How to Increase Cold Email Response Rate?
Uzair Rasheed
PublishedatCold emailing is the type of email marketing where you send emails to prospects with no prior contact. Cold emails can put you in a very awkward position and leave you disappointed at times.
However, cold emailing is still the best way to approach strangers as 80% of prospects claim that they prefer to get approached via cold emails.
Acquiring a list of your potential prospects and setting up a cold email campaign isn't something that's a challenge.
The hardest part of cold emailing is the response rate. The average cold email response rate is as low as 1%, meaning out of every 100 prospects you will reach out to, only one will respond positively.
If you are still looking for ways to improve your cold email response rate. The good news is that you have landed in the right spot.
In this blog, we are going to give away tips that will significantly improve your cold email response rates.
Why is the Average Response Rate So Low?
Before we get into tips and suggestions to improve your average response rate, we need to understand why our cold emails aren't getting a response.
Here are the top 5 reasons why your cold email response rate might be too low.
Your cold emails aren't landing in your prospect's inbox.
Your subject line is not getting the job done and your open rate is too low.
Your cold emails are not personalized.
Your email body content is too long and isn't adding any value to your prospects.
You aren't proving your claims.
Background Research
One of the most important things to understand in cold emailing is that your cold email campaign is all about your prospect not about you or your business.
So you must focus on writing your emails around the recipient. Rather than explaining the features of your product, you should focus on how your product can help them solve their problems and transform their lives.
Your prospect doesn't care about “me”, “our”, or “us”. The magic word is “You”. For example, "{company name} can solve your problems, make your life better, and bring you results".
To do that, it is very important to do research on your target audience and create a focused buyer persona before you even write a word for your cold email.
Create a Focused Buyer Persona
A focused buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal prospect. To create a buyer persona, you must be able to answer the following questions.
What are my potential customers looking for and what do they expect from my product/services?
What are my target audience's pain points?
What solutions or products have they tried already and what makes us different from others?
How can our product solve their problems?
By creating a focused buyer persona, you can write more tailored and targeted cold emails. It will not only make your lead generation process easy for you but also provide you with all the valuable information and pain points needed to write a cold email that converts.
Background research is the most important part of cold email marketing and you will see a significant boost in your cold email response rate once you start writing emails about your customer's problems and the solution you provide. If you aren't sure how you can write a cold email to your potential client that converts, then read our complete guide about how to increase cold email response rate.
Write a Compelling Subject line
Cold email response rates are directly proportional to your cold email open rate. If your cold email open rate is low, it would affect your response rate and make it look worse.
Your subject line is a direct hit to your response rate and is the most important aspect of your email campaign.
Good subject lines catch your prospect's attention and entice them to open and read your email. Since your subject line is your first impression as a stranger, I suggest not using boring, plain, and typical subject lines.
To stand out, you should try something that intrigues them, piques their curiosity, hits their pain points, evoke their biggest desires, or challenges their beliefs.
Personalized Subject Lines
One of the easiest ways to craft a good subject line to increase open rates is to add some personalization. A good example of a personalized subject line is adding your prospect's first name, company name, or location.
Make sure your subject line is short and readable for your clients. If you are using a cold emailing tool like Nureply, then do a test campaign to make sure that your subject line looks exactly how you want it to be.
You must nail your subject line to make it through the noise and get your email opened. If you find it hard and still have doubts, then have a look at our blog on subject lines where you will find a long list of subject lines that work.
Personalize Your Emails
If you are sending the same cold email to a large audience, then you are just throwing the cat among the pigeons. Your cold emails will seem generic and your prospects will know that you are just sending the same email to everyone.
You shouldn't be expecting a good response rate without any personalization in your cold emails. No matter how good your content is, your cold email response rate isn't going to be impressive at all.
Your first cold email must have some personalized first lines that are intended to build rapport with your prospect.
Remember this is a cold audience. Your prospect was not expecting an email from you and you don't want to come out as a person who hasn't done his homework. You must sound like a real person who has put some effort into research.
You need to add the company name, job title, location, and personalized message to your prospect's list. You can write these first lines by finding their company's website or LinkedIn. Personalized first lines can be a comment on their business goals, achievements, and activities.
To improve your cold email response rate, you can now use AI as a quick solution.
Nureply studies your prospect's business and generates hyper-personalized first lines in seconds. So now you don't have to spend time and money on VA to get your emails personalized.
If you haven't tried it yet, try it now for free.
Keep It Short
There are mixed opinions about how long the cold email should be. However, I suggest keeping it short. The reason being you are a stranger to your prospects and your email is going to hit their inbox out of nowhere.
You can write longer emails if the audience is warm enough and is well aware of your product. But when sending a cold email, you can only write more when your prospect responds and ask you for details.
Imagine receiving hundreds of sales emails every day as a business owner. Let's say someone nailed the subject line and you open the email only to see a long intimidating email full of text. Will you read it? I don't think so.
According to recent studies, an average human has an attention span of 8.25 seconds. That means you haven't got a lot of time to convey your message. You want to get your point across to the reader as quickly as possible without overwhelming the reader or causing them to lose interest.
If you want to increase your cold email response rates then keep your message short yet full of value, write short paragraphs, free of any grammatical errors, and make sure you can go through all of it quickly.
Read it out loud to yourself and see if the flow of the email is good enough and you can read all of it easily without any drag.
Warm Up Your Prospect Through Social Media
A cold audience is not the easiest to deal with. Remember when I said that the average cold email response rate is 1%?
One thing which I didn't mention was that the 1% response rate does include all the negative and disappointing responses you will get from your recipients.
However, you can increase the chances of getting a positive response by warming up your prospect before you even start sending them cold emails.
One great way to build trust and provide social proof is to connect and engage with your target audience on LinkedIn. Do regular posts on your LinkedIn and share your recent articles and blog posts.
You can warm up your potential clients through content marketing. If they have already consumed your content, read your blog posts, and visited your website just because they were following you on a social media platform. They won't be cold anymore. Right?
Social media is one great place to spread your brand voice and share your unique business perspective. If you regularly connect, engage, and share your ideas with your future customers. This will increase the chances of getting a response on your cold email campaigns.
Choose the Right Call To Action
A call to action is what you ultimately ask your readers when they are done reading your cold emails. In other words, a specific action you want your prospects to take when they read your cold email. For example, Schedule a call with us, click on the link below, reply to this email, etc.
Your cold email response rate is very much dependent on your CTA. You must choose it wisely and never ask for too much. Keep your demands low and don't expect too much from the readers.
A lighter call to action has more chances of conversion than a demanding call to action. If you were to write your prospect to schedule a meeting by clicking on a link in your first cold email. The chances of getting a response are very much slim.
Besides adding a link in the first cold email isn't good practice anyway as it increases the chances of the email getting directed to the spam folder.
On the other hand, if you ask them whether they would like to see some case studies, success stories, proof of work, etc. Then they have got nothing to lose right?
Your chances of getting a response increase significantly just by choosing the right CTA for your cold email.
Add Follow-ups
Following up on your cold email is a very important part of your cold email outreach. Out of all the sales you generated from your cold email campaigns, only 2% are actually from the first cold email.
That means the chances of getting a response on your first cold email are low. There could be many reasons that your email got ignored completely. They might have been busy, your email wasn't good enough, or they wanted you to follow up just so they could learn more about your services.
In any case, sending a follow-up email is always a good idea as it gives you another chance to convey your message and educate your prospect about the pain points your product can solve.
So make sure that you load your follow-ups with lots of value and state the benefits you might have missed in your last email.
Also, you must give your target audience enough time to respond before you send another email.
Sending a follow-up the very next day isn't a great practice as it might annoy your prospects and they will tell you to stop emailing.
Also, the number of follow-up emails should be limited. If they didn't respond after four emails. You must stop sending emails and admit that they aren't interested in your product.
Email at the Right Time
Your chances of getting a response to your cold emails increase phenomenally by sending emails at the right time. According to studies the best time to send a cold email is between 8 am to 11 am in the recipient's time zone.
This is because most business professionals check their emails first thing in the morning and the chances of getting a response get slimmer with the day passing by. You should not send the email at the end of their working day. That's when the chances of getting a response are lowest since your prospects are probably done for the day and now just want to get back home.
Therefore, it's one of the best tips to schedule your cold emails to be sent out early morning in the recipient's time zone. Luckily we have got lots of emailing tools that have made our job easier and we can now schedule our emails as we like.
Use a Cold Emailing Tool
Using a cold email tool can help you increase your responses to your cold emails. You can keep track of all the statistics that help you analyze the performance of your emails.
If your open rate isn't good enough then you need to work on the subject line. If your open rate is good and your average response rate is low, then you need to improve your email structure and content.
If too many of your emails are getting marked as spam, then you need to assess why your email is not landing in their inbox. There could be several reasons. You might be using too many links in your email, it could be some spam words that may have triggered the system or your email copy isn't good enough.
Scale your emails and try improving the sequence every time you start a new cold outreach campaign. There is always something to improve in your email sequence.
You can scale all emails individually to see which email performed better. That way you can improve the ones that had a low response rate.
Nureply is an AI-powered cold emailing tool that has changed the course of email marketing for you and has made it so much easier for you to get a positive response. On top of all the features I just mentioned above, it also allows you to personalize and send your emails with AI on the same platform.
You will be able to separate positive, negative, and neutral replies to your emails with AI. Saving you a lot of time and increasing your productivity. You won't need to go through all emails at once and can reply to all the positive responses immediately with our sentimental analysis feature.
Besides our AI personalization will allow you to send quality emails while ensuring more replies and a better response rate.
Conclusion
I have written this blog after testing and implementing all the strategies mentioned above in this blog.
And they have all worked for me so far.
Cold emails are hard but still an effective way to engage with your prospects. If done the right way they can help you grow your business.
Remember a bad carpenter blames his tools. Don't blame cold emails for your response rate.
If it's low, you need to work on your cold emails and should try making them better. Put in the right effort and be consistent with it. I am sure you will definitely make it work. If you haven't yet tried personalization with our AI, try it for free.