Hey YC!

We are Lucas and Stefan from Venta AI. A year ago we launched an outreach tool for Europe and soon had to learn about EU-compliance laws. Since cold mailing is not legal in most of Europe, we implemented LinkedIn and letters as alternative and highly effective outreach channels. Today we are launching Venta AI 2.0 -compliant AI SDR that can run multi-channel outreach campaigns to highly targeted prospects globally.

TL;DR: Venta AI is a legally compliant AI SDR that automates prospecting and cold outreach via letters, LinkedIn and email. Thanks to our AI-based qualification and multi-channel approach you can reach every customer, avoid landing in SPAM and increase your reply rates at least 2x.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BjDrlGZCb0

Meet Europe’s strict regulations on cold outreach

When we started cold outreach, compliance wasn’t top of mind. We knew that many EU countries have restrictions and informed our users about them. But soon enough one user received a cease and desist letter for sending a cold email and had to pay a hefty fine. This incident prompted us to take a closer look. EU regulations generally forbid sending electronic messages without an explicit opt-in. In many cases, enforcement might be lax, but if you run afoul of these laws, you could face everything from a cease and desist letter (with fines in the hundreds) to a lawsuit (potential fines of up to hundreds of thousands) or even a severe GDPR violation, which can result in penalties reaching millions.

If you think this is solely a European issue, you might also want to check out Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) or Australia’s Spam Act.

Email deliverability is a nightmare

The second problem everyone faces with cold mailing is email deliverability. People have written enough about this on Bookface, so I will just say: it becomes a never ending cat and mouse game between cold mailers and email service providers (mainly Gmail and especially Outlook).

Compliant ways to reach out

If you don't want to break any laws in the above countries, you have 3 options for cold outreach:

• LinkedIn messages (allowed if connection request accepted)
• Phone calls (allowed with "presumed consent")
• Sending letters (always allowed)

Since LinkedIn limits how much you can send and phone calls take a lot of time, there is only one truly compliant and infinitely scalable way to cold outreach: letters.

Launching Venta AI 2.0 - compliant outreach at scale

Today we are launching Venta AI 2.0, which allows you to run multi-channel outreach via email, LinkedIn and letters, while remaining compliant in each country.

Since letters need to be printed and postage paid, we help you use this channel as cost-efficiently and effectively as possible:

1. Qualification: Venta AI qualifies accounts based on your own questions, such as: "Is this a logistics company that uses electric trucks". This helps to ensure that you are only contacting your ICPs.
2. Contact Picking: Letters should only be sent to 1-2 people in a company. Venta AI always selects the most appropriate contact from all employees in a company based on your buying personas.
3. The correct postal address: As described here, we have learned the hard way that many business addresses in company databases are just plain wrong. So we scrape the addresses directly from a company's website, select the location closest to our prospect and validate the address before sending.
4. CTAs & Traceability: Letters work differently than emails. To bridge the gap from analog to digital, we always include personalized QR codes on every letter. You get an instant Slack notification with the contact's number when they scan it.
5. Saving money on sending: You can send worldwide directly from our platform and simply pay with credits in your subscription.

What to expect from letters

We ran several campaigns testing letters directly against email, sending the same message to the same ICP (CEOs in marketing agencies). Email campaigns were run with fully warmed up Gmail accounts, optimized sending times and AI spintax. Letter campaigns were printed with a handwritten font.

On average across 1200 contacts we saw a 2x improvement in reply rate (4.5% from letters vs. 2.5% from emails) and meeting booked rate (1.5% vs. 0.6%).

Let’s get physical

Want to try letters as an additional or compliant way of reaching customers?

Let’s talk. Contact us at lucas@getventa.ai or book a demo at https://www.getventa.ai/trial