Cold email often gets a bad reputation – mainly due to the mass amount of poorly written emails that people receive on a daily basis.

What most cold email senders forget to realize is that the main goal of a cold email is to create a new connection and build a relationship with your intended recipient.

Not to make a sale straight off the bat.

The important thing to focus on when sending cold emails is providing a ton of value – showing your recipient what you can offer and contribute to.

People hate sales emails (especially when they’re unsolicited!), so your goal is to simply paint a picture of how much value you’re able to provide to them.

What Is A Cold Email?

In short, a cold email is a simple email that’s sent to potential B2B customers from a business that has never contacted them before.

A large portion of people consider cold emails to be spam, but they are completely different from spam emails. The purpose of a cold email is to deliver relevant and specific information to qualified prospects.

If cold emails are set up correctly and utilized properly, they can be an extremely effective tool to generate leads and increase company sales.

Here are a couple of examples of areas that can benefit from cold email:

• Sales and Marketing
• Consulting
• Recruiting
• Business Development
• Networking
• Job Applications

And that’s just to name a few…

Here’s How To Ensure That Your Cold Emails Get Results

Personalize Your Subject Line

For example, sending a subject line like this: 

“Hey {Name}, quick question for you”

Will outperform a subject line like this: 

“Quick Question”

More people will open the first subject line because it clearly shows that the email is intended for them. 

The other is launched straight to the junk folder.

Create a Custom Opening Line

When you personalize your email, you’re dramatically increasing 2 important things:

– Responses

– Deliverability Rate

People like talking to real trustworthy people – and they absolutely hate a sales pitch from someone they’ve never spoken to.

You don’t even need to do tons of research for this either – just check their Linkedin, social media, and website for any relevant topics you could make a nice comment on.

This is a good example:

“Saw the post you shared on LinkedIn about {company name}’s recent award. Congrats!”

Hit a Pain Point

This is where you can really stand out from the hundreds of other emails your prospect receives.

Here you can really show much you understand their business, and what they might be struggling with.

And then from there, you can transition into your valuable offer that helps them fix whatever it is that bothers them.

Here’s an example of hitting a pain point:

“Are you currently having issues with {your lead’s biggest problem}?

It’s a tough issue to overcome, and something most companies in {your lead’s industry] suffer from. And it can [stat or research to agitate big problem]

We can help you avoid this with [benefit}.”

Use The Same Language As Your Prospects

Now, it’s important to make sure that your grammar is pretty good, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.

In fact, a few tiny grammatical or spelling mistakes can make your email seem even more real – but that doesn’t mean you should go out of your way to make it as poorly written as possible.

What’s important here is that your prospect should be able to relate to what you’re saying. 

For example, a real estate agent is going to use completely different words or phrases to a lawyer or an accountant.

Your goal should be to squeeze in a few words or phrases that resonate with your prospect and help them to realize that you fully understand their industry.

Always Add a Clear Call To Action

After a prospect has read your email, what would you like them to do?

It could be to book a call, or to read a piece of content, or to download your free Ebook – whatever it may be.

Again, we aren’t asking for a sale here, what we ideally want to do is continue to build a relationship with our prospect.

It could be something like this:

“Are you free sometime this week {Name} to hear some of the ideas I had specifically for you?”

A good Call to Action gives clear instructions on what you’d like your prospect to do next.

Without one, you’ve just sent an email with zero purpose.

Always Remember To Follow Up

More often than not, your prospect won’t respond to the first email, and a lot of people will leave it there.

What people fail to realize is that prospects might be a little busy to respond, or they’ve just forgotten to get back to you.

The sweet spot is around 3 to 6 follow-up emails – but again, keep these as conversational as possible.

For example, you could send an email just to check if they read your first email, or a short case study of a recent client win, or a valuable piece of content that’s relevant to them – the list goes on.

One thing’s for sure, you’ll be amazed at how many people will only respond to you on the 3rd, 4th, or 5th email.

So, all-in-all, cold email isn’t the only way to bring in more leads for your business, but if used correctly with a clear strategy, it can be one of the most powerful tools you can use.

One of the reasons being that most business owners are looking at their emails every single day, and your message will stay in their inbox until it gets read – something that you don’t get with other marketing methods.

It’s also important to remember that recipients are flooded with hundreds of emails every week, which is why you need to put your creative hat on and make your cold email stand out.

If you don’t, it will be dismissed along with all the other generic emails that jam their inbox.