Sopro’s largest-ever prospecting report reveals how to grow your business with email

Founders Hub parent company Sopro has today launched a must-read report for founders and startups everywhere.

Sopro has launched The State of Prospecting, the most comprehensive report into email prospecting ever, analysing billions of data points from 25 million emails.

With 71% of B2B buyers rating email as their preferred channel to hear from buyers, and 93% of survey respondents stating prospecting delivers positive ROI, this comprehensive report reveals the secrets of consistently driving new business conversations with email.

About Sopro

Privately owned and funded, Sopro launched in 2015 and is now a £10m+ turnover business with a team of 225, having used its own email prospecting technology to grow.

Using its unparalleled dataset of results, the award-winning company has spent years optimising email prospecting to guarantee sales success. This data, which spans 82 industries and five years of expertise and insights, reveals how founders and marketeers can send the best outreach emails.

  • Perfect email length: 150 words
  • Best time for email opening: Friday at 8am
  • Best time to send for lead rates: Midday on Wednesday and 11am on Thursday
  • Optimal response time (so have your sales team primed!): Monday at 11am
  • Number of times to contact a prospect: The third email in a sequence gets the most responses

Sopro’s research has also uncovered the best and worst industries and job titles for open and response rates.

  • Best open rates: Any job title that includes ‘founder’
  • Best industry open rate: Media Production wins with a 45.9% open rate
  • Best responders role: Payroll Managers are top, replying to 39% of sales emails
  • Best responders industry: The politest industry is Government Administration, replying to 30.2% of email

The report also reveals that email engagement rates have surged in the last 18 months, outperforming every other B2B channel, and offering much more immediate results.

 Ryan Welmans, CEO at Sopro and Founders Hub, comments:

“Brands of all sizes re-evaluated email as a new business prospecting tool during the pandemic, and increasingly many now rely on it. The results that smart tech and brief but compelling content can deliver make email prospecting a key marketing channel. In addition, business buyers consistently tell us it’s their preferred way to be contacted about new product and service ideas.”

The report found that it wasn’t just Medical Supplies that were the perfect target industry for prospecting during the pandemic. Open rates, response rates and lead rates increased for many other industries and though some industries – including recruitment, education and tourism – did suffer, they had already begun to recover in the first half of 2021.

  • 20% of prospecting campaigns performed better than pre-COVID
  • 67% performed the same as pre-COVID
  • 13% performed worse than pre-COVID

Katie Street, MD at Street Agency and Co-Founder of Tanba, adds:

“There is no doubt that the pandemic fundamentally changed the marketing channels that businesses could use to identify and connect with prospects. For our agency and many of our clients, the smart use of email marketing tech and highly personalised and automated emails is by far our most successful sales and marketing channel and one that that I only expect to increase during 2022.”

The two biggest digital marketing challenges companies face are lead quality and generating enough leads. Insights from the Sopro report provide the ultimate guide to help with these challenges, as well as predictions for the future of email marketing – a channel we are set to see grow further.

To download a copy of the report, The State of Prospecting 2022, visit: https://sopro.io/results/the-state-of-prospecting/whitepaper/

All of Sopro’s prospecting results are published at: https://sopro.io/results/the-state-of-prospecting/