This is how our own reps work, by the way. Each rep has a saved list of the deals they lost, and most have one for their open deals too. The lists keep themselves up to date from the CRM.
On top of those sit a few narrower lists, for the deals closest to a decision:
- Open deals that read one of our comparison pages in the last seven days.
- Open deals that opened the billing page this week. One rep named theirs “Ready 2 Buy”. (We didn’t workshop the name. It works.)
Which companies move to the top?
The ones that came recently and read the pages only a buyer bothers with: pricing, comparisons, integrations and security.
Here’s the nice part. With an ordinary list of website visitors, the first job is working out which companies are worth your time, and most of them aren’t.
Your outbound list has already done that work, because somebody picked every company on it. So a visit from one of them doesn’t need qualifying. It only needs sorting.
Four groups cover it:
| What the company did | Where it goes | What it gets |
|---|---|---|
| 💰 Read pricing, comparison, integration or security pages in the last two weeks | Top of the list, today | An email a rep writes by hand, about what they were reading |
| 📄 Visited in the last two weeks, but only the blog or the homepage | Next | Your normal sequence, sent sooner, with a first line about the topic they read |
| 🕰️ Last visited more than a month ago | Where it was | Your normal sequence. An old visit is history |
| 👻 No visit on record | Where it was | Your normal sequence. This is usually the biggest group, and that’s fine |
The two-week and one-month lines are rules of thumb from our own site, so stretch the two weeks to a month if your deals take six months.
The top group will be small, and that’s the point. Our own comparison-page list usually holds a handful of companies, few enough for a rep to write to properly before lunch. Each one gets a real email instead of a template with their name pasted in.
One exception before you start. If a company on your list turns out to be an open deal or an existing customer, its visit belongs to whoever owns that account. They know what’s already been promised. Take it off the outbound list while you’re there.
What should the email say?
Whatever problem their reading points to, and nothing about having seen them.
Reps argue about this on sales forums: do you tell a prospect you noticed them on your website? Our take: with a company you’ve never spoken to, don’t.
You know the company visited, not which person, so there’s a decent chance you’re telling someone about a visit they never made. And if it was them, nobody enjoys finding out they were watched.
What the visit does give you is the topic. Say your cold email was going to be this:
Hi Sam,
Quick intro: we help B2B teams turn website traffic into pipeline. Do you have 15 minutes this week?
Then you check, and the company read your HubSpot integration page twice and your pricing page once. So you send this instead:
Hi Sam,
Most teams on HubSpot only see the companies that fill in a form. The ones that read the pricing page and leave never reach a rep.
We put those companies on the account record in HubSpot and tell the account’s owner. Worth a look at how that would work for your team?
There isn’t a word about the visit in it. It’s about HubSpot because that’s what they were reading, so it reads like a well-timed email from someone who understands the problem. (Which, to be fair, it is.)
The rule flips for people you already know. With a deal you lost or one that’s still open, saying you noticed can work, because there’s a relationship to carry it.
How soon should you write?
The same day or the next morning. Not the same minute.
Interest has a short shelf life. A company comparing tools this week has often picked its shortlist by next week. An email that turns up nine days after the visit is answering a question they’ve stopped asking.
Too fast is a problem as well. An email that lands while your pricing page is still open in another tab tells them exactly how you knew. All the care you took to leave the visit out of it is wasted.
So split the two jobs. The alert goes to the account’s owner as the visit happens, and the email goes out within a working day.
| What you see | When to write |
|---|---|
| 💰 Pricing, comparison or security pages, from a company in your top group | Today or tomorrow morning |
| 📄 A blog post or the homepage | This week, through the sequence |
| 🖱️ A visit a few minutes after your own email went out | No rush. That’s your email being clicked, so carry on with the sequence as planned |
| 🔁 A second visit after you’ve already written | Follow up, on a different channel or to a different person |
How do you get it into Apollo or lemlist?
With two sequences, and one rule for moving a company from the first to the second.
The first is the cold sequence you already have, for everyone on the list. The second is a short one, two or three emails long, for companies that have been on your site.
It can be far more specific, because you know what they were reading. Write one version for pricing visitors and one for integration visitors and you have enough to start.
The rule is where it goes wrong. When a company lands in your top group, its contacts have to leave the cold sequence before they join the new one.
Skip that step and the same person gets your cold intro at nine and your HubSpot email at eleven, from the same rep. (Ask us how we know.)
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1️⃣ | A company on your list reads a pricing or integration page |
| 2️⃣ | It lands in your “visited” list, and its owner gets the alert |
| 3️⃣ | Its contacts are taken out of the cold sequence |
| 4️⃣ | They go into the short sequence, or the rep writes by hand |
Who gets the email is a separate decision. You know the company, so pick people by role. That’s the contacts you’d already lined up for that account, or the people whose job matches the pages that were read.
And you don’t have to automate any of this on day one. If your top group is five companies a week, write to them by hand. Automate when the list gets too long to read.
How do you know it’s working?
Compare the companies that had visited with the ones that hadn’t, on the same list, with the same reps, in the same month.
That’s about as fair as a sales test gets, because nothing else changed. If the visited group replies more often, the sorting is doing its job. If it doesn’t, your top group is too loose and you’re counting blog readers as buyers.
| What to measure | How to read it |
|---|---|
| 💬 Reply rate, visited against not visited | The headline. Look at it after a month, once both groups have a few dozen companies in them |
| 📅 Meetings booked per 100 companies, in each group | Replies are nice, but this is the number your sales lead cares about |
| ⏱️ Time from the visit to the first email | It should be under a working day. If it’s a week, the alert is going to the wrong person |
| 📋 How much of your list has been seen on your site at all | If it’s close to nothing, your marketing isn’t reaching the companies sales is working |
Show the last row to marketing. A target list that never turns up on your website is a list your ads and content aren’t reaching. That’s worth knowing before anyone builds the next one.
Look at it once a month. If the visited group stops doing better, tighten the pages that count as buying before you change anything else.
So, should you check before you reach out?
Yes. It’s the cheapest improvement you can make to a list you were going to work anyway. The list, the reps and most of the emails stay exactly as they are. The only things that change are the order and the first email to a handful of companies.
So before this week’s emails go out, ask three things of your list. Which of these companies have been on our site in the last two weeks? What were they reading? And does somebody here already own them?
The ones on pricing, comparison, integration or security pages go to the top. A rep writes to them within a day about what they were reading, without a word about the visit. Everyone else gets the sequence you’d planned. After a month, compare the two groups.
The companies that haven’t visited aren’t worse prospects. You just don’t know anything about them yet, so they get the email you’d have sent anyway.
Curious which companies on your list have already been on your site? Try Snitcher, upload your target accounts and see who’s been by this month. You’ll know who goes first before Monday’s emails go out.
