Are Cold Emails Effective?
Uzair Rasheed
PublishedatCold Emailing is one of the most important tools for a business to connect with new prospects.
Leveraging cold emails is as essential to a business as a hammer to a blacksmith. Period!
Your business might start well with people you may know, friends, colleagues, and relatives. However, once you hit the point where your network or initial customer base is exhausted.
Then that's when the real challenge begins. That's the time when you need to go out there and reach prospects.
Start cold emailing, pitching, and spreading your message across to your potential leads.
Cold emailing is a huge part of it.
Sending cold emails out to a cold audience out of nowhere can be really awkward and frustrating for the recipients.
Especially when it's a sales email, it can become super awkward. Nobody likes to be sold to and as soon as your leads sense some sales-y stuff, your email goes to spam or you receive disappointing replies like “Unsubscribe”, “Please take me off your mailing list”, “Not interested”, etc.
And that brings us to the question
Are Cold emails even effective?
The simple answer to this question is “Yes”
Cold emailing works. It can be time-consuming but still, it's one of the most effective and proven strategies of email marketing campaigns.
Whether your cold emailing will be effective or not. It all comes down to the following questions which you might ask yourself.
How good is the email structure, is there any value in your cold emails for your prospects, are you educating your audience about your product or service in a way that they aren't bored, and will they read your cold email till the end?
In this article, we are going to break down the cold emailing process and explain what matters the most for your cold emails to be effective. Let's get started.
Lead Generation
One of the most important parts of cold emailing is lead generation.
Some business owners spend on their lead generation process to get their hands on quality leads by purchasing a lead list from a credible website.
Others may rely on a lead generation tool to gather the email addresses of their potential leads or do it manually by searching it on different platforms.
Manual prospecting takes time but will ensure good quality leads for your cold email campaign.
Your best source for quality lead generation is Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Crunch base. Use these platforms to search for your potential customers that are a good match for your focused buyer persona.
A focused buyer persona can be defined as a research-based fictional representation of your ideal client.
This will make it easy for you to find prospects who match the characteristics of your ideal persona and will increase the chances of getting a response to your cold emails.
If your lead generation doesn't quite match your target audience directly and the quality of leads isn't up to the mark, then your cold emailing process will not be effective either.
Once the lead generation part is done. It brings you to the most important part of your cold email campaign.
Cold Email
Crafting cold emails is an art. A generic boring cold email will have a very low conversion rate and will be sent to the spam folder immediately. Therefore, you must not rely on the dozens of cold email templates found on the internet at all.
It's better to either learn cold emailing yourself or get the job done by someone who can write good cold emails. For you to understand what it takes to write a high-converting cold email.
Let's break down the characteristics of an effective cold email copy.
1. Subject Line
The Subject line is the very first impression normally, if not done properly can be the last impression on your prospects too. Boring, plain, and cliché subject lines will get your cold emails directed to the spam folder immediately.
So, you need an effective subject line that grabs their attention, hits their pain point, evokes their desires, challenges their beliefs, or gives them a mind-boggling offer.
You can check out our blog where I have given 10 different ways of writing compelling subject lines that get the emails opened.
2. Personalization
No matter how good your email copy is, it cannot overshadow the importance of personalization in cold emailing. Remember this is the cold audience and as of now, you don't have any rapport with them.
Therefore, your first few lines should be able to develop a connection and a little rapport with your prospects.
Sending one email to thousands of leads is like dispatching one size shoe to everyone and hoping it fits. One size doesn't fit all. Therefore, you need to write a personalized cold email for every specific person to make your cold email more effective.
Personalization can be done in two ways.
Your current solution as of now will be hiring a Virtual Assistant to the personalization in your cold emails and hoping he/she does a great job at personalization while you wait, pay for the services, and keep your fingers crossed.
Thanks to AI powered Nureply which is 7x faster and 6x cheaper than hiring a VA while ensuring 2.4x more replies on your cold emails.
3. Email Body
After the subject line and your personalized first few lines, comes the body content of your email. The content of your cold email must be short, precise, relevant, and interesting to make it effective.
Your cold email must resonate with your ideal customers. To do that you need to understand your prospects, create your buyer persona, and do good research on it.
Find their expectations, desires, and pain points. Your cold email marketing must add some value and solve your prospect's problems.
You need to explain “How your product is the best solution for their problems” and “How awesome will be the results if they were using it already”.
But remember this is easier said than done. It needs a lot of practice, skill, and experience to craft an effective cold email sequence.
4. Call To Action
Once you have conveyed your message, you must give them a clear and easy call to action.
You shouldn't be expecting too much in your initial email so use a very less demanding and frictionless call to action in your first cold email.
Ask them if they would like to see a demo, or if they want to learn more about your product or service.
Adding links to your landing page and asking them to schedule a meeting is something I don't recommend in your first cold email.
Your first cold email should be just about chasing a response. And if you don't get one.
Then they might want to learn more about your product or service and that's when you need to add a follow-up email.
That too loaded with lots of value and juicy benefits.
Scale your Cold Emails
One of the most effective marketing strategies in cold emailing is to scale your cold emails.
Multiple cold email marketing tools allow you to not only send a cold email but also give you a clear idea of how effective your cold email is.
You can check the email deliverability, open rate, response rate, and spam rate to scale your cold email. That way you can see which email is performing better in your email sequences.
Open rate insights reflect how compelling your subject line is, while response rate and click-through rate tell you how effective is your email's body content.
Cold email outreach isn't just about sending a cold email. A lot of it is actually trial and error.
Monitor the performance of every email in your sequence including the follow-ups to find which cold email needs your attention.
Prioritize cold emails and add follow-ups that performed better in terms of statistics.
That way you can improve your cold email marketing, add follow-up emails that work, and optimize your cold email strategy.
Conclusion
Most people check their emails on daily basis. Cold emailing is one great way to warm up your prospects, increase your brand awareness, and bring more sales to the table.
To be honest, cold emailing can be frustrating and disappointing at times.
However, if you scale your cold email marketing campaigns, keep an eye on the open/response rate, strive for writing better copy, and most importantly be consistent with it. You will finally get there.