Cold Email and Lead Generation

Cold Email Guide: 10 Tips to Make your Cold Emails Successful

April 7, 2021
12:44 pm

Did you know that 59% of sales email recipients moan over the lack of relevance when they receive a cold email?

What’s worse is that an equal number of email users delete cold emails without even giving them a read.

Sometimes, it’s about what you offer. But most of the time, it’s about how you package what you offer. It’s about how grand your cold email makes your product or service sound or how promising it looks for investing in.

Now, consider that this is the one email that can make or break a potential conversation and, eventually, sale. With that in mind, it’s safe to say that getting your cold emailing strategy right is important.

So, in this post, we’re going to give you some of the best tips to make your cold emails a resounding success!

COLD EMAILING TIP 1

Define The Purpose Of Your Cold Email

You don’t like it when your time gets wasted.

So, why do it to your cold email recipients? While an occasional ‘check-in’ email is good, try to send cold emails that have a purpose.

This will ensure that the readers of the cold email understand its importance and open it upon receiving. If you do not create purposeful cold emails, the intended recipients will fall into the habit of ignoring your outreach emails.

And you don’t want that.

Here are a few tricks that can help you define the purpose of your cold email:

Sharing a blog post
Following up on a previous email or action
Offering results of surveys and studies that could boost their business
Offering free tickets to events
Giving a live demonstration of your product or service

Ensure that you establish the purpose of your cold email early on. There is no point beating around the bush and confusing the reader.

Cut straight to the chase with your cold email.

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Amp Up The Subject Line

The best way to write a compelling cold email is to create an impactful subject line. If you have a subject line that is concise and catchy enough to convey your thoughts; you’ve won half the battle by capturing the prospect’s attention! Cold emails are not like cold calling. The idea is to capture their attention amidst the hundred other cold outreach emails they receive, making them curious about what you have to say. So remember: Less Is More Remember to keep your subject line short, preferably 60 characters or less. Long email subject lines can be ambiguous. They’ll also leave the text incomplete; further alienating the reader. Tap Into The Imagination It’s common knowledge that if our brains are teased with part-information, we naturally become curious to know more. A perfect example of this can be the movies that always release a trailer or teaser to let the viewers know what they can expect. This works well for cold emails as well. Here, your subject lines have to be the hero and tap into the imagination of the readers. Ask a question, share something they might not know of, or talk about a trend everyone is catching up with. Address Directly Thinking of using a generic subject line? Don’t. It will have the opposite impact. Statistics suggest that personalised email subject lines have a 58% higher click-to-open rate. This doesn’t mean you have to spend time finding names, though. This only means that you need to get creative with your subject lines. Address the pain point. Offer a solution. If not, mention a common connection from which you got the lead. Write like you’re talking to them.

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Give…And Then Take

The ultimate purpose of your cold email is to generate leads. This will happen when you ask the reader to take an action. However, before you ask, it’s better to give something. Let us explain.

Get the readers of your cold email to trust you. And the best way to do that is by offering them free information.

When you offer them audits, surveys, a blog post ripe with information etc. with no strings attached, you build a connection. You can then use this connection and kindly direct them to your call-to-action!

This technique of persuasion almost always works. Humans are programmed to reciprocate and repay.

And to make the readers of your cold email reciprocate, you have to act first. This principle is explained perfectly in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion if you want to check it out.

There, he explains how humans are bound by the need to repay, and this is what ties us all together in a cluster of interdependencies!

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Personalise To Specialise

Avoid generic emails. While these can save a lot of time in creation, they will have no impact whatsoever on helping your business and selling your product. Not just the subject line of an email should draw the person in! Personalized emails always get more reads and increase your conversion rate. If you want to tell the reader that ‘ You’re special ‘; make sure you have some concrete facts to support it and a way to show them how this email adds value to them. Almost 49% of internet users say that they do not open any kind of marketing emails that they receive from strangers. In addition to that, every 1 out of 5 emails gets sent to the spam folder of the recipient because of increased spam filters. What does that tell you? No one’s interested in your sales pitch. They’re looking for a personal conversation that can benefit them in some way. This does not mean you have to write long, sugar-coated paragraphs in their praises. It just goes to show that when you’re reaching out to someone, address their pain points. Talk to them like you’ve done your research and have something valuable to offer. The more they relate to your email copy, the higher the chances are of having a good reply rate.

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Keep The Content Short

Let’s face it, no one has the time to read lengthy emails. Time is short and everyone is trying to make the most of what they have in hand.

Thus, as you create your cold email, you have to ensure you create crisp content rich with facts and figures. It needs to be important and interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention.

Remember to put in some ‘natural’ pauses and don’t overwhelm them with an overflow of information. Understand your customer enough to know what they would like to read and comprehend.

PS. Don’t forget to format your email well!

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The Paradox Of Choice

Email marketing is a very tricky space to be in. If you offer 10 products, avoid putting them all in one cold email campaign.

Email marketing gives you the option to create multiple cold emails spread over a period of time. However, if you cram all the options into one email and send it to a potential lead, this will neither hold their interest nor create any potential sales!

The reason? The paradox of choice.

It is a simple concept that states the more choices we have, the harder it is to make a decision. That’s the reason why most of the time we step out of a store without making a purchase, despite having liked a lot of products. The sales process is all about psychology and getting people to think that they really need what you offer.

Focus on highlighting one of your offerings. You can always upsell and cross-sell when the conversation starts.

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Laser-Targeting

How do you ensure that you send the right message to the right person at the right time via your cold email? Laser-targeting is the answer. This technique ensures that your prospect gets the exact information they expect. And personalisation is the best way to do it! Take the example of FastCompany. Did you know that they sent out no less than 100 emails to a bunch of busy professionals who did not have the time to click on random cold emails? Yet, they successfully recorded an open rate of 45.5%. How did they do that? By following three simple principles of personalisation:

They created their buyer personas ahead of time.
Their buyer personas were highly-researched for optimum accuracy.
They personalised each cold email instead of creating clusters.

Personalisation is the key to successfully implementing the laser-targeting technique. In this case, having a smart lead generation tool like the FindThatLead Prospector makes it easy to reach the right accounts.

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Call-To-Action Placement

This is another crucial and, yet, often ignored factor!

You may have all the components of a successful cold email, but you have to place them in the best way possible to get the best out of it. Calls-to-action are an essential part of cold emails and one of the best ways to end them.

But they can work well at other stages of your cold email too.

Your email subject lines tap into the reader’s interest, and the body further convinces them to be invested in your text and business. But it is the call to action that persuades them to take action.

Therefore, this should be placed in a manner that catches the eye of the reader. Think about putting it in the centre or early on. Placing it at the end might even be a good sign-off. Although, you also don’t want customers to miss it!

If you’re not using a templated cold email and are opting for a more textual and personal approach, add a link you want them to click upfront and in its expanded form, like https://abc.com/article.

Owing to the endless number of spam and theft online, most people are sceptical about clicking on hyperlinks or links that look suspicious.

Coming clean is the best way to go about it!

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Test Across Devices

No technique is infallible. You need to keep testing continuously to know what works best for you. The same holds true for cold emails as well. Mobile phones are known to be the best mode for email marketing at the moment. But it’s important to keep testing your email marketing strategies across other devices as well. It’s also important to know how your email looks on various devices because there’ll be a difference in dimensions and visual effects. A good way to go about it is to use email marketing software that offers responsive templates that you can edit to suit your cold email campaign.

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Create Multiple Touchpoints

A good cold email should be short and relevant. At the same time, though, you have to include all the information.

So the question is, is it necessary to cram everything into one cold email? No, it’s not. It usually takes around 8-10 cold emails to generate a response from a potential customer.

Try dividing your information into bite-sized, entertaining, and enticing pieces that can be sent across using multiple follow up emails. And don’t be repetitive.

The best way to do it is by mapping out a whole cold email campaign. Here is a sample map that can help you out:

Cold email 1: Talk about the offer.
Cold email 2: Tap on the urgency of the offer.
Cold email 3: Talk about something different, but related to the offer.
Cold email 4: Ask them if they have any questions regarding the offer.
Cold email 5: Give prospects access to free tutorials.

This way, you pack all your information into five emails. This doesn’t overwhelm your prospects and warms them up to the idea of your offer. This, in turn, increases the chances of them opening your cold emails and acting on them!

CRACKING THE COLD EMAIL CODE

Well, there you have it, folks! Now you know how it works and you know the benefits. It’s time to put words into action! Cold emails can make or break a deal for you. From the subject lines to its call-to-action, get your gears up and running and let the leads come your way. And as a parting note, remember to always measure the success of your cold email campaigns closely. What doesn’t work, needs to be changed on the go. So don’t miss a beat!

Pearl Lemon Team