How Lemonlight Cut their Bounce Rate in Half (without Reducing Output)

There are few companies in the world that balance quantity and quality across their outbound — and even fewer who manage to do it with over 18 million saved sales contacts.

As the world’s #1 video production company, Lemonlight is no stranger to scale. Today, they offer end-to-end video creation for some of the largest brands in the world — Disney, Amazon, Walmart , Netflix; household names, companies who are recognized by billions.

Morgan Anderson, Marketing Manager at Lemonlight, understands that Lemonlight’s high volume outreach paired with high quality targeting and messaging is especially unique.

“Our innovative approach to our work is what separates us from the rest of the field,” she says, “This is a work hard, play hard environment — and Apollo has been our lifeline.”

Lemonlight’s outbound sales success can be boiled down to three best practices:

1. Improving their quality of outbound in Apollo to secure 70% of all net-new meetings  
2. Creating email guardrails to protect their domain and cut bounce rates in half
3. Setting up workflow automation thoughtfully and precisely to save each rep over 2 hours of manual work per day

Here we’ll dive into the details on how Morgan and the Lemonlight sales team built, structured, and scaled a uniquely successful outbound motion.

How to build the foundations of outbound

Ever tried prospecting from the yellow pages?

Morgan has. And it’s just as ineffective as it sounds.

“One of the biggest challenges that we had before finding Apollo was finding leads to reach out to,” says Morgan, who was a former sales rep for the company, “We were very old school, using the yellow pages, using industry-specific tools like Zillow, manual LinkedIn prospecting.”

In their search for a data and engagement tool that they could reasonably build their team around, Lemonlight prioritized finding a vast, verified database right from the jump.

“We tried a lot of different platforms,” Morgan adds, “But then we found Apollo and suddenly had access to a database full of contacts that we could reach out to. It was a complete gamechanger.”

They had the leads. But — despite the high volume of outreach they wanted to scale up to — they knew better than to blast random contacts before defining their ideal customer profile (or “ICP”), a set of characteristics that outline which types of buyers get the most value from their video services. 

Using filters like location, job titles, industry, company size, and revenue, they were able to precisely define the prospects who had the highest-need for their services and use it to search within the Apollo database to build highly-targeted lead lists.

For example, their “Mid-market + Enterprise” ICP is clearly defined by a list of keywords they target (and exclude), plus specific regions and size that their team best services.

In this way, Lemonlight was able to prospect with specificity, enhancing their lead quality to ensure every meeting is the right one.

Download this free customizable template for building out your own ICPs.

To build further confidence in their lists before they deployed them, Morgan and the team connected their HubSpot CRM to Apollo, empowering them in two key ways:

1. It protected them from reaching out to any prospect who’s a current customer, an active opportunity, or on a do-not-contact list.
2. It allowed them to reignite communication with any of their existing saved contacts who were prime for re-engagement.

“Connecting our CRM and using the stage filters and the exclusion filter for sequences was huge for us. We didn’t just use Apollo for all of our net new outreach, but we also re-engaged with all of our saved contacts,” says Morgan.

Initially, SDRs had free reign over lead generation, list building, and workflows in Apollo. “It worked amazingly,” recalls Morgan, “It really was fantastic.” 

But that’s the thing about world class sales organizations — they never stay stagnant. 

As their pipeline increased, they needed to minimize wasted time and free up their reps to focus on human-to-human interactions.  So they shifted focus to creating strategic, top-down automation.

Reaching the right contacts — at the right time

Lemonlight’s approach to sales engagement boiled down to a single goal: reaching the right prospects with the right message at the right time.

The way Morgan puts it sounds simple — but if you’ve ever tried to build and scale a sales function, you understand that traditional, one-to-one outreach will never get you the volume of conversations you need to scale, nor does it lend itself to valuable, timely outreach.

The sales team at Lemonlight needed more control over their messaging. So they built sales sequences, outreach campaigns of scheduled, automated email touchpoints, highly-personalized to their different segments of prospects.

For each of their different types of buyer personas (and other sub-segmented lists), they created four-step auto-email sequences full of personalized messaging that reflected the specific value each type of buyer would get from the product. This was based on personalization data they uncovered from Apollo: the prospect’s industry, location, recent job changes, etc.

But they didn’t “set and forget” their sequences. Engaging your prospects is an ongoing process of trial and error and, by A/B testing their messaging overtime, Lemonlight uncovered their golden messaging framework.

From here they toggled messages “on” or “off” based on performance.

“What’s been really helpful for us is A, B, C, D, E, F testing different messaging to figure out what’s really working. Is the subject line resonating? Is the body copy compelling? We test all of this," says Morgan.

Here’s what they learned (it might work for your audience, too!):

1. Four-step sequences are the highest-performing when it comes to auto-email sequences.
2. Don’t include a link to your calendar in the first email. Wait until the second email to start layering in specific information and relevant links. “Here is when we like to share examples of videos we’ve done for similar businesses. We’ve found that to be very successful,” says Morgan.
3. Keep the subject line generic, but personalized. Their team’s go-to subject line is nothing fancy: “Lemonlight + {{company_name}}”. They leverage dynamic variables to customize the subject line to a prospect’s specific company and grab some eyeballs.

With these practices in play, 70% of Lemonlight’s net new meetings are coming from its outbound efforts in Apollo — in less time, with less work, and in touchpoints of higher-quality.

How to protect your domain with email safeguards

With best-practice sequences firing off, Lemonlight was sending out 300,000 emails every single week. 

Which is simply — staggering.

While that level of volume is not feasible (or even beneficial) for many companies, Lemonlight was able to play the volume game because they understood what many sales organizations don’t:

1. Volume can’t come at the cost of personalization (as covered above)

2. Properly setting up your email inboxes and creating sending safeguards is the secret to increasing volume

To protect their domain and avoid the dreaded spam folder, the Lemonlight sales team synced multiple inboxes to Apollo and set sending limits to make sure they’re not oversending over the course of the month, the day, the hour, even down to the minute.

Lemonlight’s email sending limits offered them protection from being flagged by email service providers. They had a comprehensive system set up that only allowed for 200 email sends per day per inbox, 45 emails per hour, and 90 seconds between every send, which helped them slash their bounce rates by 50%.

“All three of these options prevent oversending, plus I can trust in the data that we’re pumping into the system and using for outbound,” says Morgan, “We’ve had a phenomenally low bounce rate these last two quarters…we’ve essentially cut them in half.”

👉 In Chapter 7 of Apollo’s book Outbound Sales, we outline everything (and we mean everything) that you need to know about setting up your inboxes for success, including an email deliverability checklist. Read it here!

Workflow automation saved Lemonlight SDRs 2+ hours every day

In addition to automated outbound, Lemonlight automated their internal workflows with sales plays.

Adding and removing contacts from sequences, adding personalization statements into messaging, rotating which SDRs are the sequence “senders” — Lemonlight was able to automate all of these tasks with its arsenal of 15 plays that “fire” based on the exact conditions set in place by sales leadership.

One of the plays that has the biggest impact on their efficiency filters through newly-added contacts and automatically routes them into the proper sequences; one of those pesky admin tasks that eats a lot of time and is especially prone to human error.

Their set-up for this sales play looked something like this:

This setup tells Apollo:

• WHEN: A new contact is created
• IF: That new contact aligns with a specific buyer persona (“Marketing Directors”, for example)
• THEN: Add them to a specific sequence (“Marketing Leaders” sequence, for example)

This is just one of Lemonlight’s many sales plays that have resulted in more efficiency across the board — saving each SDR over two hours of work every single day.

With the right set-up, the sky's the limit for outbound.

Apply the Lemonlight tactics by creating an Apollo account — it’s completely free.