Increasing sales numbers is hard work, regardless of the nature of your business or even your industry. There’s a lot to keep straight—you need to make sure your existing customer base is fully satisfied while keeping your head on a swivel for every new opportunity to make another sale.
Waiting for customers to find your business is not enough to maintain healthy revenue in the long term. To significantly improve your sales figures, you will have to invest in outbound lead generation.
Once you’ve identified prospects that you can feasibly convert customers, sending them a cold email is one of the simplest ways to initiate contact.
Cold emails are a time-honored lead generation tradition. A decade ago, a cold email could be a simple announcement of ongoing offers from a brand. However, those halcyon days of digital marketing have passed.
Today, a generic, bland cold email will likely never be opened. With thousands of other businesses sending out these message blasts, it is more important than ever to stand out from the crowd. To that end, you should know what to do to engage your recipients, and equally crucial to know what not to do.
In this article, we run down ten do’s and don’ts that are the secrets to success of constructing cold emails for lead generation.
Dos: Five Things To Remember When Sending Cold Emails
1. Have a Strong Subject Line
Your recipient will scrutinize the subject line before even considering opening your email. Too many well-intentioned cold emails have failed at this critical first step, and their messages have been consigned to the trash folder because they didn’t get the subject line right.
Avoid sending what is essentially a sales pitch. Instead, it should be conversational and speak directly to the recipient’s concerns and pain points.
2. Keep It Short
Remember that anything you send out will be competing for the reader’s attention. Whether it’s dozens of other cold emails from other companies or YouTube, Instagram, and thousands of other distractions—there’s a ton of competition for people’s time.
Respect this and make the most of having your recipient’s attention for a brief moment as they peruse their inbox. Ideally, your cold email should outline all critical information in less than 250 words, or else it will run the risk of losing the reader’s interest.
3. Always Add Value
Your prospective leads may not be familiar with your company and its offerings. The cold email aims to break the ice and start a new business relationship.
It’s essential to avoid being too sales-forward. It can be a huge turn-off to open an email only to be faced with a hard sell, especially from a company you know nothing about.
Instead, construct your message to address their problems and pain points. It’s always better to offer a solution rather than to push a product outright.
4. Personalize Your Email
No one wants to receive the equivalent of a dry press release in their inbox. Your cold email should be full of personal touches that let the reader know that you value their time and attention.
For starters, including their name in the subject line can grab their attention immediately.
5. Include a Clear CTA
While a cold email doesn’t necessarily have to lead to a sale, it must at least move the prospective lead further along the awareness pipeline.
End your cold email with an outbound link to your company website, latest marketing campaign, or to your digital business proposal. Ensure that the recipient’s next step takes them closer to making a purchase with a strong call to action (CTA).
Don’ts: Five Things To Avoid When Sending Cold Emails
1. Don’t Send Just One Email
A single email can easily be overlooked or even ignored. However, a drip email campaign will increase awareness even when your emails are not being opened.
Ideally, each lead should receive three to five emails that will move them along the awareness pipeline.
2. Don’t Act Like a Spammer
Carrying on from the previous point, you must exercise astute judgment when timing your cold email drip campaign. Spread the emails out over several days or even weeks.
The content of your email should be clean and free of excess HTML code and inline images. These elements trigger spam filters with most email providers.
3. Don’t Send Long, Rambling Emails
The longer the email, the less chance it will be read in full. Keep the message crisp and to the point.
Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes, and think about how much you are willing to read an email you didn’t ask for. Do not oversupply them with information. Speak to their problems and offer clear solutions without writing odes to your company.
4. Don’t Add Attachments
Cold emails have a low open rate of under 25%. With that in mind, avoid heavy attachments that make your cold emails slow to load and open. The odds are already stacked against you; don’t make them worse by adding superfluous attachments.
5. Don’t Use Uniform Email Templates
Uniform email templates leave room for errors, such as incorrect names or designation tags. Also, sending the same template more than once to a prospect will make them feel like they are one of hundreds being bombarded with generic marketing materials.
Mix up your cold emails, especially for drip campaigns where leads will be contacted multiple times for a response.
Start Your Cold Emailing Campaign with Outbound Leads
While some marketers might say that cold emails are an outdated means of reaching out to your target audience, there’s a reason they’ve been in use for so long. When leveraged correctly, a cold email is a perfect first step on the journey from prospect to a loyal customer.
To maximize the effectiveness of a cold email campaign, you need a strong bank of outbound leads. Lead generation agencies like LevelUp Leads provide quality consumer data that you can use to boost sales. All you need to do is write the perfect cold email for your ideal customers and let the agency do the work of finding them for you.
