With an average person receiving more than 120 emails every day, the standard way of sending cold emails might not make the cut. They might be ignored, trashed, or worse, land in spam ❌
If you’re tired of:
Spending long hours drafting a pitch email that includes all infos about your company
Carefully creating a contact list to which this pitch is destined
Sending it either manually or via mail merge
Getting “No” “Not Interested” “Unsubscribe” if any response at all
Well then, you came to the right place.
In 2020, we generated over 2000 leads for our clients, using cold outreaches. We perfected (and are perfecting) the art of cold emailing and decided to share some of our most valuable tips.
Before we go ahead, here are…
4 Steps To Take Before Any Cold Email Campaign
These are the absolute essentials before diving deeper into cold emailing.
1. Create a detailed buyer persona.
Understanding your target audience is at the heart of all effective business strategies. Having an accurate buyer persona helps narrow down what prospect is more likely to engage with your email, their specific needs and desired outcomes.
2. Segment your email list for personalization.
Identify various data points from your buyer persona, and segment your email list accordingly. Use those factors while drafting your cold email outreaches. Why is it important? To personalize your email copy for better connections and engagement from your prospects.
3. Check your Email Deliverability metrics.
You can only generate leads or take ahead your communication with the prospect if your email reaches their inbox. Email Deliverability is at the crux of your outbound email campaign and largely determines its success. Forget it, and you can forget about any result...
4. Amp up your copywriting skills (or hire a professional!)
This is especially true if you are currently cold emailing but aren’t getting results.
A good and creative copy grabs your readers’ attention right from the start. It also increases your chances of being remembered by your prospect and makes you stand out. Keep your email copy short, relevant, and personalized.
Our tip: Emails aren’t made for sales pitches, rather to connect. Use them first to create a connection, the pitch comes next.
Here’s how we do it at The Scalelab:
And now, let’s dig into the details for successful B2B cold email outreaches!
5 Tips To Successfully Generate Leads with Cold Emails
1. Warm Up Your Prospect
Engage with your prospect before you even send an email. This way the so-called “cold email” is a little warmer from the start.
There are many ways you can do this:
Visit the prospect’s LinkedIn profile
Like or comment on one of their posts on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram…)
You can do the same if they publish articles. (check out their website, Medium or any other blogging sites)
Good news here, you can do this automatically with following tools:
Lemlist: to visit a prospect’s LinkedIn profile before sending an email
Phantombuster: to auto-like or comment a social media post
2. Craft an Irresistible Subject Line
Did you know 47% of recipients open an email based just on the email subject line? On the other hand, 69% of them report an email as spam based on the same factor. So, your email subject line can make or break your cold outreach efforts.
Follow these best practices to craft an amazing subject line:
Use the prospect’s first name or company name.
Keep it short, clear, and to the point. Highlight exactly what’s in it for your prospect.
Subject lines have limited space. Longer subject lines will be trimmed, your prospect would lose interest in your email, and most likely, toss it in the trash. Keep these character limits in mind:
Apple Mail: 140 characters
Gmail: 110 characters
Outlook: 55 characters
Mobile: 35 characters (average of iOS and Android)
It is recommended to keep your subject lines between 17-24 characters or 3-5 words to boost open rates.
Ask a question to entail the expectation of a reply.
Never write your subject lines in Title case as you will make your email look like a newsletter. Always think about writing to a human, don’t over do it. - Title case: Are You On LinkedIn? - Sentence case: Are you on LinkedIn? - Lower case: are you on linkedin?
Utilize preview text along with the subject line to increase email open rates. Summarize your email copy and hook your prospect into opening your email with this preheader text copy.
❌ When writing subject lines and preview text, don’t do this:
Why? The key aspects of the email and value offer cannot be read without opening it. Would you open these kinds of emails? Well, we won’t!
✅ Instead, do this!
Why? Because the subject line and preview text are short and clear. The preview blurb has statistics and relevant information that instantly communicates what the email would be about.
3. Add Value from the start
Making the best first impression is at the heart of succeeding with cold emails.
Unfortunately, sending a series of cold emails that focus on selling your product/service simply won’t do. This is the recipe for leaving a bad impression.
One of the best ways to leave a great first impression to add value to your prospects.
Josh Braun coins it very well with this cold email structure you should adopt. He talks about the concept of “Deposits”. A deposit is information that you can offer to prospects which will help them get closer to their goal and add immediate value to them.
For instance, we know at The Scalelab that our target clients need one of two things:
Valid and detailed Prospect Data
Personalized Email templates that just work
A deposit could be a list of prospects (say 10 to give a taste) or a “list of email Subject Lines that received 80%+ open rates”.
Only after adding a certain amount of value, can we then “withdraw”, meaning expect to engage in a commercial collaboration.
Note: A deposit is not your brochure, it’s not your company presentation and it’s not a client case study. This, by all means, won’t help your prospects get closer to their goal.
4. Use Visuals to Hook Your Prospects
According to a recent survey, two-thirds of people said that they prefer emails that have images. Thus, adding visuals gives your cold emails an edge to stand out among the dozens of daily cold outreaches in your prospect’s inbox.
When using visuals, follow these best practices to get the best results:
Use images and gifs only when relevant.
Keep a 4:1 text-to-image ratio.
Personalize the images and gifs with the recipient’s name or company’s name for an added level of personalization. See Coffee cup below:
5. Follow Up Regularly.
According to a study, the response rate for 1st email was 18%, 14% for the 2nd, 10% for the 4th. But, the 6th follow-up email received a whopping 27% response rate. Shockingly, only 8% of salespeople follow up more than 5 times.
So, to increase your chance of generating leads via cold emails — at regular intervals. These tips will help you follow up without being annoying:
Send emails on the best-performing days and times — according to your prospect’s demographics and active time zone.
Wait for at least 2-3 days before following up.
Craft different follow-up emails for people who opened the mail, didn’t open, and clicked on your message.
Use email automation tools like Lemlist, Reply.io, HubSpot to send emails automatically at fixed intervals. This ensures you don’t forget to follow up (or worse, follow up after a very long time).
Stray away from the ‘standards’ and make the follow-up emails unique. Personalize them according to your prospects.
Here’s what we did at The Scalelab for one of our email follow-ups:
. . .
Wrapping Up…
When done right, cold email outreaches are one of the best ways to connect with prospects and generate leads for your business.
It’s all about being human and adding value to people you engage with.
If you have any questions, reach out to us at hello@thescalelab.io. Until then…
Happy Prospecting,
The Scalelab 🚀