7 Pro Tips for Cold Emailing in 2022
Onur Genes
PublishedatAre you tired of writing cold emails or still struggling to get a response?
Cold emailing can be frustrating and disappointing at times. You are going to get a lot of negative responses.
A lot of cold emails will end up getting marked as Spam.
While on the other hand, a vast majority of Cold emails don't even get opened.
The average email open rate is about 14-23%.
This means that about 80% of cold emails are getting completely ignored in the cold email outreach.
Well, here is the good news.
If you do it the right way and implement strategies that work you can get a response rate as good as 15% and can also achieve an email open rate above 70% easily.
After exhausting a lot of my potential leads, trying out different tactics to write cold emails and see what works.
Here are the best cold email tips I have found so far.
Study your prospects before cold emailing
Have you ever received a cold email trying to sell you something you don't need at all?
These emails are pointless and don't even resonate with your needs.
Cold email without proper research is not relatable and hence never works.
Make sure you leverage your lead generation process and grab quality leads for your business.
Once the lead generation part is done properly.
It is very important to study your prospects and do good research on them before you start writing your cold email.
You must understand what problems they have and find a unique pain point, what product or service have they tried, what are their biggest desires and what they expect.
If your cold email is around the exact problem or pain point they have and you are there to solve it with your product or service.
Then there you go, you just "SOLD" your service.
Write a personalized subject line
Cold emailing is harder than any other way of communication. Since you have no rapport or relationship with your prospects yet.
Therefore, your first impression counts and your subject line becomes the most important aspect of your cold email.
It is the first thing your target prospects will read and it must get your email opened.
There are many ways to write a compelling and catchy subject line. For instance, curiosity, pain point, open-loop, urgency, and funny subject lines.
You can read our blog where we have shared 10 different ways of doing subject lines that work.
Among many different variants of subject lines, the easiest and most efficient way to write a subject line is a personalized subject line.
Using your prospect's first name, company name, designation or location is one great way to grab their attention and ensure good results.
Here are some examples of a personalized subject line:
Quick question for {firstname}.
Are you still working at {company name}.
Love your work as a {job title}.
If your current cold email open rate isn't up to the mark, then try using any of these subject lines and I am sure it will give you better results.
Send a personalized email
After the subject line and greetings, the very first lines of your cold email should be different for every single prospect.
Personalization is something that you can't skip in your cold email as it conveys to your prospects that you know them and have been following their work.
These lines can be written by doing a little background research on your prospect's LinkedIn or Website.
When you find a specific person, a business lead, or a company name. You need to study it and find their goals, achievements, problems, or some recent activity that connects with them.
Cold emails are being sent out to people who have no clue about you or your business. That's the reason personalization is really important.
It builds immediate rapport and brings more credibility to you. Most people hire a Virtual Assistant to get this job done.
However, thanks to Nureply which has made it so easy for us now to generate hyper-personalized lines within seconds.
All you need is a solid lead and AI takes care of the rest.
Keep it short and to the point
I have learned it the hard way while cold emailing and would like to share with you that the B2B cold email especially the first one needs to be very short, clear, and to the point.
Tell them how you can solve their problem or how you can help them achieve their targets with your product.
Your first and foremost priority is to chase a positive response to your cold email.
Once you have it, that's when you share the details and get the leverage of writing a bit longer cold email.
So keep your cold email short, and clear, and make it easier for your prospects to go through all of it quickly. End your email in the best way possible for bonus impact.
The quicker they go through your cold email the better your chances of conversion will be.
Read our blog post here to learn more about why you should keep your cold email short.
Don't ask for too much
One of the biggest reasons your cold emails fail is that you might be expecting a lot.
Try writing a less intimidating cold email by giving them a soft and less demanding call to action.
It's very hard to get your prospects to get into a meeting with your very first cold email.
This is your first interaction and your cold email just struck them out of nowhere.
So, if you think a CEO will just be open to listening for a half hour, you are expecting too much.
Moreover, adding a link as your call to action in your first cold email is just another shortcut to getting your emails sent to the "SPAM" folder.
So keep it light and make it easy for them to respond. Don't make it sound like a sales pitch.
Here are some examples of frictionless call to action that you can use in your cold email campaign.
What about I send you more details about my product?
Would you be open to seeing some case studies?
Mind if I send you some tips regarding my solution?
Would you like to learn more?
Avoid using email templates
Cold email templates may be the easiest and cheapest option to do cold email.
However, at the same time, it's the quickest way to write spam emails and see whether your unsubscribe button works or not.
Never use a copy-paste generic message or a cold email template if you want your cold emails to work.
Email templates may save you time but they won't get the job done. Why?
Because templates are boring, plain, and typical.
A lot of people are using these cold email templates for their cold emails and to stand out you must come up with something different and unique.
Every cold email needs to be tailored to your business's unique solution and target audience.
Therefore, I recommend you write a good cold email yourself or seek professional help from someone who has got considerable experience writing cold emails.
Do whatever it takes but avoid using a generic email template.
Write a follow up cold email
You should never do a cold email campaign without a follow up.
On average, only 2% of total sales generated by a cold email campaign are from the first point of contact or the first cold email.
So if your cold email strategy is just sending one email to your prospects then you are leaving a lot of money on the table. It is best to learn how to send a follow up email.
Now it brings us to the question “How many follow up emails should you do?"
I would recommend not more than 3 follow up emails. If you haven't got a positive response after 4 emails, don't push it.
One more tip for cold emailing is to make sure to send the first email and all follow up emails in the morning.
This of course should be your prospect's time zone.
Why? Because 90% people check their email inboxes first thing in the morning as a regular task.
You have more chances to get a quick response if your email is sitting on the top of their email dashboard.
Scale your emails
Thanks to advanced cold emailing tools you can now scale your emails and see results for yourself.
You can get very cool statistics like the Open rate, Reply rate, and Spam rate of your emails.
Scaling your emails and reading your email stats is one great way to improve your cold emails.
You can check what works for your target audience. What subject lines got a better open rate and which cold email got you the most responses?
Keep an eye on the performance of each cold email and see what's working for you better.
That way you can finally come up with your magic cold email sequence that works for your business.
Conclusion
Cold Emailing is one of the most direct and effective ways of converting your prospects into loyal customers.
It has great potential and more than 80% of businesses use cold emails to acquire new customers and expand their business.
If done the right way, your cold email ROI can be as good as 4300%
Among all the cold email tips that I have shared with you in my Blog post, the most important of them all is writing a short and personalized cold email after good study and research on prospects.
The first lines of your cold email that can change the outcome of your cold email can now be written in seconds with the help of AI cold emailing.
After using Nureply for my cold email campaigns, I have saved hours and at the same time ensured 3x more replies on my cold email campaigns.
You can do the same.
If you haven't yet tried out our cold emailing tool, sign up and try.