For eCommerce brands, partnering with a 3PL is more than just logistics – it’s a potent growth strategy. By streamlining fulfillment, brands not only save time – but can also boost customer satisfaction while reducing costs.
Yet, despite their essential role, many 3PLs struggle with getting high-quality 3PL sales leads for their business. This is often attributed to a gap in their sales & marketing process – with many of them lacking the knowledge required for effective 3PL lead generation.
This is where AI-powered cold outreach is a great option. This guide gives you a stepwise blueprint on how you can find and engage high-quality 3PL sales leads and use AI to craft personalized emails at scale.
By the end, you’ll have a complete strategy to leverage AI cold emails to get premium logistics leads. So let’s dive right in.
Why Do Companies Struggle With 3PL Lead Generation?
Despite offering essential fulfillment services that are crucial to e-commerce growth, 3PL companies often face significant hurdles in acquiring clients. Here are some of the main challenges that hold back their 3PL lead generation efforts:
1. Developing a Strategy, Tactics, and Goals for 3PL Lead Generation
Effective logistics lead generation requires a focused approach, with a clear strategy, defined tactics, and measurable goals. However, many 3PL providers struggle with laying out this roadmap. A successful lead generation campaign demands not only a targeted outreach plan but also a systematic approach to monitoring results and optimizing strategies.
Without a structured strategy, 3PL firms may end up wasting time and resources on ineffective outreach methods.
2. Articulating the ICP and Finding 3PL Sales Leads
Many 3PL providers find it challenging to pinpoint their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) accurately. Knowing the specific characteristics of your target client, including their business size, shipping needs, and challenges, is essential for narrowing down 3PL sales leads.
An unclear ICP results in broad, untargeted outreach that often misses the mark. It’s important to articulate your ICP, their buying behaviors and objections to optimize your 3PL lead generation.
3. Personalizing Outreach to Increase Engagement
With ESPs tightening their grip on mass cold outreach, it’s important to personalize your outreach. To do this you must address the recipient’s unique needs or tailor your message to connect with them right when they’re in the market to buy.
Unfortunately, many 3PL companies lack the tools or resources to personalize at scale. A generic email is likely to get ignored, while a targeted, well-researched message can lead to meaningful engagement.
Without personalization, outreach becomes just another message in an inbox full of sales pitches.
How to Find Premium 3PL Sales Leads? – Best Practices
To drive growth and build a reliable sales pipeline, attracting high-quality leads that align with your ICP is critical. Below are some best practices to effectively find logistics leads:
1. Segment Your Buyer Personas
eCommerce brands don’t all have the same logistics challenges. A CEO might prioritize cost savings, while a Director of Operations is focused on optimizing delivery times to boost customer satisfaction. By segmenting your buyer personas, you can tailor your outreach to address each stakeholder’s unique concerns, making your messaging more relevant and compelling.
With over 89% B2B buyers likely to make a purchase if they feel understood by sellers, it’s important to tailor your outreach with the right messaging. In context of 3PL lead generation, this implies:
- Targeting CEOs with cost-related benefits in your message
- Tailoring your message around speed & efficiency for Directors of Operations
This may feel like a small shift, but can exponentially improve response rates by making each message feel personalized and focused around the prospect’s unique needs.
2. Build a Highly-Targeted Prospecting List
Once your buyer personas are nailed down, the next step is to build a highly-targeted list of prospects. This is where 3PL lead generation tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and ZoomInfo come into play. These platforms allow you to filter companies based on industry, revenue, business size, geographic location, and shipping volume—helping you focus on the most relevant prospects for your outreach.
By creating a targeted list of 3PL sales leads based on specific criteria like high shipping volumes or brands expanding internationally, you’ll increase the likelihood of engagement. For example, if a company just closed a new funding round, they may be scaling operations and could benefit from a 3PL partner.
A highly targeted, fresh list of prospects is key to staying ahead in logistics lead generation. Make sure to regularly refine your lists to ensure it remains relevant.
3. Craft personalized emails using AI
Personalization in cold emails isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential. Research shows that personalized emails improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversion rates by 10%.
This is where AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Clay, and Lavender come in handy, allowing you to create hyper-personalized emails at scale, which is a game-changer for 3PL lead generation.
AI tools can pull in dynamic data points, like recent funding announcements, expansion news, or product launches, to tailor each email to a prospect’s specific situation. For instance, if a company has just expanded its distribution network, you can highlight how your services simplify and support logistics scaling.
Personalized emails that connect directly with the recipient’s current challenges make your outreach feel more genuine and relevant, increasing the chances of meaningful engagement.
4. Follow-up routinely
In sales, it’s rare for a prospect to respond to the first email. In fact, studies show that 80% of sales require at least 5 follow-ups, yet almost half of salespeople give up after just one attempt. Consistent follow-ups are essential in 3PL lead generation to keep your message top-of-mind without overwhelming prospects.
Each follow-up should bring additional value to the table, while still tying back to the original message. You can share case studies, industry insights and even helpful tips to show that you understand the prospect’s pain points.
All the touchpoints should be as personalized as the first email – showing prospects that you understand their challenges & are committed to providing solutions.
How to Personalize Outreach for 3PL Lead Generation? – Full AI Workflow
Personalization is crucial for successful cold outreach. Here’s a step-by-step guide to using AI tools like Clay for building a data-driven outreach workflow tailored to 3PL lead generation:
1. Set Up a Dataset for Cold Outreach
The first step to automating 3PL lead generation involves preparing a data set for cold outreach. Since we’re figuring out how to get logistics leads for 3PL providers, the most likely ICP would be eCommerce businesses within a specific revenue range.
To do this, you can either prepare a list on Apollo, or leverage a tool like Storeleads and even Clay to come up with a list of companies that fit into your ICP.
Here are a few resources to help you leverage each of these tools for list building:
- Build a list of 1000s of eCommerce companies in Apollo – Leadify AI
- Building an eCommerce list in 4 steps (including Storeleads) – Nick Abraham
- Build a list of 1k+ eCommerce stores in Clay in minutes – Leadify AI
To make sure you have a wide list of companies, apply filters such as revenue range, technology used or even website status (to see if it’s still active or defunct). Doing this gives you a bigger playground that can then be scaled up or down, based on further criteria or triggers.
2. Analyzing Shipping and Fulfillment Information
The next step for automating 3PL lead generation is to analyze the shipping and fulfillment options. To do this, we’ll dig up the sitemap of these websites, analyze their shipping policies and then run a few keyword extractions – before using AI to find more insights for personalization.
You can use AI to analyze each prospect’s shipping policies, searching keywords like ‘UPS’ or ‘FedEx’ – which indicate the names of providers they use. Additionally, you can also analyze whether they offer free shipping or have any conditions attached (such as the minimum order amount).
Once you have these insights, you can mention these as personalized elements in your outreach.
Use AI to analyze each prospect’s shipping policies, looking for keywords like “UPS” or “FedEx” that indicate which providers they use.
3. Analyzing Shipping and Fulfillment Information
In addition to the above, you can also analyze whether they offer free shipping or have any terms & conditions attached (such as minimum order amount). You can create a formula inside Clay to analyze the text from each company’s shipping page for keywords related to free shipping and minimum purchase amounts.
For example, if a brand offers free shipping on orders over $50, you could highlight how your services could help reduce their logistics costs, making free shipping more affordable.
This level of personalization shows that you’ve done your homework, increasing the chance of a positive response.
4. Write AI-personalized emails using GPT
The next step in automating your 3PL lead generation is to craft personalized emails using these insights. Having a baseline idea about what you want to say – and how it aligns with your offering is important.
You can leverage tools like Claygent (in case the email writing requires data to be scrapped) or ChatGPT to dynamically insert these insights into your cold email. One can mention specifics like the company’s current shipping provider (or the free shipping threshold) – creating highly-targeted and relevant messages.
Why Use AI for Cold Email 3PL Lead Generation?
Now, while we’ve already covered the workflow, it’s time to address a rather common concern among prospects (and 3PL decision makers). We talk to a lot of 3PL providers and they’re both excited and scared about leveraging AI for their prospecting.
In our experience though, AI-powered cold outreach brings unique advantages to the 3PL lead generation process. Here’s a few key reasons why AI can be a useful cog in the wheel for your outbound efforts:
1. Improved Personalization and Relevance
One of the biggest challenges in 3PL sales outreach is ensuring every email feels relevant and speaks directly to the recipient’s needs. AI-powered tools excel in gathering valuable data on each prospect: like recent business activities, company size, industry challenges, and more.
This means you’re not just sending a generic email; you’re reaching out with specific points that show you understand their pain points and are ready to solve them.
2. Increased efficiency
When it comes to finding clients for 3PL companies, efficiency matters. Building and executing a successful cold email campaign takes time, from prospecting to drafting unique emails. AI tools speed up that process significantly.
For example, instead of manually searching for leads, tools like Clay can help you automatically gather lists of 3PL sales leads based on specific criteria. It can pull in relevant data, prepare targeted messages, and even handle follow-ups on autopilot.
With AI taking care of the time-consuming parts, you can focus on refining your strategy and honing your message.
4. Enhanced scalability
Personalizing outreach used to mean sending fewer emails due to time limits. Now, AI tools like ChatGPT and Clay let you scale without losing that personal touch. You can also leverage AI to segment prospects based on details like industry or growth stage and send 1000s of tailored messages effortlessly.
This way, you’re reaching a bigger audience, boosting brand awareness, and driving more 3PL sales leads—all without the usual time crunch.
Scale Up Your 3PL Lead Generation With Cleverviral
For companies seeking additional support, partnering with a 3PL lead generation specialist can be highly beneficial. That’s exactly where our experts at Cleverviral come into the picture.
They leverage the best-in-class AI tools, combining it with personalized strategies and targeted list building to help logistics companies find, and connect with qualified leads – thereby increasing conversions!
If you’re a 3PL service provider looking to ramp up client acquisition, simply drop us a line at [email protected] or fill out the form on the website.
Until then, happy prospecting!
