5 Tips for Better Cold Email Outreach
Crafting a successful cold email outreach campaign is undeniably challenging. Writing a succinct and actionable message is tough, achieving a respectable conversion rate is tough — hell, even writing a cold email that doesn’t sound spammy is tough.
That said, email can also be one of the most effective and affordable marketing strategies out there, as long as it is used wisely. Here are a few tips that we use to help our clients connect with and nurture leads through cold email marketing:
1. Target Smarter with List Segmentation
It doesn’t take a PhD in marketing to realize that the more personalized a message is, the better chance it will have of achieving its intended results. Unfortunately, it also doesn’t take a PhD in mathematics to notice that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to write custom messages for every single contact on your company’s email list.
List segmentation empowers you to get the best of both worlds by targeting certain messages to specific communities. A clothing store might only advertise their “end of winter coat sales extravaganza” to northern states, for example, while a financial planning firm may opt to send their “plan for retirement” email to subscribers over the age of 40. There are many demographics you can use to segment your lists, and you should always be A/B testing to determine which sementations yield the best results.
2. Build Context through Social Media
Building a strong social media presence, sending messages to potential leads, and even targeting certain audiences with advertising are all great ways of establishing context with your cold leads before emailing them. Strange as it may sound, people are much more likely to open an email from a company they’ve heard of before, which is why this tips is so important.
3. Identify the Decision Makers
Cold emails are far more likely to be effective if they are sent directly to the person who has the power to make a purchase. If you are targeting mid-level project managers in a large corporation, for example, emailing the front desk simply isn’t going to yield results. (And neither would emailing the CEO, for that matter!)
In both cases, you would be relying upon the email recipient to know who the decision maker is, to trust you enough to forward that email, and to care enough to actually send it. Spoiler alert: it probably isn’t gonna happen.
4. Make it Interesting
If you can send your target audience something they care about — be it a coupon, a press release, or even a silly GIF — you are far more likely to get your email opened and read. And though “opened and read” might not sound like the loftiest of goals, it is certainly a necessary start. Remember that converting over cold emails is usually less about making instant sales, and more about nurturing leads and slowly building the relationship that encourages them to convert.
5. Be Persistent
In many industries, even a single digit conversion rate on cold emails is considered successful. That is to say, you will undoubtedly face lots and lots of failure in any cold email campaign. Don’t get discouraged! Stay in contact, and keep getting your message out there. You never know what might change for your leads’ companies over the course of the following months — and in fact, you never even know if your previous emails have simply been disregarded out of busyness or some other unrelated cause. Cold email is a game for the patient.
Interested in more email marketing tips and tricks? Be sure to follow Scotch and Ramen on LinkedIN!
Originally published at www.scotchandramen.com.
