The Most Common Cold Email Mistakes to Avoid
Uzair Rasheed
Publishedat
Cold emailing has proved to be one of the most efficient ways to grow your business and find new prospects. However, it’s not that easy. Most marketers struggle to master and get a decent response rate on their cold email outreach. There are a lot of things that marketers do wrong when they start reaching out to cold prospects.
By avoiding these most common cold email mistakes, you can make your cold emails look unique resulting in a more effective and successful cold email outreach. These mistakes make your emails look generic and irrelevant to your prospects.
It takes a lot of time and some thousand emails to finally crack what is going wrong. However, you are in luck today. Because in this blog post, I will share those most common cold email mistakes and give you a complete guide on how to avoid them to make your outreach campaigns more successful.
1. Using your Main Domain for Cold emails
You should never use your main company domain for cold email campaigns. This is one of the biggest cold email mistakes done by marketers and you must avoid it at any cost.
Not every prospect is welcoming to cold emails and some of them can mark your cold email as spam without even warning you. Too many spam flags will hurt your reputation as a sender and will affect your email deliverability. Worst case you might even get your main company domain and email accounts blacklisted for spamming people.
Moreover, if you are an absolute beginner and are just learning to reach out to cold prospects, then there is a good chance that you will get it wrong and will learn through the process of trial and error. There is nothing wrong with learning through mistakes, just make sure that you don’t use your main company domain for cold emails.
What you must do instead is you should buy new domains and create new email accounts before you start reaching out to your prospects. Doing so will not risk your main company domain and email accounts. You can reach out to as many people as you want and can even do A/B testing to see what works without worrying about damaging your reputation as a sender.
2. Sending Emails to Irrelevant Prospects
No one talks about the lead quality. Instead, most people are just too much worried about their subject lines and email content. The lead quality or prospects list you may say is one of the most important parts of cold email campaigns and that must not be underestimated.
Lead generation is the first step of your campaign and you must ensure that your list of email addresses is valid and relevant to your business niche. Reaching out to the wrong person who doesn’t need your product or service will not get you anywhere.
Moreover, all invalid email addresses and wrong recipient details in your prospects list will increase your bounce rate and affect your email deliverability. Therefore, you must not rely on cheap websites that sell you a list of email addresses for cold emails. These lists mostly contain irrelevant and invalid leads.
No matter how good your cold email is if the lead quality is bad then you will not get the desired response. Do proper research and find the ideal prospects that you think will desperately need your product or service. Once you have identified where your target audience and ideal prospects are, you can now create a list of email addresses of all the businesses you think will be a right fit for cold outreach.
Manual prospecting is one of the best ways to find the email addresses of your potential prospects. Use Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and google maps to find the email addresses of businesses that are relevant to your product. Make sure that you are contacting the right person who can make decisions regarding your product or service.
Also, you can use email address verification tools to double-check all the email addresses in your list. Doing so will avoid any hard bounces on your cold email campaign and will ensure email delivery to the intended recipient.
3. Misleading Subject Line
The subject line is one of the most powerful elements of your cold email. You should always give a little thought and think of a good subject line that is catchy and at the same time relevant to your email content. If your subject line isn’t good enough then your cold email won’t get opened and your prospects will never read your messages.
Some email marketers are so desperate to get their emails opened that they end up using clickbait subject lines. Writing misleading subject lines is not legal under the CAN-SPAM act. Doing so can get you in trouble and will leave a bad impression on your prospect too. Therefore, you must spend adequate time crafting a good subject line for your cold emails.
4. No Personalization
One of the most common cold email mistakes that most email marketers do is that they end up sending the same email to all potential prospects. B2B prospects receive a lot of sales emails every day and they only read the ones that stand out.
Since cold emails are being sent out to people with no prior contact, it is very important to build rapport and make your prospects feel special. Cold emails without any personalized content seem like generic sales emails and most prospects ignore them as soon as they realize that.
One easy way to personalize your email content is to write unique opening lines that grab your prospect’s attention and make them read further into your email. You can write those lines by taking an extra step to do background research on your prospect’s website or Linkedin. A strong opening line can be a compliment on your prospects’ business or achievements.
Writing personalized content for your emails is a costly and time-consuming process though. However, if you use Nureply then you can generate personalized first lines for your cold emails within seconds. Nureply’s AI studies your prospect’s LinkedIn or website to write lines that resonate with your prospect’s business and makes your emails look unique.
5. Writing Long emails
Once you have nailed your subject line, it all comes down to your cold email message. B2B prospects receive a lot of cold emails on a regular basis. They are busy and are not very open to reading long emails. One of the common cold email mistakes done by marketers is that they try to squeeze in all the benefits and features of their products in one email.
You probably want to give them as much information as you can, just so you can build trust and credibility with your prospects. However, it’s not a good practice at all. It will either get your cold email ignored or in some cases get it flagged as spam.
You aren’t supposed to reveal everything about your product in your first email. It should rather be very short and to the point. Your prospects don’t like to see long paragraphs of text and are most often intimidated by it. Don’t even bother to bore your prospects with your introduction or ask how they are doing. Your email signature at the end of the email will confirm your identity and will let them know who they are talking to.
Just come straight to the point and tell them briefly how you can solve their pain points. The ideal cold email length will not be over 150 words. If you aren’t too sure how you can convey your message in a short email, then look at some template emails in our complete cold email guide.
6. Asking for Too Much
Whenever you are reaching out to cold prospects, don’t rush with the sales process. If you think that you can close a deal without having several interactions with your prospects, then I am afraid you are wrong.
Choose the call to action in your cold emails wisely. The less you ask the more your chances of getting a response will be. Asking to schedule a sales meeting is a cold email mistake that most marketers do.
What you should do instead is try to get them to respond to your emails. Make them ask questions about your product. Once they show interest, that’s when you can arrange a demo meeting to tell them more about your product.
All you should aim for is a positive response, and make sure that you choose a frictionless and less demanding call to action to get more responses on your cold email campaign.
7. Adding Links in your Cold email
One might think that adding links to your landing page or website is a good idea while cold emailing. But it’s not true at all and is one of the most common cold email mistakes done by inexperienced email marketers.
Adding links to your cold email will affect your email deliverability and will also increase the chances of getting your email caught in the Spam folder. Also, cold prospects are very much unlikely to trust the links in your cold email and it might just scare them off. You can surely add links in your follow-ups once you receive a response from your prospect.
8. No Value for Prospects
Your prospects are always looking for some value in your emails while reading. Marketers tend to focus more on the features of their products. Your attractive features will only confuse your prospects unless you tell them how they are going to do any good for them.
For example, if I am reaching out as a sales rep for Nureply and I mention AI sentimental analysis in my email. Most prospects wouldn’t know what it is. However, if I tell them how Nureply can save time by filtering out only the positive responses in your cold email campaigns, it will now make more sense.
Write about your product’s benefits or a specific pain point to give your prospects value in your cold emails. You can tell how your product can benefit them by providing a solution to their pain points. If you can add case studies and social proof to prove your claims. That’s even better.
No matter how you would like to forward with it, just make sure that all the words in your email are adding up some value to your prospect’s business in some way. If your cold outreach adds no value to your prospect’s business, then it would not be successful.
9. No Follow-ups
Many marketers think that the first cold email is the most important and that they should only be focusing on the first message. In fact, some cold email senders give up after one email and don’t even send follow-up emails at all. They think that if the prospects didn’t show interest after the first cold email then they are probably not interested.
If you aren’t sending follow-up emails, you are narrowing down your chances of getting a response. It’s a common cold email mistake that most cold email senders do. You should never conclude that your prospects aren’t interested just because they didn’t respond to your first email.
There are multiple possibilities that your prospects might not respond after your first interaction. They might be busy at that moment and wanted to get in touch later on. Or they might just want to learn more about your product but you didn’t give them a chance to do so because you didn’t send any follow-ups.
Follow-ups allow you to tell your prospects more about your product and add more value. You should only stop when they ask you to stop. Otherwise, you should always send 4-5 follow-up emails to give yourself a better chance of getting a response.
10. Sending Too Many Cold emails
Cold emails are very much different from newsletters and marketing emails. Marketing emails and newsletters are sent to people who have opted into your sales funnel. These emails are sent with the help of an automation tool like Mailchimp and can be sent out to hundreds of subscribers within seconds.
However, you cannot practice the same procedure on cold emails. They have a strict daily sending limit and one must make sure that they are being sent slowly at random times. Sending too many cold emails all at once is not a good practice at all.
Ignoring that will trigger the email service providers and damage your reputation as a sender. A bad sender reputation will affect your email deliverability and your cold emails will no longer make it to your prospect’s inbox.
Exceeding the daily sending limits repeatedly will even get your account banned permanently for spamming people. Therefore, you must ensure that you start slow and send very limited emails at the beginning from each account.
If you are starting with new email accounts, then you should not send more than 10 emails per day per account. Once the accounts are fully warmed up, that’s when you can send up to 50 cold emails per day from each account. Check out our blog to learn more about how many cold emails you should send per day.
11. Using Mailchimp for Cold Email Campaigns
Whenever someone thinks of automating cold emails, the first thing that comes to their mind is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is a great tool for sending newsletters and marketing emails. However, it is not the right tool for cold emails at all.
Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Hubspot are all designed to nurture and warm up prospects who opted into your sales funnel. Cold emails are sent out to prospects who didn’t show interest in your product and had no prior contact with you. Therefore, it is very important to use the right tool for your cold email outreach.
There are several reasons why you shouldn’t use tools like Mailchimp for cold emailing. Firstly, it’s against their terms of use and you can get your account banned permanently. Secondly, the emails sent out with Mailchimp land in the promotions tab mostly. The success of your outreach campaign is very much dependent on your cold email deliverability in your prospect’s inbox. Last but not least is the design mismatch that will not help you monitor or make your cold emails better.
Cold Email Outreach with Nureply
Rather than using Mailchimp, you should use a tool that is specifically designed to make your cold email campaigns successful. Nureply is an AI-powered cold email tool that allows you to send personalized cold emails with AI. You don’t need to hire a VA or a sales rep to write the opening lines for your emails anymore. Nureply’s AI can get it done for you within seconds.
Our emailing feature is in the beta phase and will be fully available to our subscribers very soon. Nureply will soon be the only software out there that will automate personalized email campaigns for your prospects. You can also monitor statistics like open rate, bounce rate, and response rate to make your campaigns better.
If you haven’t yet tried Nureply, try it for free.
Wrap Up
Cold emailing is one great way to find new prospects for your business. As a beginner, you might be doing some of the mistakes listed above. It took us a lot of cold emails to find out what is a decent approach for cold emails and we are still working on making it better.
Avoiding these simple mistakes can help you get a better response rate on your cold emails. It’s better not to waste your time doing things that don’t work. You should rather focus on things that will set you up in the right direction. I hope that by adopting these methods you will be able to generate tons of leads for your business.