Cold email outreach can be a great way to connect with potential customers or partners, but it can also be difficult to get right. In order to make the most of your cold email outreach campaign, it’s important to follow best practices and measure the success of your efforts. Here are some tips for getting started
The Ultimate Cold Email Outreach Guide
It’s not just you. It’s becoming harder to send cold emails.
The stats are worth a look:
It’s no surprise that only 24% of cold-sales emails are ever opened. We know that the average email user receives 147 emails per day and deletes nearly half of them within five minutes.
Cold email outreach can still be a powerful tool for prospecting sales. If done correctly, it can even be super-effective. Cold email outreach can not only increase revenue but also help you build long-lasting, lucrative professional business relationships.
BUT:
Cold email outreach can still be a powerful tool for prospecting sales. If done correctly, it can even be super-effective. Cold email outreach can not only increase revenue but also help you build long-lasting, lucrative professional relationships.
Are you curious to find out how? We are sure you are.
This comprehensive guide will teach you everything you need to know about cold email outreach. This guide can be used as a reference for creating, creating, and implementing cold emails that will help you increase sales and generate new leads.
What is Cold Email Outreach?
Cold email outreach is a cost-effective and affordable outbound sales outreach method for generating prospects. This approach uses a cold email. A personalized email message that you send to prospective customers to start a conversation and kickstart relationships with them.
Once you have established a relationship, it is much easier to nurture prospects who respond to your cold email campaigns and gradually convert them to customers. This is what cold email outreachs are supposed to do.
Is It Legal To Send Cold Emails?
Yes, cold email is legal. Indeed.
Cold email, although technically unwelcome, is not SPAM.
- Personalized and with a suitable subject line
- It includes the sender’s name and valid contact details (job title and phone number), as well as links to websites and social media profiles.
- Include a clearly stated request and customized content that adds real value to the recipient.
- It’s designed to spark a conversation and build trust, not push someone into aggressive sales.
The USA CAN SPAM Act is the document you should be familiar with in order to understand all the rules for cold email use in your business.
What is a good open rate for cold email?
25% is a good open-rate for cold email outreach campaigns. If you hit 37% you might consider your campaign very successful.
Email open rates can help to set more specific and realistic goals for future cold email outreach campaigns. They are based on industry average statistics. Email open rates can sometimes be misleading, so it’s better not to focus on email open rates and instead use response rate to your cold emails.
What Is A Good Cold Email Response Rate?
The average response rate for cold emails is about 1%. Good cold mail response rates can vary greatly from 5% to some emails to 20%, or even over 40. The higher the response rate, the better!
If your response rate is half of your open rate, it can be considered to be good.
There is no one answer to the question of what is a good cold email response rate. It all depends on your cold-email outreach goals, audience, industry, as well as your skills and experience.
Here’s the good news.
This tutorial will show you how to create killer cold emails copy step by step so that your cold email response rate is maximized.
When Should You Send A Cold Email?
According to some studies, the best time to send cold emails is between 5-6 am and between 7-9 pm. The image below shows this.
GetResponse, an online marketing software company, says that the best time for prospects to be emailed is between 8 and 3 pm. Each company will have its own suggestions about the best times to email cold prospects.
Are you now wondering when is the best day to send cold email?
Another study linked below shows that Monday and Wednesday were the best days to send cold emails. They had the highest open rates.
There is no universal rule that works for everyone. It all depends on your goals, who your recipients are, the time zone you operate in, and many other factors.
You must craft your cold email well. There is no magic hour or day.
The Perfect Cold Email Campaign: All the Steps
If you want to create and execute a cold email campaign that works, there are several steps you must not skip.
- Set goals for your cold email outreach campaign and ensure that the results are quantifiable.
- Identify your target prospects and conduct research to gather data.
- A personalized cold email copy will spark interest from your leads.
- Before you send out emails, double-check that everything is in order.
- Never underestimate the power and importance of follow up emails.
- Always Perform split testing and track results to ensure that what works is done.
Once you have a basic understanding of the ingredients, you can simply follow the steps in this guide. Let’s get into each step.
Step 1: Set Your Goals and Prepare for Cold Email Outreach
First, let’s get to the point. Effective cold email outreach starts with determining the desired outcomes of your campaign. This will allow you to plan it well. Before you can begin to plan the nitty-grities of your campaign, it is important that you first decide what your ideal outcome will be.
Decide what you want to accomplish with your campaign. Also, decide HOW you want your results to be measurable. This means that you will need to decide on the KPIs that will determine the success of your campaign.
Why do you send cold emails? To sell your product/service? To schedule a meeting?
What’s your goal?
The questions below will help clarify your goals.
- What service or product are your customers looking for? (Make your offering unique – you only have one goal)
- Would you be interested to see your offer? i.e. Which company to contact, who exactly to email there – Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and Buyer Personas.
- What is the best moment to reach out to your prospects and customers?
- How many follow up emails will you send them? And in what order?
- Get in-depth insight into the prospects’ current objectives and needs. Also, issues. Find out how your product/service can help them solve their problem, what motivates, etc. So that you can personalize your cold emails.
- To keep track of each prospect (which stage they are currently at and what your next steps with them involve), and the effectiveness of your campaign (open, response frequency, click-throughs, etc. )?
Step 2: Identify your potential customers
Do you not want to be seen by recipients as a nuance? Your email may end up in their spam folder? This is a fact that should not be overlooked. Don’t base your cold email outreach campaign solely on guesswork.
Instead, conduct thorough research to identify potential customers. ideal prospects. You can fine-tune your cold mail campaign by learning more about your prospects’ fears, aspirations, and goals.
First , find the right person from the right department in your company to speak.
There are many ways to identify potential customers, such as:
- Conducting research to create custom B2B lead list.
- To learn more about their careers and interests, check out their LinkedIn profiles.
- Searching for Twitters where people ask for your help in solving a problem they may have.
- Explore relevant Facebook Fan pages where people might ask for your assistance with their specific product or service.
- Ask your customers to refer customers.
- You can learn more about your customers by looking at the customers of your competitors.
- If you are targeting a B2B audience, review the job descriptions of your ideal prospects.
Mark’s advice Using job descriptions and adverts on a monthly basis to learn more about prospects’ motivations, fears, and wants is a great way of understanding their motivations. To receive job alerts via your inbox, you can save job alerts to LinkedIn.
Before you contact your prospects , ensure you know them better . Find out how your company’s product can bring value for them.
This means that understanding your potential customers’ needs is key to addressing their pain points more precisely.
It’s also a good idea to interact avec your target prospects and monitor the buying signals via other channels before cold emailing them. You should also observe if they:
- Followed your company page (or those of your competitors)?
- Viewed your profile
- What content were they sharing?
- What post they liked and commented upon
- Ask a question about your offering in a forum
- Accepted connection request
Mark’s advice is:Follow the company or individuals on LinkedIn to see any updates.
You might be wondering why it is so important to have a deep understanding of your ideal customer.
Because it allows you to better qualify sales leads.
Once you are certain they are the right fit for your offer, gather their names and contact information, validate, and organize them in a spreadsheet.
Here’s how to quickly find the email address of your potential customer:
- Search Google to find their name, website, or social media profile. They may also contain their email address. You can search for their name or interests if you don’t have their names. To generate lists of prospects for B2B audiences, you can use the tool LinkedIn offers its premium members called “Sales Navigator”.
- To find the standard format of the target company’s email addresses, do a Google search for the company’s domain name and “email” or contact. It’s not difficult to guess that many companies use the [email protected] format. Once you have the correct email address, it is possible to generate e-mail addresses for the specific companies that you are sending your email campaign.
- You can also use Email Address Guesser and other similar tools to help you generate accurate e-mail addresses. These tools are usually available as plugins to your internet browser. This allows you to search for e-mail addresses directly through someone’s social profiles.
- Use paid services such Spokeo, which has large searchable databases full of email addresses. A reliable lead research service can also provide custom lead lists.
Once you have gathered the emails you want to send, verify the email addresses in your list. You have a variety of verification tools that you can use to verify your e-mail addresses, such as BriteVerify or Atomic Email Verifier.
Because it has a significant impact on your email deliverability, verification is crucial to the success of your cold emails outreach. Unverified email recipients may mark your emails as spam or bounce half of your emails back to you.
If you send cold emails that are marked as spam, your email address may be blacklisted. This will prevent your message from being accepted by other email addresses.
It is therefore crucial to ensure that your email list does not contain any typos or fake accounts.
Verifying email addresses will verify that you have collected sufficient quality data. You can be sure that there is a person behind the data to ensure that your cold email outreach goals are not compromised.
This phase is complete once you have collected the email addresses of potential customers and provided a reason to contact them.
Step 3: Create compelling cold email copy
Cold email recipients are people, not robots. Your goal is to inspire a strong desire within them to do what it is you want.
Why? Because it increases your chances of closing sales deals. You need to create a unique and personalized cold email copy. How do you create a cold email that gets responses and drives conversions?
#1 – Spark Curiosity with a Killer Subject line, Preview Text, and Opening Line for Better Opening Prices
Are you aware of how important it is to have great subject lines for cold emails?
It is important to make a first impression.
You can see now why it is important to create the best cold outreach email subject lines that will grab the reader’s attention and not frustrate them.
It is important to make your cold email subject lines catchy:
- Super clear
- Keep it short (preferably less than five words, i.e. Maximum 60 characters
- Informative
- Relevant to your prospect’s requirements (showing how your solution can help them without making false promises or trying oversell)
- Compelling (be cautious to avoid spammy language, e.g. $$$, !!!! symbols !, and words such as free, discount, and similar
- Original
- Natural
- Personalized and
- Invoke an urgency.
There are many other valuable expert tips on the topic. However, some of them can be contradictory. This means that you need to test until YOU find what works best for you.
We will still share some expert subject lines that can help you significantly increase your open rates.
These same tips should be applied to your opening line (the first sentence), preview text, or preheader. All of these elements should work together to achieve the same goal: getting your cold mail opened, read, and responded to.
Your introduction should be clear, honest, and to the point. It should also be focused on the benefits you can offer the recipient, not what you want.
Be sure to spellcheck your subject lines. Send a copy to yourself of your first email so you can preview it. This will allow you to see exactly how your leads view your email so you can avoid any blunders.
Keep in mind, too, that many people now open email on mobile devices. Your message will often be cut short.
If you want recipients to see the entire message, you must ensure that your subject, opening line, preview text and code are optimized for mobile , unless you desire the effect below (which we doubt).
Zurb’s TestSubject is a handy tool that you can use to test whether recipients will see your subject line and opening lines before hitting the Send button. Create a personalized cold email
If your subject and opening line are intended to grab the recipient’s attention and get their cold email opened, then your email body text should be aimed at delivering on the promise(s) made in your first few lines and encouraging desired action.
Here are some tips to help you get through this phase.
- Your message should sound authentic and natural to build human connections with your prospects.
- Keep the text clear and focused on your value proposition. Briefly describe who you are and what you can do to solve the prospect’s pain points. Also, explain why they should care about the potential benefits that you can offer. You could also include numbers about a free trial, demo, webinars, tools, resources, or any other similar offer.
- Write a concise message that is to-the-point and shows respect for their time (ideally between 50 and 125 words). A couple of paragraphs containing the most important information that is easily scanned should be sufficient.
- Personalize Every bit of your cold emails.
- Include a specific Call-to-Action to let the recipient know exactly what you want.
- Before you send your copy, make sure to proofread it and to double-check its quality, length and how it will display on different devices.
- Avoid ALL CAPS, excessive punctuation (exclamation points in particular), poor grammar and attachments as they can flag spam filters. However, emojis can be used sparingly in your subject lines to increase your open rates.
- Power words (those that evoke fear, lust or greed, safety, etc.) should be used well. agony, life-changing, annoying, money-saving, risk-free, embarrassing, forbidden, etc.)
- You can use psychological tricks like offering an immediate reward, showing success, or FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), etc. You can create a special offer that has a deadline or focus on the potential loss to your recipients if they decline your offer.
#2 – Include a precise CTA
Your Call-to-Action has one purpose: to convince your cold email recipient to do the things you want. Your CTA should trigger conversion.
What do you want them do after reading your email?
- Do you want them realizing they need your services and paying you for it?
- Purchase your product
- Become your affiliate?
- Register for your software
- Arrange a demo/meeting with you?
You want them to eventually buy your product or services, but it is important that you don’t force them into buying immediately before you establish a solid relationship.
It is important to create a concise and specific CTA that doesn’t leave your prospects guessing. Never assume that they will decide for themselves what next steps to take.
It is also important to note that using one CTA per email for a specific offer will increase your chances of success.
3 – Personalize your cold e-mail messages the right way
Did you know that personalizing your cold email copy can make a big difference in your open, click-through, and response time?
It may seem tedious to personalize every message to hundreds of prospects when you’re emailing them. But proper personalization is essential.
How to personalize your email messages in the right way
Collecting data about your recipients is the first step to creating a personalized cold email. Once that is done, you can use that data to benefit and engage them.
It’s important to find out more information about your recipients in order to build a foundation for highly targeted messages.
- Localization
- Job title
- Hobbies and interests
- Favorites (animals, colors, sports, etc.)
- They went to school/university
- Common connections
- Club memberships
- Recent challenges
- Accomplishments
- Mentions on videos, podcasts, websites, or webinars
Be sure to include a few of these details in your email copy so they blend with the rest of your message. Don’t be obvious that you are using a template. It is best to not use more than three pieces personal information from your recipient in one email.
It’s important to learn about your customers. Don’t just write “Hey, [First name]”, but create messages that are connected with the behavior and preferences of your prospects. They’ll find these messages valuable and trustworthy.
You will be able to build a stronger relationship with your prospects by sharing a common topic.
4 – Add a professional email signature
Many people overlook the last chance to make an impression. A memorable, creative and memorable sign off should be accompanied by a professional email signature that should include your:
- Name
- Current situation within the company
- Physical address
- Phone number
- Link to company website
What can you do if you include your full name and contact details in your e-mail signature?
Simply show the recipient you are a real person.
You are not only showing them how professional and human you are, but also your email signature, which acts as your electronic business card is compliant with the CAN SPAM act previously mentioned in this guide.
You can also add a brief CTA to your email signature (e.g. To help you reiterate your message to the recipient and increase conversions, include a link to your calendar to schedule a meeting.
It could look something like this:
You can also add a tagline, original quote, or important accomplishment to your signature to show your value and build trust. This will make your cold email more memorable.
You should also avoid including redundant links and information, such as multiple phone numbers or your email adress, in your cold email signature.
Also, check the HTML footer in your signature. It should be clean as messy, unorganized HTML that takes up more space than your message triggers spam filters.
Step 4: Before hitting the Send Button, perform a Sanity Test
You need to ensure that your cold email is effective.
- It’s clear that you know what you want to accomplish with your cold email, and it’s also clearly stated to the recipient.
- You’re emailing the right person in your company’s department and position, and they’re your ideal target prospect
- Your cold email copy (including all elements such as e.g. Subject line, CTA, or signature should be relevant to the recipient, eye-grabbing, appropriately personalized, straightforward and persuasive.
- Always proofread your cold emails carefully and run a sanity test before you send them.
- Your email does not contain spammy elements
- Perfect timing for sending cold emails
- Remember to keep in touch
- Split test every part of your cold email until you find the magic formula to drive conversions.
Once your cold email copy has been completed, it’s a good idea to ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly.
- Is this an email sent by a real person or a robot? Is it spammy Does it sound like someone could have sent it?
- Do I want to build a positive relationship with my prospects or am I impatient and trying to push them into sales too soon?
- Is my email too long? Or am I able to get to the point quickly and respect the recipient’s time?
- Is it clear what I want the recipient do after reading my email?
- Is the email message displayed correctly and easy to read across all devices? (Have you used a tool to verify it and ensure that everything is working properly?)
- If I were to receive an email message from an unknown sender and I received it, would it be spam? Or would I open it, read it, and then act on it?
- Are I asking too much of the recipient? Are I asking them to make a big commitment right away?
If all goes well, cold email outreach should work. Good luck and go ahead!
Remember that you are not done with your job once you have sent the first email. This is the beginning of a magical journey.
Keep reading to learn why it is important to follow up and how you can do it right.
Step 5: Always remember to send follow-up emails
Remember to not be pushy or salesy when you first contact potential customers via cold email.
It’s not a good idea for you to close a deal right away. Instead, warm them up so they notice you and reply to your first message. This will help you build trustworthiness.
Also, don’t lose heart after receiving the first message. Always send follow-up emails.
Marketing and salespeople often make the biggest mistakes of their careers by not following up.
Did you know that sending more follow up emails can increase your reply rate by three times? Exactly!
You may be wondering how many follow-ups you should send. You don’t want to overwhelm or annoy your recipients.
Experts suggest that 8 follow-up emails is the ideal number. Propeller and other studies have shown that most sales require at least five follow-up emails to close.
It is important to follow up on your prospects regularly, but not drive them crazy. It’s easier to follow up after an event that may serve as a trigger.
Another important question is how long you should wait to follow up.
There is no universal formula. However, a reasonable time frame is at least three to four days between follow up emails.
It is important to remember that your follow-up messages should not be repetitive or salesy. Don’t assume the recipient has seen your previous emails.
Instead, add more value to each follow-up email and build trust. All you’ve learned so that they can respond (empowering subject line, appropriate personalization, CTA asking them a question to give them an incentive to reply, etc.). Create your follow-up copy.
If you don’t receive a response to your emails after four to eight follow up emails, it’s time to send a breakup message to get their attention and start a conversation. This is when you inform the recipient that you will not be emailing them again if they don’t reply.
Never abruptly end any communication.
It’s possible they have been too busy to reply or forgot to. Don’t judge or sound angry. Make it clear that you won’t email them anymore, and that they can always reach out to you if they change their mind.
Now you are ready to create a successful and effective cold email outreach campaign. You can now test all of the things you’ve done so that you can see if it works.
Step 6: Split test your emails and keep track of the results to find the top performers
It’s important to track the success of your cold emails.
- Open rate – To see if your subject line is working
- Response rate – To determine if your message is reaching the bull’s eye,
- Conversion rate – If your message aligns with your sale, higher open rates and response frequencies will naturally lead to more sales.
To determine which variants drive more clicks or sales, you need to tweak your cold e-mail messages.
Split testing will give you more insight into your best-performing components. You could also test your email.
- Subject lines
- Opening lines
- Copy for the body
- CTAs
- Timing
- Personalization
- Your value proposition should be written
Until you find the winner.
After testing, you will need to tweak, optimize, and test your cold email again until you achieve the desired result.
This takes patience, time, and tenacity. It includes the following steps:
- Split test one variable or component.
- Make two versions slightly different of this component.
- Identify clear criteria to determine your winning variant.
- Determine how long you will be doing A/B testing.
- Divide your target audience into two equal-sized groups.
- Present one group with variant A, and the other with variant B.
- You will see significant differences between the two versions.
- Based on your testing results, keep the version you like best.
It is a good idea to test both variables simultaneously so that time differences don’t affect the results.
You’ve now discovered the winning formula for creating a cold email outreach strategy that works from the beginning.
Are you ready to implement it?
Conclusion
Your cold email outreach will fail if you don’t plan and prepare properly.
Our guide makes it easy to take a proactive approach when you receive cold emails.
You’ll enjoy high open, click-through and response frequencies if your cold email copy is excellent. You’ll also be able to establish long-term, reliable business relationships.
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