A Simple Guide To Cold Emails That Actually Generate Responses

Bruce Martinus | 4/1/2021 | 6 min read

Cold emails are one of the best ways to generate more leads and make more sales for your business, but to master the art of cold email marketing isn’t easy.

And that’s because with cold outreach you have no relationship with your prospect prior to the email.

So you’re unable to modify your approach to the intended recipient in real-time due to the lack of visual communication.

But there is still a way to create extremely effective cold emails that generate responses, and every good cold email normally consists of 4 things.

1) Personalize The Email To The Reader

Great personalization shows that you’ve thought deeply about the recipient and what interests them, bothers them, what they want, and how they see the world.

It also shows that you’re emailing them only – nobody else. When somebody feels as if the message is generic and intended for thousands of people, they’ll cut you straight off.

You have an opportunity to message somebody in their personal inbox, so tell them something you admire about their company. Don’t waste the opportunity by being generic.

2) Tell Them Who You Are

The first thing that crosses a prospect’s mind when they open a cold email is; “Who is this person and what can they do for me?”.

You’re the stranger here, remember. You may know a little bit about them, but they know nothing about you – so you need to show them how you’re credible.

To build trust, we can tell them about any authority, credibility, or social status that could be relevant to the person. And this can be done in one or two sentences.

The more specific we can make it for our ideal targets, the more responses we’ll get.

Our goal here is to go from a complete stranger to someone who our prospect can trust.

3) Hit a Pain Point

This is where we can truly show our value to the recipient, and show what’s in it for them.

People are more likely to act upon something to avoid some sort of pain than to gain any more pleasure.

Our research comes really handy here because we’ll have found something that can highlight that pain, and then base our offer around relieving it.

If you’ve struggled to find any problem, then we can work around that by sending them an appropriate gift.

This works well because not many people will give something away before asking for something

An appropriate gift could be something like a free industry-specific training, an eBook, a free audit, etc.

4) Keep it Short And Easy to Read

Truthfully, long emails don’t tend to get read.

We’re living in a world where everything is on the move and attention is becoming harder to gain from someone.

Most prospects are checking their emails on their phones, just like a text message. Therefore, they don’t want to be reading emails that take 5 to 10 minutes to read – we need to be getting our point across in under a minute.

Moreover, it’s equally as important to write in a conversational tone, not a salesy, traditional business pitch tone.

Reason being that prospects are more open to talking to a real person that’s connected with them on a human level rather than a generic robot-like email.

The best way to start writing like you talk is by reading through your email out loud before you press send. If it sounds natural then it will work well, but if you’re stumbling over some parts then your reader will also stumble.