The complete guide to Outbound in 2025

I tried to find a French translation for the word “Outbound”, but I confess that I did not find it. According to the English definition, the word Outbound means “outgoing”, and the related definition would be “traveling far from a particular place”. 

We understand a little, but it remains quite vague. 

In Marketing, what does that mean? How to use it daily? 

This is what we will explore in this article ☺️

What is outbound marketing?

Definition

Outbound Marketing is traditional Marketing that we have known for a long time and that everyone in this department has already used: it is when the company initiates contact with a potential customer, or prospect. 

Concretely, it’s when you go and find your customers yourself and send them the message you want. The person did not necessarily ask to see this message, it is you who decide to send it to them when you want. 

What we call “Outbound Marketing”. We often associate it with an advertising message, but it's not just that! 

With all this competition, whether physical or digital, it is important to know about Outbound Marketing and learn how to integrate this type of campaign into your commercial services. 

Often, the consumer is attracted by these messages for their advertising nature, and the company undertakes to send content to a target person, at a target time. Or rather, to several people, to the extent that the distribution is on a large scale. 

The goal of Outbound Marketing is very simple: attract potential customers. 

Outbound Marketing techniques:

To help you better imagine the concept, here are some examples of Outbound techniques:

• Television advertising; 
• The advertising you see on the street; 
• “Cold calls” (you receive a call from a salesperson you don’t know and who will sell you a product from this first conversation); 
• Same for emails; 
• Advertising on social networks;
• Paid SEO (SEA);
• Trade shows or events. 

As you can see, these are all the actions you take to meet or initiate a conversation with your potential customers. 

What is the difference between inbound and outbound?
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There are not only Outbound methods. Especially since the Internet and social networks, we also talk about “Inbound Marketing”. 

“Out” in English means “to go out”, In logically means “to come in”. As you have understood, Inbound Marketing is the fact that customers come to you organically, without you having contacted them before. They are the ones who contact you first. This is called Inbound Marketing. 

The advantage of Inbound is that generally, the prospects who contact you already have a specific need and know that you will offer them the solution. They would be more “qualified”. 

However, outbound is not dead! At Humanlinker, we believe that the success of your Marketing campaigns lies in the combination of the two concepts: 
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What are the advantages of outbound marketing?

Outbound Marketing remains very effective for several reasons: 

• This technique offers rapid results: in fact, even if the costs can be significant, it makes it possible to attract potential customers quickly, in particular thanks to targeted advertising campaigns; 
• It allows significant visibility: your Outbound Marketing campaigns will allow you to be visible to a large audience and therefore increase your notoriety;
• Finally, thanks to your Outbound strategy, you will have precise targeting: when you carry out your campaign, you can filter according to the type of position, gender, geography or even behavior. Ideal for speaking directly to your dream prospect! 

How to measure the effectiveness of an outbound campaign?

An Outbound campaign is good. An Outbound campaign where we analyze the results is even better! 

As you probably know, digital provides you with all the data you need: number of clicks, impressions, conversion rate, cost per click and so on...you will know everything, it's up to you to analyze the right data and adjust in function. 

Make a report

The first step is to track the performance of your Outbound campaigns over time. You can imagine a weekly, monthly or quarterly report depending on the frequency of your campaigns. 

The idea is to compare the results with other campaigns (objectives, results obtained, number of appointments generated) 

Identify key metrics 

Depending on your field or industry, certain metrics are more or less essential to analyze: 

• Deliverability: This is the percentage of sent emails that reach recipients’ inboxes. According to Digitaleo, the deliverability rate must be around 95%. 
• Opening rate: the opening rate measures the interest generated by the subject of the email. In general, and depending on the industry, a good open rate is between 30 and 50%. 
• Click-through rate: Click-through rate indicates how many recipients clicked on the link included in the content. Here, we are around 5 to 20%. 
• Number of appointments: this is a direct indicator of the success of your campaign, especially for your sales teams.
• Income: did the campaign bring you any turnover? If so, what worked? You will finally be able to know the return on investment of your campaign. 

Conversion tracking in CRM

As a member of a sales team, what you want is conversion! 

Thanks to a CRM (customer management platform such as Salesforce or Hubspot), you will be able to: 

• centralize data;
• track your pipeline; 
• analyze these famous rates; 
• adjust your campaigns

Let’s start creating ultra-effective Outbound campaigns 🙌

How to implement an Outbound strategy?
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In 8 steps, I show you how to easily create your Outbound campaign: 

Step 1: Define your goals

What do you want to do with this campaign? What is your goal? 

Here are some examples of objectives: 

• Generate 50 qualified leads 
• Obtain 100 monthly appointments
• Increase turnover by X% in the next 3 months 

Step 2: Identify your target audience 

As an experienced salesperson/Marketer, you know that specifying your target as much as possible is the key to the success of your campaign.  

Define who your target is, the criteria, what the needs and challenges are. Then you can segment your database based on the criteria. 

Step 3: Build Your Database 

An outbound campaign depends on a relevant and up-to-date contact list. In your CRM, do not hesitate to segment your audience, ensure that your contact information is accurate. 

Step 4: develop a powerful message for your target

Your message must be clear, personalized and focused on added value for the prospect.

99% of the time, your message looks like this: 

• An object/catchphrase 
• A little introduction
• The added value of your proposal 
• Un Call-To-Action

Step 5: choose your communication channels

Depending on your objectives and your target, you have the choice between several channels: 

• By email 
• On social networks 
• On Google 
• By phone call 

Step 6: Automate your campaigns

Thanks to automation, you will have ultra-effective Outbound campaigns. For what ? Because you will send your messages to 100, 1000, 10000 people in one click. 

Be careful, the idea is to be effective AND personalize your content for each prospect. Don't be afraid, Humanlinker exists! 

Humanlinker is an all-in-one tool with which you can: 

• analyze each of your contacts and understand their personality; 
• personalize your approach with unique messages, generated with AI;
• analyze your performance and adapt your strategy.

Don’t hesitate to take a look at the app 👇
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Step 7: relaunch your prospects

For many different reasons, your prospect may not respond to your first Outbound message. In this case, simply: 

• Analyze the prospect's behavior following sending your message; 
• Follow up rather than wait for the prospect to respond. For example, 3 to 5 days later, you could send a reminder, and 1 week later, call your prospect. 

Step 8: Analyze your results

You know our passion for data. No ? Well know that there is nothing more important than analyzing data to see if our actions have worked. So get started if you haven’t already! (We have already identified the metrics to observe in part 4 of the article) 

The Evolution of Outbound Marketing in the Age of AI

In the era of artificial intelligence, Outbound Marketing has increased its power tenfold. Everything we did before AI, we still do it, but 1000 times faster. Thanks to : 

1. Automation : 

AI makes it possible to automate content creation, campaign management and data analysis; all this on a large scale. With AI, you can easily enrich your contact list, or determine the best times to send your message. What took you time to imagine before, AI does it for you. 

2. The personalization :

You know our obsession with personalization. But is it really possible without AI? In any case, it would not be as powerful. The AI ​​knows the personality of your prospects (for example on Humanlinker, the DISC analysis tool allows you to understand prospects based on their behavior on LinkedIn) and acts accordingly, i.e. it sends the right message according to the personality of the person opposite. 

3. The segmentation : 

Thanks to its capabilities for analyzing large quantities of data, AI is able to guide you in segmenting your prospects, even more than before. With AI, you segment your prospects according to their personality, their common interests or even all interactions with the brand. 

Isn’t that all beautiful? And it is for these reasons that AI is an integral part of our tool. (If you want to take the test, it’s free, and it’s through here!) 

What are common mistakes in Outbound Marketing and how to avoid them?

The errors that we noticed the most are: 

• sending generic messages - you waste time sending messages that are not personalized;
• target the wrong audiences - you waste time sending a message to the wrong recipient; 
• Follow-up without providing value - you lose the trust of your prospects if you follow-up just for the sake of follow-up. 

What are the outbound prospecting techniques?

There are several Outbound marketing prospecting techniques: 

• The telephone call, which we call “cold” 
• Email (you will find an article on prospecting emails here)
• Prospecting on social networks, particularly LinkedIn

Don’t hesitate to combine these techniques for even more effectiveness. You must be everywhere, to be present in the minds of your prospects. :)

What tools should I use for outbound marketing?

At each stage of Outbound Marketing its tools: 

- Automatisation des emails : Lemlist, Mailshake, Reply.io.

- CRM : HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive.

- Prospection LinkedIn : LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Waalaxy, Humanlinker.

- Data scraping: Hunter.io, Apollo.io.

- Performance monitoring: Google Analytics, Klipfolio.

Most tools use automation. Logically, these tools save you time because you send many messages at once, because you maintain consistency for each prospect, and because you improve the personalization of your actions. 

Among all these tools, which will be the most useful for you? To get the answer, you need to identify your goals and consider your budget. It would be interesting to check if the tools are compatible with your CRM. 

It all depends on you and your vision. 

How to personalize your outbound marketing prospecting emails

A personalized email can have an opening rate by more than 50% easily.

To personalize your approach as best as possible, here are some tips: 

• Add the prospect's first name (almost obligatory!) 
• Mention a specific detail 
• Personalize from the subject or introduction 
• Segment your audience as much as possible

Here is an example with a structure AIDA : 

Subject: What if you wrote your content in 1 hour per week? > Attention

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Hello [first name],

From what we've observed with other sales organizations, your sales reps waste 15-20% of their time researching or creating marketing content. This represents a significant amount of time spent away from core sales activities. > Interest 

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- [present the solution] > desire

Results indicate that this helps low-performing reps share relevant content with your key personas. > desire 

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What do you think about discussing it for 15 minutes? > Action 

You will find in this article other examples of B2B emails. 

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Optimize your outbound strategy to obtain more sales meetings

In Outbound, the important thing is to work with qualified leads. For this, the targeting of your campaign will be extremely important. Otherwise, you will get low response or conversion rates. 

I'll come back to this but it's necessary: ​​personalize, even ultra-personalize your content and your approach. In 2025, generic content or conversation without authenticity is no longer welcome. 

Finally, the idea will be to use tools to: 

• automate: particularly repetitive tasks so that your salespeople can concentrate on value-added tasks; 
• personalize: thanks to AI, it’s clear that our lives are easier! Don’t hesitate to use it for the right things, including personalizing your messages. 

Create a mixed strategy between inbound and outbound marketing?

Here is an example of an Outbound strategy that many companies use (because it works really well): 

• Create an audience on one or more social networks - Inbound
• Share high-value content - Inbound
• Let potential customers come to you - Inbound
• Initiate contact with those who engaged with your content - Outbound
• Follow up with people who contact you but don't respond - Outbound 
• Recover their data to go through another communication channel - Outbound

Test Humanlinker for free to launch your outbound strategy

Humanlinker offers a free trial period which allows you to discover all its features without obligation (knowledge of your prospects, help with creating workflows, personalization of messages using AI, etc.). This is the perfect opportunity to test a tool to simplify your prospecting and multiply your results. 

Whether you're a novice or an expert, this trial period is designed to give you a taste of what the tool can accomplish for your outbound strategies. 

Test for free by clicking here  

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Finally, outbound marketing is your fishing net: it allows you to cover a broad spectrum, actively seek out your prospects and quickly generate opportunities. 

Conversely, inbound marketing acts like a hook: this strategy attracts prospects through engaging and relevant content.

Even though inbound has gained popularity, outbound is still an essential lever for reaching specific targets, accelerating the sales cycle and creating a direct impact. By mastering the right techniques and tools, and integrating it into an overall strategy, outbound can be a powerful asset for growing your business.

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