How to write a Cold Email to a Potential Client?
Uzair Rasheed
Publishedat
Cold emailing is the process of reaching out to prospects who don’t know you and have no prior contact with you or your company.
It’s difficult to chase a response from someone who doesn’t know you and didn’t ask for your emails at all. That’s why a cold audience is the hardest to convince and convert. Therefore, you must learn the basics of cold emails before setting up your first outreach campaign
Even though most people aren't quite successful with cold email campaigns, I believe that it’s still worth it to go through the whole process and finally nail it by testing and making your cold emails better with time.
If you want to grow and find new potential clients, then you must reach out to cold prospects. That’s where all your future clients are. This blog post will give you a step-by-step guide to writing and setting up a cold email outreach campaign that converts.
You will also get some cold email templates that worked and got a decent response rate for us. However, please make sure that you don't use the templates as it is. What works in one niche and audience will not necessarily work for you too.
You need to understand the basic idea behind a converting cold email and need to write one for your niche after doing proper research and learning about your prospect’s problems and desires.
Setting Up Domains
Let’s start with the basics. You should never use your company’s main domain to reach out to cold prospects. Always buy new domains and create new email accounts with address names that are similar to your company.
Some people aren’t very welcoming to cold emails and there is always a chance of getting your emails marked as spam. This can damage your reputation as a sender and can affect your email deliverability.
Getting your reputation damaged can get all your email accounts blocked. It can sometimes even get your main domain blacklisted. Therefore, buying some new domains and creating new email accounts is always advised before setting up your first cold email campaign for sales.
Make sure that you get your new email accounts verified with SPF Records (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance).
It enables recipient servers to recognize you as a legitimate sender and will ensure that your cold emails land in your prospect’s inbox.
Warming Up Your New Accounts
Email warm-up is the process of building a reputation for a new email account to make sure that your cold emails land in your prospect’s inbox.
You can only send a small number of cold emails to your prospects when starting up a new email account. Therefore, if you start sending your cold emails without warming up your email accounts, they will most likely not make it to your prospect’s inbox.
Warming up builds your reputation and improves your email deliverability. It’s a very important step of your outreach campaign and must not be ignored.
You can do it manually by sending 10-20 emails to your friends and colleagues from each account every day. Please do it for several weeks to ensure the email service providers that the accounts are being used for legit email activities.
You can also automate your warming-up process by using email warm-up tools. That will of course take less time and will be not as much tedious too. Once your accounts are fully warmed up, you can now start sending cold emails to find your potential clients.
How to Find your Potential Client?
Finding your potential client is part of the lead generation process where you gather the email addresses of your potential prospects. You should do some research to find the right audience who needs your products and has the same problems that your product can solve.
There isn’t a single product out there that doesn’t have a particular audience. You must market your product to the right person. If you will try to sell your product to everyone, you will waste your resources and time too.
The quality of leads is as important as your email content. If you send your cold emails to irrelevant people, it isn't going to convert. Imagine selling umbrellas to people living in deserts. They don't need it and it won't work at all.
Avoid buying lists of email addresses from cheap websites because they mostly contain a lot of invalid and irrelevant contact details. Sending cold emails to invalid email addresses will increase your bounce rate and hurt your reputation as a sender. On the other hand, sending a cold email to irrelevant prospects will be just another email wasted.
One of the best ways to find the email addresses of your prospects is to search them manually on Google, LinkedIn, and CrunchBase. There are also several tools out there that can expedite the manual lead generation process while ensuring quality leads for your cold emails.
If you want to write a cold email that converts and generates sales for you, then make sure that you don’t compromise on the quality of leads too.
How to write a Cold Email for Sales
Now that you are ready to start your cold email outreach. It all comes down to the most important part of our blog how to write a cold email for sales and how to draft a cold email?
The primary reason for cold emails having a low average response rate is that we have no relationship or connection with the prospects. There is no credibility of course and they have never heard of our organization or company either.
Your first cold email shouldn’t be intended for a sales meeting. It should rather be focused on building connections with your prospects and chasing a positive response only.
Don’t try to push sales in your first interaction. Try giving your potential client as much value as you can and introduce solutions to their pain points only.
Once they respond you can try to have a better understanding of their problems and explain how your product can help them. This builds rapport and increases your chances of converting your potential prospects into paying customers.
To explain everything in detail, I have explained all the essential elements of a cold email separately. You should try achieving all of them to write a cold email that converts.
1. Writing a Strong Subject line
The subject line is the first impression of you on your prospect. It is one of the most important aspects that decide the fate of your cold email. If the subject line fails to do its job, your campaign will fail too.
Make sure that your subject line doesn’t give the impression of a spam email. A poorly crafted subject line can damage your reputation and affect your email deliverability by getting your emails marked as Spam.
You can simply avoid such situations by writing a subject line that works.
a. Make them curious
Don’t tell them everything in your subject line and leave the information incomplete to intrigue your prospects. Curiosity always works. It tends to leave your prospects unsettled and compels them to click on your email to see what is in there.
b. Personalize your subject line
Cold email subject lines with personalization can increase your open rate by 50%. Your potential clients don’t want to be treated like many others. Personalized subject lines make your prospects feel special and explain that you are not a spammer who probably sent the same email to many others.
c. Stay Relevant
Your subject line should also be relevant to the content of your cold email. Your prospect wouldn’t be impressed if you just came up with a clickbait strategy in your subject line. Your cold email may get opened but will most likely end up getting directed to the spam folder.
2. Use a Strong First-line Icebreaker
One thing I admire about cold email is that, unlike other marketing strategies like Social media ads, google ads, and content marketing, cold emailing can be personalized and tailored exactly to your prospect’s pain points and desires.
Once the subject line has done its job, it comes down to the first few lines of your cold email. A strong opening line will retain your prospects’ attention and make them read further. It should also build some rapport and make them feel special.
Your opening line should never be an introduction to you or your company. It should be all about your prospect. A compliment on one of your prospect’s company’s achievements can be a strong opener.
A good opening line is always written after a little background research on the prospect’s profile. It also makes your cold email stand out among other generic sales emails and increases the chances of a positive response.
Most marketers hire a Virtual assistant to research and write first-line icebreakers for their cold email campaigns. Hiring a VA is of course a costly and time-consuming process with no guarantee of consistent quality.
Nureply is one innovative solution to writing strong first-line icebreakers for your cold email campaigns. It can generate hyper-personalized first lines for your cold emails in seconds.
3. Offer a Solution to a Specific Pain point
Once you have successfully grabbed your prospects’ attention, you need to come straight to the point. They want to know how you can help them. They aren’t interested in how great you or your company is doing. Instead, all they are looking for is value.
If you have already done the research and followed the steps I mentioned above, then you probably already have identified the biggest pain points of your prospects. All you need now is to agitate your prospect’s pain points and highlight your solution.
Don’t go too deep into the features of your product. If you really feel the need to mention your cool features, then tell your prospects the benefits. Features tend to confuse most of the time and don’t serve the purpose. It doesn’t matter how good the features are. Your potential clients only want to know how is it going to benefit them.
4. Add Case studies as Social proof
If you have any case studies, you should always add them to your cold email. Your prospects don’t know about your company and as of now, you have zero credibility. Adding case studies in your cold email can prove what you just claimed above in your message.
Most people just claim in their cold emails and have nothing attached as social proof. Case study emails stand out with the impression that you took an extra step for your prospects and proved your claims.
It builds trust and induces desire in your potential clients too. If they can see what they can achieve with your product. They are more likely to respond.
5. Keep it Short
An average office worker receives around 121 emails every day. Out of those 121 emails, I assume that more than half would just be some random sales pitches.
You must understand that the person you reached to out is busy and would most probably already trying his best to dodge sales pitches. Therefore, your prospect or ideal client wouldn’t like to read a wall of text and will most likely get intimidated by it.
When you are writing your first cold email to your prospect, don’t think you have to say it all and reveal everything good about your product. A cold email campaign has got multiple follow-ups too and they are there to add more value to your campaign.
Data suggests that cold emails that are 50 to 125 words long perform the best. This length is enough to get your point across and start a conversation. Short and to-the-point cold emails perform better and have also got fewer chances of getting caught in the spam traps too.
6. Call to Action
This is the last step of your cold email where you want your potential client to take the desired action. A call to action (CTA) can be a call for a meeting, a sign-up request, or just a simple reply to your email.
Make sure that your Call to action is simple. It should be able to clarify the purpose of the email. A lighter call to action will perform better of course. I will not advise you to send a link to the meeting as your CTA. Because I think you are just asking for too much in your first interaction.
If your call to action is just about getting a response, it will perform better. Engaging your prospects in communication is all you need. Once you have done that successfully, you can then ask them for a quick demo or a sales meeting.
For more different ways of ending your email body, check out this blog post.
7. Don't add links or images
Plain text emails sound natural and have better cold email deliverability than the ones with links, fonts, and images added. Cold emails with non-standard fonts and colored text affect the readability of your email making them look very unprofessional.
On the other hand, cold emails with too many links added can be marked as spam by the recipient’s servers. Also, your prospects are very much unlikely to trust the links in your cold email. If you want to add a link, you can always do it in the follow-ups after a few successful interactions with your prospects.
Always send a Follow-up email
If you are setting up a cold email campaign with no follow-up emails, then you are narrowing your chances of converting your potential clients. Your prospects are busy and no matter how good your first cold email is there is always a good chance that they might not read your first cold email.
Sometimes they read it but they aren’t feeling convinced enough to respond or schedule a meeting with you yet. In that case, they would like to learn more about your product or service. Giving up after the first cold email is never a good practice. You should at least send two to three follow-ups to give yourself a better chance to convert your prospects.
Make sure that you are not sending a bump follow-up just to remind them that they forgot to read your first email. Follow-up emails are as important as your first point of interaction. Make sure that you load them up with value, case studies, or benefits that you might have missed in your first cold email.
Please give enough time in between each follow-up you send and if you aren’t quite sure yet how to do them, then please read our blog about how many cold emails to send per day.
Set your Daily Sending limit
The number of cold emails you can send with each email account is limited. You should not send more than 50 emails from each fully warmed-up account. Sending more emails than that can hurt your reputation as a sender and will start affecting your email deliverability.
Think of it as a speed limit. If you over speed, you will get penalized with Spam flags. Get caught violating the sending limit multiple times and you will lose your license. That's why you should always make sure that you keep a good eye on the number of emails you send from each account. Always keep it below the limits to maintain a good sender reputation.
If you want to learn more and find out how many cold emails you should be sending. Please read our blog here.
Cold email examples
You can read the cold email templates written below to understand how you can write a good subject line, first-line icebreakers, pain point benefits, social proofs, and CTA in a cold email. However, I don't advise you to use these templates as it is. You need to do proper research on your target audience to make sure that the tone of the email and content resonates with your prospects.
1. Cold Email Template for marketing agencies
Subject line: Love your work at {company name}
Hey {firstname},
{company name} has done an amazing job helping clients with their web development and software solutions. Awesome how you are providing innovative solutions to companies.
I noticed that you aren't using cold emails to reach out to your prospects. Cold emailing is one great way to find new customers and grow your company.
We specialize in finding new clients for software agencies like {company name}. Recently we helped our client close deals with {social proof} and generated around 1M$ with our outreach strategies.
Can you take more clients at {company name}? Let me know and I can send you a few times to chat.
Thanks, {Your name}.
2. Cold email template for SEO Agencies
Subject line: Quick question
Hey {first name},
{company name} is doing a phenomenal job by helping security teams outsmart any attacker. Your work in the cybersecurity space is second to none.
I have noticed that your website is missing alt text and your content is outdated too. Also, you have multiple broken links that can leave a bad impression and affect your site's SEO. The solution to such problems is {your tailored solution}.
{your company name} helped dozens of companies like {social proofs} rank on the first page of google and increased their organic traffic.
Mind if I send you a few times for a quick chat?
Best Regards, {your name}
How to use Nureply to send Personalized Cold emails?
The opening lines in both cold email templates written above are generated by Nureply's AI.
Nureply is a complete cold email software as a service now where you can personalize your email content and send them to your prospects without having to leave and switch platforms. All you need is
A list of prospects
Warmed up email accounts
A Nureply trial account
1. AI Personalization
Gone are the days when you needed a VA to write first-line icebreakers for your prospects. Nureply makes it easier and cheaper for you while ensuring 2.4x more replies to your cold emails.
All you need is a CSV file with your prospect’s Linkedin or website written in it. Upload the list of prospects and within a few minutes, you can have a downloadable updated CSV file with personalized first lines for each one of your prospects written in it.
Step 1: Sign up with Nureply
Step 2: Sign in to your Nureply account
Step 3: Upload your prospects list in the Personalization section
2. Setting up your Email Campaign
With our emailing feature, you can send cold emails as well as write first lines using AI. We are in the beta phase right now and all our customers will be able to send cold emails with Nureply's full version soon.
You will be able to schedule your cold email campaign and automate follow-ups. You can also set the daily sending limit from each account to make sure that your email accounts stay healthy.
You can track everything related to cold emails like clicks, opens, replies, and bounces. We know that the responses from your prospects can be overwhelming and time-consuming to go through each one of them individually. That's why we introduced sentimental analysis in our unified inbox that will enable you to filter positive, negative, and neutral replies with the help of AI.
Our email validation tool will ensure that all the email addresses in your list are correct and valid. It will save you from any hard bounces due to wrong email addresses and maintain a good reputation as a sender.
Test your Cold email Campaign and see the results
It is very important to monitor the performance of your cold email campaign. You can always start with multiple small campaigns with different writing angles. See how they perform individually and use the ones that are working better in your niche.
If you want to test various subject lines and email copies to see what is effective. You can do A/B testing by setting up two identical outreach campaigns with the same number of prospects. Once you are done, you can see the statistics to compare which one performs better.
Conclusion
Cold emailing is one great channel for effective product marketing. It is more personal and direct to your prospects when compared to other channels of marketing like social media ads. Make sure that you personalize your cold emails for each one of your prospects to do them properly.
Keep it short, clear, and to the point. All the tips mentioned in this blog post will help you write an effective cold email sequence and if you keep doing it consistently, you will see how big the potential is with cold emails.